Diego Medrano
Encyclopedia
Diego Medrano Fernández is a Spanish poet, narrator
and regular columnist
of Asturian
newspaper El Comercio.
studies in the Universidad de Oviedo
, where, "after feeling like Oscar Wilde
in prison", and telling himself a certain quote by Francois Mauriac
-"Freedom and health are the same thing"- he soon leaves everything for the sake of his cyclopean
literary vocation. "Perpetual writer, always writer", he is the heir of a tradition that combines decadence
and culture
in the same identity: Jean Lorrain
, Charles Baudelaire
, Max Jacob
, Arthur Rimbaud
, Emile Cioran, Louis Aragon
, Louis-Ferdinand Celine
, Georges Bataille
among others.
He steps into the world of literature with the book: Los héroes inutiles (The Useless Heroes) (Ellago Ediciones, 2005), a complete collection of the correspondence that he held with Spanish
"damned" writer Leopoldo María Panero
, that serves as a literary poetic
where the author, following two well-known sentences by Charles Baudelaire, declares himself "hero" and "useless". His first poetry book, also published in 2005: El hombre entre las rocas (The Man Among the Rocks) (Arena Libros) is a sort of writing notebook in which he entwines the poetic with the narrative in a same coherent unity, similar to Jean Cocteau
or René Char
, where the former (poetic) is always destined to triumph over the latter (narrative).
He publishes his first novel El clítoris de Camille (Camille's Clitoris) (Seix Barral) in early 2006, a transgressive novel
that is practically impossible to label or classify. This novel was surrounded in controversy for constituting the solid monologue
of a decadent mentally ill writer facing a love process, a surprising novel, tinged by the use of a most peculiar and deconstructive syntax
and a not less provoking language. Also in 2006, he published a book of micro-stories, Los sueños diurnos. Manual para amantes, pobres y asesinos (Daylight Dreams. Instructions for lovers, beggars and murderers) (Cahoba Narrativa) which is the sum of over three-hundred micro-stories and over six-hundred characters, filled with quotes and "illuminations", where he followed the composition processes of Robert Walser
and his Mikrogramme (Micrograms).
In 2007, with La soledad no tiene edad (Loneliness Has No Age) (Septem), Diego Medrano combines extensive and short stories, the titles of which should give an accurate orientation: Bragas (Panties), Nembutal, Urinarios (Urinals), Mahou
, Atapuerca
, Sirenas (Sirens)... 272 pages for readers ready for everything. In 2008, Medrano returns with the poetry book Agua me falta (Got No Water) (Septem).
The first volume of his diaries, Diario del artista echado a perder (Diary Of The Wasted Artist), constitutes a convulse "Dictionary of the lousy" -dozens and dozens of "damned" and "cursed" artists- with the author's own life, no less heterodox or singular.
He also published other poetry books such as: El viento muerde (The Wind Bites) and A veces cuerdo (Sometimes Sane).
–for searching a new and unruly order in literature- and the Petites Poemes en Prose
(Little Poems in Prose) by Charles Baudelaire –for their poetic nature concentrated in the minimal narrative structure- comes Medrano's "El hombre entre las rocas". Between Oppium (Opium: The Diary of a Cure) by Jean Cocteau –for its attempt at a constant diary
of all work- and James Joyce
's Finnegans Wake
–in its plausible attempt to fixate an episodic syntax, through formula
s that the author plays with and is not going to give up- appears this little jewel. With the freedom of Samuel Beckett
–letting the verbal river flow- and the aphasia
of Louis-Ferdinand Celine –unworried about the style that his own work germinates- Medrano elaborates this little verbal artifact, without comparison in our days, the modernity
of which is that of the very tradition that is assimilated – the quoted authors and many others- trying its maximum use as conscience lash and sublime purge of styles.
could have said, or any other structuralist
for that matter. On one hand, always with Barthes in mind, Medrano declares himself Barthes' subject-monster: "he who forces the loved one in a relentless net of tyrannys". On the other hand, always in the monstruous territories, the author fantasizes with all kinds of cultural references, in a novísimical
or horrifying turn: poem dedicated to Mozart
learning to play the piano
, different approximations to Giacometti
, bombings over Guernika, tributes to Capote
and Michaux
, fascination for Ezra Pound
. In a very personal metric
and rhythm
, he created this "textual wakefulness", as he refers to it himself, in one of his many other fugues of other books with which he was occupied at that moment, without any other calm or polarity than to go on getting lost. Poetry book that is a book of mirrors and book of poems, that is a novel, narrativity, in a bohemian crossing of sad paintings, over any other blunt plastic. An immense "boutade", to name it El viento muerde (The Wind Bites), referring to certain verses by Lorca
("And over the slate roofs / the wind, furious, bites") when it is exactly the opposite: concept or sensation, much rather than tambourine or red moon.
s or emphatic flashes belongs to the most authentic Medrano, always in permanent crisis. The book was fully written one night (the night of the 25th to 26 May 2007), under the alchemy
of the shut blinds, the shaking hands and the nerves on top. He thought of committing suicide and, with the sole purpose of avoiding it, he started writing a little poem every ten or fifteen minutes: he had the intuition that this would be the only way he could reach the dawn alive, that this and no other was the valid formula to survival. In the depths of the verb, according to Medrano, was a bear. It was a very big bear, and he would only calm down when he heard, from the author's lips, the word: "j-e-l-l-y". Beyond the bear, Medrano says, someone was snapping his fingers restlessly; probably the consequence of some strange Blues
or an irreverent Jazz
. Divided in episodes –like clouds or secrets in the present constellation- a woman shoved a living mouse in her vagina. Testimony of all this is recorded in this text, weird above any other condition that, in equal or very similar tuning, could stay related to other famous weirdnesses: Juego de cartas (Card Game) by Max Jacob, Cente mille millards de poems(Hundreds of Thousands of Poems) by Raymond Queneau
, Libro de los agujeros (Book of the Holes) by Francisco Pino or La prosse du Transsiberien (Transiberian Prose) by Blaise Cendrars
. Only for very ephemeral sane individuals.
s and dreams
, personal persistent cartographies
and signs that will soon see the light shining over the water of its immediate publication". Medrano's voice, metallic in all its forms, polymorphic in its expression, for better or worse, is already a sign in the midst of a lethargic society, where similar voices rise "with the safety of those who can only fear themselves", as a certain Nadal Award winner of the most suggestive, provoking and immediate Spanish narrative
, said about the author. Eight years of metal in vein, blue blindness of someone who delves deeper into himself, to the point of fanaticism.
, together with his passion for the defeated of every condition, the bohemians without solution, the damned who have only themselves. "How hard it is to kill oneself when someone truly wishes to die", whispered the author in one of his many presentations, apparently exhausted. With a bit of metaliterature
, a lot of tragedy
, complete "esperpento
", black or medranic mass and the green urine
of fools, the author managed to make an endless number of critics doubt, who did not know in what limits to frame this text. "What the hell is this?", asked certain reviewers in their blinking chronicles. The madness of the text, miraculously, cannot be untied of the very madness that generates the difficult understanding of it, or at least the most visible attempt. Surprisingly, perhaps in the height of the tragedy, some have described it as "prodigious humor". Brilliant text, hallucinated, the first reference of which would be Radiguet's
Le Diable au Corps (The Devil in the Flesh).
, his books, his work, his thoughts... What else does a young man need to reach the artist he has inside?
Samuel Lamata arrived to Madrid
to dedicate himself exclusively to writing, to triumph in literature, but specially to spy on Umbral and to turn this city into a literary character. In the sleazy pension of Hortaleza Street where he lives, before going to bed, he often repeats to himself two sentences by Witold Gombrowicz
. The first: "I wasn’t anything at all, therefore I could allow myself everything". The second: "Since I practice literature I always had to destroy someone else in order to save myself". This is how his vibrating search stars, his literary search, vital search, where he, as narrator with a wide literary register (Borges
, Kafka
, Gómez de la Serna
, etc.) tries to find the real Francisco Umbral, find out who hides behind the character of Maruja Lapoint (pseudonym
that corresponds to a certain bohemian celebrity of the Café Gijón) and, finally, try to uncover his own identity...
, happened to have a brilliant reception by a great number of young people. It could not be more colossal and pretentious: three-hundred microstories, each of them with their own plotlines, with over six-hundred characters. Texts that, following the turbulent path of Robert Walser
's micrograms written in the Herisau
and Waldeau mental hospitals, those texts that Walser used to write on any kind of surface (receipts, cards, flaps, notepads), Medrano writes constantly on napkins and compiles them all in this volume. "Tired of other genres, I was looking for something rather brief, and thus, I turned into a literary napkin machine in the worst whorehouses. I think I wrote over ten thousand, although only three hundred appear in the book. The others must have been stolen or lost. I still haven’t been able to stop", he said during the presentation. It's amazing, how many quotes he operates with in the texts: cult characters in total marginality, a revision of high culture in the worst trances. Singular and effervescent optic of the classics. All kinds of abuses, The author quoted Nijinsky
that morning in full effervescence: "I want to make love to my daughter and my mother". In several shopping centers the book was being sold with a couple of extra pages, stapled, which the editorial did not commercialize. Some of the texts boiled in their daring nature. Medrano quoted a sweating Kafka: "At some point, there is no return anymore. That is the point one has to reach". The edition, impeccable, shines with several illustrations by Egon Schiele.
or Franz Kafka. Cocteau has the voice of wet grass in spring. Kafka, nevertheless, hit by barbiturates, is almost mute, no voice at all: I’d say he is just a little feverish thread more in the nothingness. "I am what I leave on the way", I said one morning to some drunkard who looked at me with innocent animal eyes, thinking I’d try to sell him bibles or something. I used to wake up very early, I liked seeing the junkies
, fucked up, give them therapeutical kisses, and dangerous kisses for the prostitutes: only the resisting ones, the ones who were not defeated by the previous night yet. Now I always wake up late. The time these stories were written (1997-2007) is the time in which I thought of myself as the greatest hurricane to hit the streets of crisis, the deep journeys of fear and the sewers of helplessness: all the alleys of madness. Still today, I believe we are only fear and sex. What is in between, if you don’t get scared, you can find it in these pages: where violence is chopped without any kind of hurry, making slices of oneself to go on living. And where the hands tremble, for being golden. And where the mirrors, so nice, only give us magnificent putrefaction.
and hyperrealist situations... Doubts strike us with each new story we read, disconcert us because we doubt whether we should laugh or cry; because we cannot know if we are detached from these characters or they nest crouching in our soul.
Surviving can be amusing is a cocktail
where sensibility, anger, prodigious observation and imagination skills, which we should gulp down in some exclusive bar in company of a werewolf
.
Narrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
and regular columnist
Columnist
A columnist is a journalist who writes for publication in a series, creating an article that usually offers commentary and opinions. Columns appear in newspapers, magazines and other publications, including blogs....
of Asturian
Asturias
The Principality of Asturias is an autonomous community of the Kingdom of Spain, coextensive with the former Kingdom of Asturias in the Middle Ages...
newspaper El Comercio.
Life
Begins philosophyPhilosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
studies in the Universidad de Oviedo
University of Oviedo
The University of Oviedo is a public university in Asturias . It's the only university in the region. It has three campus and research centres, located in Oviedo, Gijón and Mieres.-History:...
, where, "after feeling like Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
in prison", and telling himself a certain quote by Francois Mauriac
François Mauriac
François Mauriac was a French author; member of the Académie française ; laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature . He was awarded the Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur .-Biography:...
-"Freedom and health are the same thing"- he soon leaves everything for the sake of his cyclopean
Cyclops
A cyclops , in Greek mythology and later Roman mythology, was a member of a primordial race of giants, each with a single eye in the middle of his forehead...
literary vocation. "Perpetual writer, always writer", he is the heir of a tradition that combines decadence
Decadence
Decadence can refer to a personal trait, or to the state of a society . Used to describe a person's lifestyle. Concise Oxford Dictionary: "a luxurious self-indulgence"...
and culture
Culture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
in the same identity: Jean Lorrain
Jean Lorrain
Jean Lorrain , born Paul Duval, was a French poet and novelist of the Symbolist school....
, Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...
, Max Jacob
Max Jacob
Max Jacob was a French poet, painter, writer, and critic.-Life and career:After spending his childhood in Quimper, Brittany, France, he enrolled in the Paris Colonial School, which he left in 1897 for an artistic career...
, Arthur Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent...
, Emile Cioran, Louis Aragon
Louis Aragon
Louis Aragon , was a French poet, novelist and editor, a long-time member of the Communist Party and a member of the Académie Goncourt.- Early life :...
, Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Louis-Ferdinand Céline was the pen name of French writer and physician Louis-Ferdinand Destouches . Céline was chosen after his grandmother's first name. He is considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, developing a new style of writing that modernized both French and...
, Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille was a French writer. His multifaceted work is linked to the domains of literature, anthropology, philosophy, economy, sociology and history of art...
among others.
He steps into the world of literature with the book: Los héroes inutiles (The Useless Heroes) (Ellago Ediciones, 2005), a complete collection of the correspondence that he held with Spanish
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
"damned" writer Leopoldo María Panero
Leopoldo María Panero
Leopoldo María Panero , is a Spanish poet, commonly placed in the Novísimos group.Panero is the archetype of a decadence as much cultivated as repudiated, but that decadence has not stopped him from being the first member of his generation in being incorporated to the classic Spanish editorial...
, that serves as a literary poetic
Poetics
Aristotle's Poetics is the earliest-surviving work of dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory...
where the author, following two well-known sentences by Charles Baudelaire, declares himself "hero" and "useless". His first poetry book, also published in 2005: El hombre entre las rocas (The Man Among the Rocks) (Arena Libros) is a sort of writing notebook in which he entwines the poetic with the narrative in a same coherent unity, similar to Jean Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...
or René Char
René Char
René Char was a 20th century French poet.-Biography:Char was born in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in the Vaucluse department of France, the youngest of four children of Emile Char and Marie-Therese Rouget, where his father was mayor and managing director of the Vaucluse plasterworks...
, where the former (poetic) is always destined to triumph over the latter (narrative).
He publishes his first novel El clítoris de Camille (Camille's Clitoris) (Seix Barral) in early 2006, a transgressive novel
Transgressional fiction
Transgressive fiction is a genre of literature that focuses on characters who feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and who break free of those confines in unusual and/or illicit ways. Because they are rebelling against the basic norms of society, protagonists of transgressional...
that is practically impossible to label or classify. This novel was surrounded in controversy for constituting the solid monologue
Monologue
In theatre, a monologue is a speech presented by a single character, most often to express their thoughts aloud, though sometimes also to directly address another character or the audience. Monologues are common across the range of dramatic media...
of a decadent mentally ill writer facing a love process, a surprising novel, tinged by the use of a most peculiar and deconstructive syntax
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
and a not less provoking language. Also in 2006, he published a book of micro-stories, Los sueños diurnos. Manual para amantes, pobres y asesinos (Daylight Dreams. Instructions for lovers, beggars and murderers) (Cahoba Narrativa) which is the sum of over three-hundred micro-stories and over six-hundred characters, filled with quotes and "illuminations", where he followed the composition processes of Robert Walser
Robert Walser
Robert Walser may refer to:* Robert Walser , Swiss modernist writer* Robert Walser , American musicologist, author and professor...
and his Mikrogramme (Micrograms).
In 2007, with La soledad no tiene edad (Loneliness Has No Age) (Septem), Diego Medrano combines extensive and short stories, the titles of which should give an accurate orientation: Bragas (Panties), Nembutal, Urinarios (Urinals), Mahou
Mahou
Mahou may refer to:*Grupo Mahou-San Miguel, Spanish brewing company*Mahou, Mali...
, Atapuerca
Atapuerca
The Atapuerca Mountains is an ancient karstic region of Spain, in the province of Burgos and near Atapuerca and Ibeas de Juarros. It contains several caves, where fossils and stone tools of the earliest known Hominins in West Europe have been found. The earliest hominids may have dated to 1.2...
, Sirenas (Sirens)... 272 pages for readers ready for everything. In 2008, Medrano returns with the poetry book Agua me falta (Got No Water) (Septem).
The first volume of his diaries, Diario del artista echado a perder (Diary Of The Wasted Artist), constitutes a convulse "Dictionary of the lousy" -dozens and dozens of "damned" and "cursed" artists- with the author's own life, no less heterodox or singular.
He also published other poetry books such as: El viento muerde (The Wind Bites) and A veces cuerdo (Sometimes Sane).
El hombre entre las rocas (The Man Among The Rocks)
Between Oficio de tinieblas 5 (Trade of Darkness 5) by Camilo José CelaCamilo José Cela
Camilo José Cela y Trulock, 1st Marquis of Iria Flavia was a Spanish novelist and short story writer. He was awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize in Literature "for a rich and intensive prose, which with restrained compassion forms a challenging vision of man's vulnerability".-Biography:Cela published his...
–for searching a new and unruly order in literature- and the Petites Poemes en Prose
Le Spleen de Paris
Le Spleen de Paris, also known as Paris Spleen or Petits Poèmes en prose, is a collection of 51 short prose poems by Charles Baudelaire....
(Little Poems in Prose) by Charles Baudelaire –for their poetic nature concentrated in the minimal narrative structure- comes Medrano's "El hombre entre las rocas". Between Oppium (Opium: The Diary of a Cure) by Jean Cocteau –for its attempt at a constant diary
Diary
A diary is a record with discrete entries arranged by date reporting on what has happened over the course of a day or other period. A personal diary may include a person's experiences, and/or thoughts or feelings, including comment on current events outside the writer's direct experience. Someone...
of all work- and James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
's Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish author James Joyce, significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's...
–in its plausible attempt to fixate an episodic syntax, through formula
Formula
In mathematics, a formula is an entity constructed using the symbols and formation rules of a given logical language....
s that the author plays with and is not going to give up- appears this little jewel. With the freedom of Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
–letting the verbal river flow- and the aphasia
Aphasia
Aphasia is an impairment of language ability. This class of language disorder ranges from having difficulty remembering words to being completely unable to speak, read, or write....
of Louis-Ferdinand Celine –unworried about the style that his own work germinates- Medrano elaborates this little verbal artifact, without comparison in our days, the modernity
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
of which is that of the very tradition that is assimilated – the quoted authors and many others- trying its maximum use as conscience lash and sublime purge of styles.
El viento muerde (The Wind Bites)
This poetry book is "pure linguistic fact", in what Roland BarthesRoland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
could have said, or any other structuralist
Structuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
for that matter. On one hand, always with Barthes in mind, Medrano declares himself Barthes' subject-monster: "he who forces the loved one in a relentless net of tyrannys". On the other hand, always in the monstruous territories, the author fantasizes with all kinds of cultural references, in a novísimical
Novísimos
The Novísimos were a poetic group in Spain who took their name from an anthology in which the Catalan critic José María Castellet gathered the work of the majority of the youngest and most experimental poets in the decade of the 1970s: Nueve novísimos poetas españoles , Barcelona, 1970...
or horrifying turn: poem dedicated to Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart , was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music...
learning to play the piano
Piano
The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...
, different approximations to Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draughtsman, and printmaker.Alberto Giacometti was born in the canton Graubünden's southerly alpine valley Val Bregaglia and came from an artistic background; his father, Giovanni, was a well-known post-Impressionist painter...
, bombings over Guernika, tributes to Capote
Truman Capote
Truman Streckfus Persons , known as Truman Capote , was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and the true crime novel In Cold Blood , which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At...
and Michaux
Henri Michaux
Henri Michaux was a highly idiosyncratic Belgian-born poet, writer, and painter who wrote in French. He later took French citizenship. Michaux is best known for his esoteric books written in a highly accessible style, and his body of work includes poetry, travelogues, and art criticism...
, fascination for Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
. In a very personal metric
Metre (music)
Meter or metre is a term that music has inherited from the rhythmic element of poetry where it means the number of lines in a verse, the number of syllables in each line and the arrangement of those syllables as long or short, accented or unaccented...
and rhythm
Rhythm
Rhythm may be generally defined as a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time may be applied to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or...
, he created this "textual wakefulness", as he refers to it himself, in one of his many other fugues of other books with which he was occupied at that moment, without any other calm or polarity than to go on getting lost. Poetry book that is a book of mirrors and book of poems, that is a novel, narrativity, in a bohemian crossing of sad paintings, over any other blunt plastic. An immense "boutade", to name it El viento muerde (The Wind Bites), referring to certain verses by Lorca
Federico García Lorca
Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca was a Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director. García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of '27. He is believed to be one of thousands who were summarily shot by anti-communist death squads...
("And over the slate roofs / the wind, furious, bites") when it is exactly the opposite: concept or sensation, much rather than tambourine or red moon.
A veces cuerdo (Sometimes Sane)
With portico by Pere Gimferrer, this book of poetic aphorismAphorism
An aphorism is an original thought, spoken or written in a laconic and memorable form.The term was first used in the Aphorisms of Hippocrates...
s or emphatic flashes belongs to the most authentic Medrano, always in permanent crisis. The book was fully written one night (the night of the 25th to 26 May 2007), under the alchemy
Alchemy
Alchemy is an influential philosophical tradition whose early practitioners’ claims to profound powers were known from antiquity. The defining objectives of alchemy are varied; these include the creation of the fabled philosopher's stone possessing powers including the capability of turning base...
of the shut blinds, the shaking hands and the nerves on top. He thought of committing suicide and, with the sole purpose of avoiding it, he started writing a little poem every ten or fifteen minutes: he had the intuition that this would be the only way he could reach the dawn alive, that this and no other was the valid formula to survival. In the depths of the verb, according to Medrano, was a bear. It was a very big bear, and he would only calm down when he heard, from the author's lips, the word: "j-e-l-l-y". Beyond the bear, Medrano says, someone was snapping his fingers restlessly; probably the consequence of some strange Blues
Blues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...
or an irreverent Jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
. Divided in episodes –like clouds or secrets in the present constellation- a woman shoved a living mouse in her vagina. Testimony of all this is recorded in this text, weird above any other condition that, in equal or very similar tuning, could stay related to other famous weirdnesses: Juego de cartas (Card Game) by Max Jacob, Cente mille millards de poems(Hundreds of Thousands of Poems) by Raymond Queneau
Raymond Queneau
Raymond Queneau was a French poet and novelist and the co-founder of Ouvroir de littérature potentielle .-Biography:Born in Le Havre, Seine-Maritime, Queneau was the only child of Auguste Queneau and Joséphine Mignot...
, Libro de los agujeros (Book of the Holes) by Francisco Pino or La prosse du Transsiberien (Transiberian Prose) by Blaise Cendrars
Blaise Cendrars
Frédéric Louis Sauser , better known as Blaise Cendrars, was a Swiss novelist and poet naturalized French in 1916. He was a writer of considerable influence in the modernist movement.-Early years:...
. Only for very ephemeral sane individuals.
Agua me falta: Tragedias & Neurosis 1999-2007 (Got No Water: Tragedies & Neurosis 1999-2007)
Restless author –moreover with himself- and dense literature. Each new book by Medrano seems to be a new reason for the fire and its spigot. Extremely original voice in the contemporary literary panorama, polemic author in a tradition where heterodoxy is brought to the limit; theorist and executor of his own polarities, constant flow of books and obsessive-maniac with all sorts of literary material. Many will be surprised with this secret poetry book, among all his previous books, for which he confesses: "I've given everything here, while I was gusting and airing in a good number of other proseProse
Prose is the most typical form of written language, applying ordinary grammatical structure and natural flow of speech rather than rhythmic structure...
s and dreams
Dream
Dreams are successions of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. The content and purpose of dreams are not definitively understood, though they have been a topic of scientific speculation, philosophical intrigue and religious...
, personal persistent cartographies
Cartography
Cartography is the study and practice of making maps. Combining science, aesthetics, and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality can be modeled in ways that communicate spatial information effectively.The fundamental problems of traditional cartography are to:*Set the map's...
and signs that will soon see the light shining over the water of its immediate publication". Medrano's voice, metallic in all its forms, polymorphic in its expression, for better or worse, is already a sign in the midst of a lethargic society, where similar voices rise "with the safety of those who can only fear themselves", as a certain Nadal Award winner of the most suggestive, provoking and immediate Spanish narrative
Spanish literature
Spanish literature generally refers to literature written in the Spanish language within the territory that presently constitutes the state of Spain...
, said about the author. Eight years of metal in vein, blue blindness of someone who delves deeper into himself, to the point of fanaticism.
El Clítoris de Camille (Camille's Clitoris)
Delirious, comical, brilliant, absurd, all amalgamated in the same identity, magic and undecipherable. The story of Dante Cornellius, character obsessed with excrements and whose hair, he believes, changes color every instant, will not leave anyone indifferent. It was greeted by Pere Gimferrer, literary director of Seix Barral as a new wave of fresh wind in contemporary young narrative. Ricardo Senabre underlined the twists and turns or stylistic games of the author in the El Cultural section of El MundoEl Mundo (Spain)
El Mundo is the second largest printed and the largest digital daily newspaper in Spain and one of the newspapers of record in that country, with a daily circulation topping 300,000 readers for the printed edition and 24 million unique web visitors per month for the...
, together with his passion for the defeated of every condition, the bohemians without solution, the damned who have only themselves. "How hard it is to kill oneself when someone truly wishes to die", whispered the author in one of his many presentations, apparently exhausted. With a bit of metaliterature
Metafiction
Metafiction, also known as Romantic irony in the context of Romantic works of literature, is a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction, exposing the fictional illusion...
, a lot of tragedy
Tragedy
Tragedy is a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of...
, complete "esperpento
Esperpento
Esperpento denotes a literary style in Spanish literature first established by Spanish author Ramón María Valle-Inclán. A consistently distorted description of reality serves to criticize society. Leading themes are death and the grotesque. Everyday life is intertwined with nightmare, human beings...
", black or medranic mass and the green urine
Urine
Urine is a typically sterile liquid by-product of the body that is secreted by the kidneys through a process called urination and excreted through the urethra. Cellular metabolism generates numerous by-products, many rich in nitrogen, that require elimination from the bloodstream...
of fools, the author managed to make an endless number of critics doubt, who did not know in what limits to frame this text. "What the hell is this?", asked certain reviewers in their blinking chronicles. The madness of the text, miraculously, cannot be untied of the very madness that generates the difficult understanding of it, or at least the most visible attempt. Surprisingly, perhaps in the height of the tragedy, some have described it as "prodigious humor". Brilliant text, hallucinated, the first reference of which would be Radiguet's
Raymond Radiguet
Raymond Radiguet was a French author whose two novels were noted for their explicit themes and writing style and tone.-Early life:...
Le Diable au Corps (The Devil in the Flesh).
Puta albina colgada del brazo de Francisco Umbral (Albino Whore Hanging from Francisco Umbral's Arm)
Hunger, poverty, a miserable and sleazy pension in Hortaleza Street, mysterious death threats in the dirty mirror of a ruined bathroom, a celebrated woman of the Café Gijón, Francisco UmbralFrancisco Umbral
Francisco Umbral was a Spanish journalist, novelist, biographer and essayist.-Style:...
, his books, his work, his thoughts... What else does a young man need to reach the artist he has inside?
Samuel Lamata arrived to Madrid
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
to dedicate himself exclusively to writing, to triumph in literature, but specially to spy on Umbral and to turn this city into a literary character. In the sleazy pension of Hortaleza Street where he lives, before going to bed, he often repeats to himself two sentences by Witold Gombrowicz
Witold Gombrowicz
Witold Marian Gombrowicz was a Polish novelist and dramatist. His works are characterized by deep psychological analysis, a certain sense of paradox and an absurd, anti-nationalist flavor...
. The first: "I wasn’t anything at all, therefore I could allow myself everything". The second: "Since I practice literature I always had to destroy someone else in order to save myself". This is how his vibrating search stars, his literary search, vital search, where he, as narrator with a wide literary register (Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
, Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
, Gómez de la Serna
Ramón Gómez de la Serna
Ramón Gómez de la Serna Puig was a Spanish writer, dramatist and avant-garde agitator. He strongly influenced surrealist film maker Luis Buñuel....
, etc.) tries to find the real Francisco Umbral, find out who hides behind the character of Maruja Lapoint (pseudonym
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
that corresponds to a certain bohemian celebrity of the Café Gijón) and, finally, try to uncover his own identity...
Los sueños diurnos. Manual para amantes, pobres y asesinos (Daylight Dreams. Instructions for lovers, beggars and murderers)
This book, presented by Javier Tomeo and Pere Gimferrer in BarcelonaBarcelona
Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain after Madrid, and the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of...
, happened to have a brilliant reception by a great number of young people. It could not be more colossal and pretentious: three-hundred microstories, each of them with their own plotlines, with over six-hundred characters. Texts that, following the turbulent path of Robert Walser
Robert Walser
Robert Walser may refer to:* Robert Walser , Swiss modernist writer* Robert Walser , American musicologist, author and professor...
's micrograms written in the Herisau
Herisau
Herisau is a municipality of the canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden in Switzerland. It is the seat of the canton's government and parliament; the judicial authorities are situated in Trogen....
and Waldeau mental hospitals, those texts that Walser used to write on any kind of surface (receipts, cards, flaps, notepads), Medrano writes constantly on napkins and compiles them all in this volume. "Tired of other genres, I was looking for something rather brief, and thus, I turned into a literary napkin machine in the worst whorehouses. I think I wrote over ten thousand, although only three hundred appear in the book. The others must have been stolen or lost. I still haven’t been able to stop", he said during the presentation. It's amazing, how many quotes he operates with in the texts: cult characters in total marginality, a revision of high culture in the worst trances. Singular and effervescent optic of the classics. All kinds of abuses, The author quoted Nijinsky
Vaslav Nijinsky
Vaslav Nijinsky was a Russian ballet dancer and choreographer of Polish descent, cited as the greatest male dancer of the 20th century. He grew to be celebrated for his virtuosity and for the depth and intensity of his characterizations...
that morning in full effervescence: "I want to make love to my daughter and my mother". In several shopping centers the book was being sold with a couple of extra pages, stapled, which the editorial did not commercialize. Some of the texts boiled in their daring nature. Medrano quoted a sweating Kafka: "At some point, there is no return anymore. That is the point one has to reach". The edition, impeccable, shines with several illustrations by Egon Schiele.
La soledad no tiene edad (Loneliness Has No Age)
I don’t know what I am. I don’t know who I am. Sometimes, in rainy days, I take my shoe off and, when I press it against my ear for a while, I can talk with Jean Cocteau, Antonin ArtaudAntonin Artaud
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, more well-known as Antonin Artaud was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director...
or Franz Kafka. Cocteau has the voice of wet grass in spring. Kafka, nevertheless, hit by barbiturates, is almost mute, no voice at all: I’d say he is just a little feverish thread more in the nothingness. "I am what I leave on the way", I said one morning to some drunkard who looked at me with innocent animal eyes, thinking I’d try to sell him bibles or something. I used to wake up very early, I liked seeing the junkies
Substance dependence
The section about substance dependence in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders does not use the word addiction at all. It explains:...
, fucked up, give them therapeutical kisses, and dangerous kisses for the prostitutes: only the resisting ones, the ones who were not defeated by the previous night yet. Now I always wake up late. The time these stories were written (1997-2007) is the time in which I thought of myself as the greatest hurricane to hit the streets of crisis, the deep journeys of fear and the sewers of helplessness: all the alleys of madness. Still today, I believe we are only fear and sex. What is in between, if you don’t get scared, you can find it in these pages: where violence is chopped without any kind of hurry, making slices of oneself to go on living. And where the hands tremble, for being golden. And where the mirrors, so nice, only give us magnificent putrefaction.
Sobrevivir puede ser divertido (Surviving Can Be Amusing)
Heterodox and caustic stories, collection of tender and intolerable guys, surrealistSurrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
and hyperrealist situations... Doubts strike us with each new story we read, disconcert us because we doubt whether we should laugh or cry; because we cannot know if we are detached from these characters or they nest crouching in our soul.
Surviving can be amusing is a cocktail
Cocktail
A cocktail is an alcoholic mixed drink that contains two or more ingredients—at least one of the ingredients must be a spirit.Cocktails were originally a mixture of spirits, sugar, water, and bitters. The word has come to mean almost any mixed drink that contains alcohol...
where sensibility, anger, prodigious observation and imagination skills, which we should gulp down in some exclusive bar in company of a werewolf
Werewolf
A werewolf, also known as a lycanthrope , is a mythological or folkloric human with the ability to shapeshift into a wolf or an anthropomorphic wolf-like creature, either purposely or after being placed under a curse...
.