Parafraseando a Edward Said, Stuart Walton dice que hay tres tipos de autores póstumos: el accidental, el deliberado y el ilícito.

Los primeros son siempre bola extra: obras menores que no estaban destinadas a la gloria pero que aceptamos agradecidos como huevo de consolación porque hemos perdido a la gallina. Walton cita a David Foster Wallace y habría sido mejor invocra a Stieg Larsson, porque en el caso DFW, tanto su mujer como su mejor amigo consideran The Pale King un póstumo deliberado. Nosotros deberíamos pensar en Bolaño y en su viuda seducida por el Chacal.

Los segundos son aquellos que el autor guardó por prudencia -como el Maurice de EM Foster o el Tratado del Alma de Descartes-, postponiendo su publicación hasta el día en que la ley, la sociedad, la Iglesia o la familia ya no puede imponer su castigo. Me pregunto si cuenta el archivo de Sylvia PLath que guarda Smith College, sellado por su marido hasta el 11 de febrero de 2013, cuando se cumplan exáctamente 50 años de su muerte. Si lo hizo por proteger a sus hijos, está claro que no sirvio de mucho.

A los terceros los llama Walton "huérfanos de la Literatura", aquellos que el autor quiso muertos y que le sobreviven por gracia o desgracia de una mano traidora. El caso más famoso es sin duda el de Kafka, quien pidió que toda su producción fuera incinerada para ser traicionado por su mejor amigo y trasladado a Israel, donde gran parte de su producción sigue enterrada en vida. O Nabokov, traicionado por su propia sangre.

Todos los traidores reclaman que, de haber querido destruir sus obras, las habrían destruído ellos mismos. Que sirva de lección a aquellos que lo dejan siempre todo para el último minuto.

Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o' nights:
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.

Would he were fatter! But I fear him not:
Yet if my name were liable to fear,
I do not know the man I should avoid
So soon as that spare Cassius. He reads much;
He is a great observer and he looks
Quite through the deeds of men: he loves no plays,
As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music;
Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort
As if he mock'd himself and scorn'd his spirit
That could be moved to smile at any thing.

Such men as he be never at heart's ease
Whiles they behold a greater than themselves,
And therefore are they very dangerous.

I rather tell thee what is to be fear'd
Than what I fear; for always I am Caesar.

Ilustraciones de K.I.M. para Marcel Paris

Gia Carangi by Chris von Wangenheim as Tattooed Girl , Harper's Bazaar 1980

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.

Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer

Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el Coronel Aureliano Buendía habría de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevo a ver el hielo.

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

(...) The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

From a commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College.

La semana pasada, esta foto de Cindy Sherman se vendió en subasta por 2.735 millones de euros, coronándose como la fotografía más cara de la historia del arte. Fríamente titulada 'Untitled #96', la foto es parte de una serie que le encargó la revista ArtForum en 1981, llamada Centerfold or Horizontals.

Sherman quería imitar el formato de página doble típico de las revistas (ese que corta la foto por la mitad), especialmente en las revistas para adultos. No se si tiene relación, pero 1981 es un año clave para la industria del porno, el año que Linda Lovelace se fue de gira con las feministas, John Holmes escapó con vida de la avenida Wonderland y empezó la era dorada del video. Cada uno sabe de lo que sabe. En la serie, Sherman encarna adolescentes cuya alma, como balaba Julio Iglesias, les está cambiando de niña a mujer. En la pieza #96, Sherman arruga una página de periódico con una expresión que oscila entre el deseo y el miedo. Si miramos la foto de cerca, vemos que ha estado leyendo anuncios clasificados para solteros. ¡Pillina!

La crítica acusó a Sherman de promocionar un estereotipo sexista y ArtForum rechazó la serie, "por temor a malentendidos", pero dio el campanazo en las galerías y fue publicada finalmente en formato libro por Skarstedt Fine Art (2004) con una introducción de Lisa Phillips, comisaria jefe del New Museum en Nueva York.

Es una introducción muy larga sobre algo que en realidad me importa muy poco. La pregunta que sí me interesa es: ¿cómo afecta su nuevo status a la obra de Yasumasa Morimura?

Como Sherman, Yasumasa Morimura ha hecho carrera a base de encarnar personajes ajenos. A diferencia de Sherman, la encarnación de Morimura es literal, como Gus van Sant reconstruyendo Psicosis frame a frame. Morimura lo hace con Marilyn Monroe, Greta Garbo, Brigitte Bardot y Audrey Hepburn, pero también con Albert Einstein, Che Guevara y Harvey Oswald. Cualquiera que haya visitado Japón sabe que son imitadores impenitentes, maestros natos del doble. Los montajes de Morimura son tan perfectos que, si no conociéramos tan bien los originales, no notaríamos el cambiazo.

Intuyo que su intención es hacernos recapacitar sobre nuestra relación con el icono, una construcción artificial y mediatizada que, paradójicamente, determina y condiciona nuestras ilusiones de autenticidad. No sabría decir si es la misma incomodidad que produce en mis gatos el cambiar un mueble de sitio o si es comparable a "Lo siniestro" -die Unheimlichkeit- de Freud, el sudor frío que producen aquellos que parecen estar vivos (muñecos de cera hiperrealistas, automatas, robots) pero que claramente no lo están.

En cualquier caso, el valor de la copia está fuertemente atado al del original, pero es un valor resbaladizo. Tanto, que no sabría decir si To my little sister vale hoy más o menos que hace una semana. Por otra parte, es un derivado al cuadrado: Morimura imita a Sherman que a su vez imita a Barely Legal. Sin embargo, aunque la relación de la serie de Sherman con el softcore es esencial para entender la obra, la de Morimura con el porno o las revistas en general no existe. ¿Significa eso que la copia de una copia es un original?

:

EVERYBODY TOGETHER, AT LAST

#don'tvoteforthem #democracynow #spanishrevolution

We need to concentrate this waves of citizen outrage. And it is urgent, because everybody is already trying to use them for their own purposes. So let's do it.

Spanish democracy is stranded, and this movement wants to deliver it back to the sea. Among us there are right-wings, left-wings, liberals, conservatives... people who will want to take different paths once the boat has sailed. But, for that to happen, we all have to make it sail.

This is exactly what all the branches of this movement agree upon: that the boat is the Spanish democratic system and the path are just ideologies. That is, what we all have in common is the fundamental first step: repairing the system.

This consists of:

1 – Reform of the Election laws, so all the votes from all Spanish citizens, independently of where they live, can have the same influence on the distribution of parliamentary seats.

2 – Real separation of powers; Total independence of Justice from the political power and a reform of the Senate so that it has a real role and stops being mere Congress bureaucracy.

3 – Political Regeneration: Open lists, abolishing public financing of political parties, everlasting banning from politics to holders of public office guilty of corruption charges, withdrawal of all the unjustified privileges attached to political posts, transparency of personal patrimony before and after their position as public administrators, etc.

Once we succeed, there will be elections. And in those elections parties will be able to make all the proposals that, today, are just noise in the process of regenerating the system: nationalizing the banks, reducing the number of government employees, give more, less or no competence to the Autonomous regions, stop funding the church...). Because the true enemies of this movement are those who want us to start discussing all those questions and forget about our common cause, so we disband before we succeed. We have to resist the impulse to follow our individual path and avoid asking or shouting things that cannot be asked or shouted together by all the indignant citizens from the right and from the left. Because this is the first time that the "two Spains" are not confronting each other, the left against the right. Do not allow the usual suspects (PP + PSOE) use us and turn or movement into that.

How will we succeed?

- Explain these three premises to everybody.
- Follow the #don'tvoteforthem instructions: find a party among tje 3.000 parties that has those three premises in their program and vote for them in the next election.
- Explain family, colleagues and friends who are you voting for and why.

And that is all there is. Together we can do it. Nothing more and nothing less.