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Carmen Torres Ripa es una periodista de Baracaldo que tiene dentro de sus venas el veneno de la escritura y ese veneno se hizo para ella más palpable cuando por casualidad conoció a un personaje de la magnitud de Hildegard de Bingen. Este hecho la ha supuesto trabajar sin descanso durante más de cuatro años en el conocimiento de esa santa germana, que sigue sin ser santa a los ojos de la Iglesia, pero no de los fieles. El resultado ha sido su segunda novela La mujer de las nueve lunas.

El próximo jueves 24 de marzo se presentará en la madrileña Casa del Libro de la Gran Vía el primer libro del escritor aragonés Luis Zueco titulado Rojo amanecer en Lepanto, una apasionante obra. Su originalidad radica en el punto de vista de la narración, ya que el narrador es Alejandro Farnesio, el héroe menos conocido de la más singular batalla naval que haya librado nuestra escuadra.

Amidst a rainy night I was reperusing some Encyclopedia Britannica’s articles, and since by hook or by crook, as the folkloric phrase runs, I always meet German mythologies and Greek stanzas of yore, I found a text written by Kathleen Kuiper (1) versed in the symbol styled “Rumpelstiltskin”, whose gast spends the tides of its life in the drudging work of turning straw into gold. I thought, then, our mind is like an alchemist who by the hair unites extremes without grokking how or why those brinks could be together.

En un acto presidido por la escritora española Milena Busquets y que contó con la participación del escritor y crítico literario francés, Pierre Assouline, en representación de la Academia Goncourt, el jurado seleccionó la novela Milwaukee Blues de Louis-Philippe Dalembert.

In the last days I read the American press, and I remembered an old, classic problem between the Humanities and the Natural Sciences, which I can formulate in the next fast question: are the Humanities useless for Natural Sciences? Leon Wieseltier says^[1] (1) that the Humanities, in the technocratic world, without solid reasons have been accused of having a “nonutilitarian character”. With criticism he remarks, besides, “the essential inability of the natural sciences to offer a satisfactory explanation” of human concerns, such as Soul, God, World, Freedom, abortion, euthanasia, etc. He argues that “the character of our society cannot be determined by engineers”. He says that “no distinction between human and machine”, as a director of engineering at Google wants, is nonsense.

As an Irish poet who has been living and writing in Madrid for the last four decades, I felt dutybound to compile a book of poems that would reflect my relationship with the diversity of Spain, its landscape and its people. The result of this endeavour is Spanish Points, a collection of my Spain-related poems chosen by me from nine books published between 1990 and 2020, together with a selection of recent unpublished poems.

La historia del pensamiento se caracteriza, entre otros muchos planteamientos, por la dicotomía entre razón y fe. Desde que el mundo es mundo al ser humano siempre le ha asaltado la necesidad de saber si existe algo más allá de la vida.

I’ve been weening the time-honored distinction between ancient and modern art. Time, I guess, isn’t a keen concept to split art. I’m going to talk a bit about this. Will we be “modern brethren” within ten thousand years? This discussion could endlessly be enlarged. I would like to hie the piebald literary connoisseurs to regard the microscope, or rather the microscopical worldview, which was well imprinted on the curious minds of the Greek pointy-heads (the phrase “οφθαλμος σου απλους” in Matthew 6: 22, and the word “καρδια” in Matthew 6: 21, evoke microscopical images) and on the minds of a Leibniz, of a Newton, as the hallmark of the said artsy rivers.

Our scooping finite mind, which is jostling athwart the fleeting and hitherandthitering reality from morning to night, is prone to sublime chimeras, to helter-skelter expressions without some tail tressed by adjectives or some head made of nouns, and to descry odds from the top of its wavering teleology. We can regard this hodgepodge of mental movements, with Kant, as the main crux of the “human intellect” in an “unphilosophical state” (1). The bleak lack of philosophy leads us to give an apparent rhapsodical accommodation to the sundry deeds of the world, and such an arrayment stands for a “Weltanschauung”, which is conveyed through religious words (2), which as spells hie us to believe in divinities. This apparent rhapsodical accommodation might be called “common sense”.

Henry Louis Mencken was a penetrating writer, who represented the crux of the journalism of America. Then, a philosophical analysis of his work will be useful to understand that journalism. To do this, I have perused A Gang of Pecksniffs^[1], which is a compendium of texts engaged against the hypocrisy of mediocre newspapermen. Our point d’appui could be this simple Kantian sentence: we can not know things in an objective manner. Our necessary representations a priori, like geometry and arithmetic, give a form and an order to the various data coming from the exterior world.

^[1] Mencken, Henry Louis, A Gang of Pecksniffs. New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House-Publishers, 1955.