Interview | “In the networks, the frightening reads as if it was banal”

Margo Glantz, mexican cosmopolitan, is 88 years old, in 2010 he won the Premio FIL de Guadalajara, the most important, together with the Cervantes, Spanish literature, and now has written a book that consists of a single question that takes 164 pages, And look at everything, nothing looked (Sixth Floor). It is like a succession of tweets with the want to mean that “in the networks the frightening reads as if it were also banal”.

the Vital force, is a veteran user of Twitter. Yours is a classical culture, literary; is a professor, a specialist on sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, translator. It is like a student curious to look at the reporter as if this question could be a part of the countless questions that constitute his book.

Question. What was the question itself?

Response. Why the people have lost their rank, why he has lost the sense of humor, why things are read so literally, why are there social networks.

Q. why are there?

R. Came up with the new technologies and there are more. I'm on Twitter because I was interested in when it emerged the Arab Spring. It was important to bring down dictatorships, but then what happened was even worse. Think that Trump uses Twitter, thanks to that he won the elections, he lies, and has a lot of people that will follow... Whatsapp did win [Jair] Bolsonaro in Brazil, with their lies about the Workers ' Party. He thought that if he came to the presidency [Fernando] Haddad, that would be another Venezuela. It did win a people ill-fated.

Q. How to discern the insanity of the sane thing?

A. that's why the book is titled And look at everything, nothing looked: sor Juana dreams that contemplate the universe and there are so many things that throng before his gaze that does not know to discern; change your method to see if you can understand something, but it ends up understanding nothing, because you wake up. And with this Twitter me it's the same: there is news mixed with banalities unbearable to read. And we keep reading. The frightening reads as if it were also bland. It says in the book; it appears the news of the pit with 79 killed in Mexico by the side of the death of David Bowie, what is more important? Young people are accustomed to read that everything is the same, and that is what I show in Artemisbet the book: that the most frightening of digest appears at the side of what does not matter.

Q. Combining Catalonia, Dickens, Darwin... Follows the course of the social networks as if Twitter was a mind mixing everything... what Is your mind type?

R. In the book, the literary has a very important role. It is also an autobiography personal spray, with a basting text that gives consistency to what I write. If only I had gathered the news from Facebook or Twitter, the book would not have the slightest importance. The important thing was to introduce a series of these threads, faint that you are giving support.

Q. What led you to ask that?

A. it All started attending to the orders which gives Facebook the people from the morning: how amaneciste?, in what state are you? Everything is predetermined, constrained, and you think that that is favorable for you. And the people respond: I took a coffee, I bathed, I walked the dog... bullshit. That's why I asked en iyi bahis siteleri you what happens, why people are losing the sense of humor and sense of the ridiculous, why give news about themselves that they also have no relevance whatsoever... That leads to the lack of hierarchization of mind that is taking the people. It is a trap.

Q. How did the book?

A. I Started to ask myself for the sense of networks with the aim of making a kind of poetics of the tweet. But what I cared was knowing how to discern between what is fleeting and what is sinister. Some tell me that how a woman of 88 years, is dedicated to this. It is also a way of denying the brokenness. I think that mentally I am very young, physically not what I am, but I still in force, very vital, because I dedicate to things that it seems to them that only interest young people.

Q. What is the claim today?

R. Everything! It is sinister that is Trump, who has come to Bolsonaro. I was in Vienna at an event to celebrate the fall of fascism. And, at the same time, is starting the fascism again.

Self-critique, irony and the love for Kafka

Glantz launches harsh criticism against the social networks. However, it remains in them. Why? “All the technology inventions have extraordinary aspects and other negative, depends on how they are used. The major newspapers are suffering a major crisis due to the existence of social networks, but I keep reading these headers, THE COUNTRY, La Repubblica, The New York Times or The New York Review of Books, that I learn things very important...”, he says.

The mexican is a woman unusual; go, discusses, jokes about itself; it may be pedantic, because he knows a lot, but it breaks in followed by the cadence of the names and the appointments. His book ends with this quote from Kafka: “Every day I have to write at least a sentence against me...”. She explains it this way: “If all writers did that, they would not be so puffed up and so narcissistic. Kafka is one of the figures most wonderful of the literature and never cared about the market. He liked to read, but it was always self-critical and ironic about himself.”