Free Grandstand | The Mayor Who Didn’t Love Writers by Francesc Sangino
Very few of you know that the Socialist Municipal Group presented an initiative to the plenary session of the Alicante City Council so that Almudena Grandes gets a street. I say very little because municipal plenums or political articles have very few followers. So I’ll start by saying this is not a political article. Nor is it an article about literature: this article is about kim kardashian.
Fewer of you will know that the bipartisan vote against designating a street for the great writer (I mean Almudena Grandes), although it is true that municipal district councils can independently initiate this file and they have not considered it at the moment either. I didn’t use ideological reasons in my speech, because if Grandes deserves a street, we’d be doing him a disservice if we said he deserves it because he’s red and a feminist. How ugly that a politician uses ideological motives, offers partisan tricks, belittling the brilliant work of a scientist, writer, musician or athlete. How ugly and petty to use it as a battering ram against your opponent, tossing them into the pit of oblivion as soon as you chip them. How ugly and simple-minded it is to tear away someone’s good name in order to bring it to the partisan arena, how ugly it is to set it aside for this very reason. What a quinqui it turns out. Congress president Meritsel Battet said in 2019 before the pledge or oath of the Constitution: “They are not asked about their phobias, connections and aspirations. Only if they promise or swear to uphold and uphold the Constitution. Please stick to it. Why or for whom they do it is superfluous” (read the article “Congress or Nursery” by Marías).
But I wanted to talk to you about Kim kardashianya I’m going: Javier Marías passed away very recently. His disappearance left us orphans of that “deep insight into human nature” that Domingo Rodenas wrote in El País. Marias was not exactly on the left, and I did not agree with him very much in his columns, but I praise him, among other things, for his courage to criticize what Marias said was the “megalomaniac of Asnar” in the dark times of the Iraq war. Reading every Sunday to someone who makes you feel uncomfortable because they don’t think like you creates the indescribable pleasure of expanding your cerebral cortex.
His value as a writer is indisputable, and his proposal for a Nobel Prize is just. Write toAnthony Lucas in El Mundo that “Marías leaves dissent against some things of the present”. In this he was a man of these immediate times. There was no proper Sunday that did not begin with Millás and end with Marías. Now I’ll settle for just the first one. So I was wondering why our mayor hasn’t already appeared in one of those videos of his to tell us if he liked it better with heart so white or with Tomorrow in the battle think of me, how has he not announced that Javier Marías will name a street in Alicante, the most Oxford we have, of course, to improve it without the need to demand it from one barricade or another. But it won’t, I claim.
And now I allow myself to remember that the Second Republic put a street in Valle-Inclan in 1935, which was also not from Alicante; Franco’s dictatorship took it from them, and a Francoist adviser named Peral returned it to the city in the 1960s. Let’s see if we are more brutal now, in the era of greater digital literacy, than in the era of lower analog literacy. Avoid answering me.
Creativity and imagination are required of the left, because the right has already authored two masterpieces: the exploitation of workers and the accumulation of wealth in the few. So we have to think that maybe the neighbors would much prefer to live on Los aires Difficult Street or Los Enamoramientos Street. That way, it’s possible that some, if only a few, will wonder why the hell their street is called that, and maybe some reading neighbor will explain it to them from neighbor to neighbor, and one of them might even end up in a bookstore buying one of these two novels, proud to live on a street with such an emotional title.
That way we won’t fall into the pettiness of using someone’s name for our concerns in a plenary session, turning the Blue Room into another school. Pilar Reyes says that Javier marilike “I had a novel if it had the first paragraph.” Maybe it’s time we started having the first paragraph of some streets with names that reflect respect and admiration for people who deserve it, whether they’re on the left or the right; or if not, maybe it’s time to unbutton our blouses, search our hearts with the point of a gun, and shoot ourselves right there, as Marias wrote.
If this latest and fatal case happens, we will soon have a street in Alicante dedicated to Kim Kardashian, which is what I came to talk to you about.
