Do you notice the proximity of Sant Jordi? Cultural journalists are often asked this, and this chronicle is an example of the difficulty of choosing and of the failed attempts to reach everywhere.
On Tuesday, at the Alibri bookstore, Josep Carles Rius presents Periodismo y democracia en la era de las emociones (UB Editions) with very good company, not only at the round table he shares with the director of La Vanguardia, Jordi Juan; the director of La Marea, Magda Bandera, and the president of the College of Journalists of Catalonia, Joan Maria Morros, but with a host of professional colleagues, such as Rosa Maria Calaf, Albert Om, Jesús Martínez, Estel Huguet or Andreu Claret , as well as colleagues and former colleagues of this newspaper, of which Rius was deputy director, such as Rafael Jorba or Josep Playà. There is also the lawyer Magda Oranich, the publisher and UB professor Joan Santanach or the audiovisual producer Xavier Atance. If we put them all we wouldn’t fit.
Jordi Juan says that the presentation is “a good excuse to meet and talk about the job”, and Rius says yes, but “we have to find a way that doesn’t give me so much work”. There are 464 pages about committed journalism and how the profession has dealt with the pandemic, Brexit, the rise and fall of Donald Trump, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the massacre in Palestine and also, of course, the independence process in Catalonia, ” what has touched us most closely”, says the author, “with emotions as a guiding thread”. The rector of the University of Barcelona, ??Joan Guàrdia, vindicates the university publishing house, which he compares with those of Oxford and Cambridge. “They wish they had books like this”, he says, and concludes that “what we have learned does not belong to us, we have the obligation to pass it on”.
La Finestres is down a street and I approach it in case the presentation of the complete poems of Joan Salvat-Papasseit (the one by Edicions 62 and the one by Lo Diable Gros/Godall) is still on. There, at the door, are Ferran Aisa (curator of the Year Saved) and Joan Vinuesa, with whom we are going to have a drink at the corner bar.
The next day, at Fàbrica Lehmann there is a repoquer of jotes, with nothing more than words, because Julià de Jòdar presents La casa tapiada (Comanegra) with Julià Guillamon, Júlia Ojeda and Laura Tejada. Among the audience are, attentive, Eduard Márquez, Fèlix Riera or David Fernàndez. Guillamon traces a line of continuity between Xavier Benguerel, De Jòdar and himself through the “interrelationship between figures and ways of recognizing the voiceless”. Ojeda puts author and novel on a par with Philip and Joseph Roth, Conrad, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Even more: “He is our Faulkner”. Tejada recognizes himself as a character in the book, and brings us his life together with the novel. De Jòdar talks about the “internal dialogue between the stories of the characters and the readers” in a novel that he defines as the “review of youthful optimism and the balance of contemporary disappointment”, “between the present and the shadow of the past”.
I’m trying to get to the presentation at the Museu de l’Art Prohibito of the Horitzons magazine, which Antoni Gelonch (who chairs the Horitzons 2025 Foundation) and Francesc Canosa as director have launched from Ponent, but I can only say hello to some of the assistants among the crowd that marches, such as the poet Meritxell Cucurella-Jorba and the artist Rosó Cusó, with whom we return to the same corner as the day before.
It’s already Thursday and there’s a party at the Antiga Fàbrica Damm: Regina Rodríguez Sirvent is not presenting Les calces al sol (La Campana), but celebrating the 50,000 copies she has sold in a year and a half. There are the writers Carlota Gurt and Anna Manso, the journalists Imma Sust and Laura Fa, and the image consultant Anna Pontnou is accompanied by the first lady, Janina Juli. Part of the editorial team has also come: communications manager Laia Collet, Anna Jolis – the first to read it in the editorial office -, Sílvia Fornells or the director and editorial coordinator of the group, Juan Díaz.
“It’s the first time I’ve been to a panty party,” says Antoni Bassas, who acts as master of ceremonies. The author explains that during this time, “a whole life”, she has had “a lot of happiness, as I would never have imagined”, but she has also known “a lot of darkness”, referring to the very premature birth of her son Bruc – who is arms of the father, the illustrator Guillem H. Pongiluppi –. Also speaking are the editor Joan Riambau -claims the Creu de Sant Jordi for the author for “widening the reader base in Catalan”–, the writer Melcior Comes -a professor at the Ateneo School–, Anna Mestres – friend and narrator of the audiobook – and Six, the character, who “turns out her name is Lídia Climent and she’s here”. Bassas misses the media talking more about the “panty phenomenon”. We’ve done it again.
It is already late when I call Adrià Pujol Cruells, who has just presented his Sixty-six Sinophos (H
I haven’t seen double dates work yet, but there are more every day. At the very least, there will be until Sant Jordi, but it may not be everywhere at the same time.
