Madrid-based editor of Letras Libres, a Spanish-language literary magazine, published in Mexico and Spain.
SP
Daniel, Letras Libres publishes reviews, essays, opinions and fiction. We’re in February and last week, the US broke up with Europe — it’s tempting to simplify and describe the world around us in dramatic terms. How’s the mood at the office?
DG
I think everybody is worried and a bit disoriented by the speed of the changes. Some of the things we’ve seen — for instance, about the European defence — were more or less expected. Many are almost unbelievably grotesque, like the Gaza project or the US adopting Putin’s narrative, turning the victim into the aggressor. Letras Libres is partly Mexican, and US and Mexico relations are another reason to worry. Alliances that had been working for some decades seem broken, and many things we took for granted feel less certain. Sometimes I think there’s a mixture of disbelief and a kind of paralysis, as if we were a rabbit blinded by headlights. I think this paralysis, an air of victimhood, is understandable — but we have to avoid it.
SP
What are your contributors coming with? How do you avoid writing the obligatory and bleak response?
DG
They come up with many different things, from an article that studies Trump as a bluff artist to a series of essays by Manuel Arias Maldonado about the rise of national populism. Or articles about technological corporations, regulation and a political idea of Europe. We are also preparing an issue about the new autocratic axis. I think one of the problems with this kind of leader is that they are attention grabbers, and you have to analyze the importance of what they’re doing, but also remember that there are other things going on in politics, but also in books, culture, etc. They can’t monopolize your conversation. Paying attention to other things is important, as is the use of humor and irony.
SP
Some Europeans are even a bit optimistic. This spring, will the sun shine on a more united Europe?
DG
I always liked the joke about the optimist and the pessimist. The pessimist says, « It’s horrible, it can’t get any worse than this. » The optimist says, « Don’t worry! Of course it can! » I don’t know, I wish, and in some aspects a more united Europe seems the best (or only) option. Being designated as « the enemy », or at least somebody not particularly liked, could be interpreted as a compliment or a recognition of an alternative model.
SP
Have you, apart from your own magazine, interesting writers to recommend for these times (or movie/series)
DG
Some thinkers and columnists I love reading are José Luis Pardo, Arcadi Espada, Ivan Krastev, Mary Gaitskill, Branko Milanovic, John Keane, Josu de Miguel, Marina Hyde, Luis Garicano, Najat El Hachmi, David Rieff, Pratap Bahnu Mehta, Olivier Roy, Noah Smith, Fernando Vallespín, Pablo de Lora, Ana Palacio, Mariano Gistaín, Víctor Vázquez (and cartoons by El Roto, in El País). In films I liked lately Volveréis by Jonás Trueba and Los destellos by Pilar Palomero. I enjoyed recently Pero ¿en qué país vivimos?, a sort of history of popular culture in Spain, by Agustín Sánchez Vidal, Crisálida by Fernando Navarro and Dear Members of the Board by Julie Schumacher.
SP
Can you focus on one of these and tell me why their book(s) is/are a good read right now?
DG
Manuel Arias Maldonado has an enormous range — political theory, environmentalism, cinema. He can write long essays, books and scathing columns. He is generous because he mentions lots of books and authors, he explains their positions even (or especially) when he disagrees with them. Sometimes he saves you time (you don’t need to read those books), sometimes he becomes a very useful guide. Mariano Gistaín should be much more well-known. He’s a truly original writer — a mixture of Philip K. Dick, Simone Weil, Groucho Marx and Luis Buñuel. He’s one of the few literary authors that really understand the internet and its transformations — he was a pioneer in Spain — a visionary and a critic of capitalism, a very intuitive and perceptive analyst. Just before the arrival of Covid in Europe, when some people were talking about the news from China, but still not much and with some skepticism, he wrote a column whose first paragraph was the code of the virus. And he’s also very funny.
SP
Gistaín is writing for Letras Libres. I cannot find his books in any other language than Spanish, so we should translate one of his essays, for ERB readers. Which of his ideas were so fascinating that you’d want our readers to read about them as well?
DG
About 8 years ago he wrote that democratic capitalism had entered a crisis when it ran out of competitors — exactly, he said, as predicted by the theory of capitalism. He has also explained that computing science belongs to the realm of the esoteric, and I think he’s particularly interesting showing the contradictions and absurdities of the digital world (in texts that are sometimes short essays, sometimes narrative pieces). He has also written that a fly’s brain contains the universe and that we were screwed by Ockham’s razor.
SP
How have we been screwed by Ockhams razor?!
DG
In Nadie y nada (Nobody and nothing), two Beckettian characters who are unsure if they exist or not, decide that they can’t die twice or three times because of the principle of parsimony — which then turns against them.
SP
Sorry, why does that mean we are all screwed by Ockhams razor?
DG
Yes… A bit confusing. I thought that it meant (though a joke) that we tend to think that the shortest explanation is the correct one. But that it doesn’t always work like that, and sometimes we make mistakes based on that assumption. So maybe it’s more about trusting theories too much than about Ockham’s razor itself.
