Episode Details

With indescribable relief, I note that the summer storms have finally arrived and two-thousand-year-old festival known as Ferragosto is behind us. The festival, originally a celebration of Roman Emperor Augustus, was once a time when beasts of burden were adorned with flowers after the rigors of harvesting and threshing wheat and workers bet their wages on horse races, a ritual which is in some places preserved, such as the Palio di Siena. The ancient tradition is so instilled in the unconscious collective, that the Digital Disconnection reaches its zenith during these holidays.

I am still confined in my studio writing another novel with Spartan discipline, so that when I hear some folkloric shouting as tribal as repetitive or teenagers under the influence returning to their parent's house talking in loud voices at six in the morning, which reverberate in the very narrow Mediterranean streets as if their insufferable nonsense were of vital importance to the hood, then, I put in my ear plugs without losing a stitch and keep sewing words lost in thought. So there is no actual Digital Disconnection for me. Because the Flemish triptych of screens on my desk has me by the balls, excuse my French. With the first hailstorm of the summer, as promised, I also caught up with the podcasts that I had not been able to record during the dog days.

And of course, I keep reading–making notes and underlining–the authors that stimulate me compelling me to write more, better, faster. Well, if someone doesn't know what I'm saying, writing is a ranging passion, as for others it will undoubtedly be gambling or politicking. It is for all these reasons that I consider it appropriate to comment on Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor, considered one of the one hundred masterpieces ever written.

The first work of any author is sometimes a surprising literary debut. Although at other times, on the contrary, the first sorrow of many others. Anyone coughs in the face of a first-time author to show in turn that the manuscript was read diagonally–or with an atmospheric reading as has been so fashionable lately.

However, Mary Flannery did not give in one iota to the requests of her publishers to sweeten her fiction according to the usual commercial standards, nor did she sell herself short. All this took her from one publisher to another, until she managed to publish Wise Blood almost unnoticed. Then, ten years later, word of mouth turned Wise Blood into a cult novel; I imagine that editorially I would have to classify it as a long seller, one of those novels whose reputation is based on the generosity and intelligence of its readers, not on the crazy greed of getting hold of a literary novelty that after a year no one remembers.

But let's go back to the beginning of her journey. Her short stories had opened the way for her in 1945 to scholarships and creative writing workshops at the University of Iowa, which could take her for a period of time of the backward-looking background of her native Georgia, a former Confederate state determined to stop time in an idealized past, based on the undisputed racial supremacy of whites over the descendants of black slaves, never mind that in World War II, which had just end, they fought and bled together in Europe and the Pacific.

Apart from the racial injustice that would take twenty years to even begin to confront, religion became a consumer product in which to take refuge from the many apocalyptic fears that the new atomic age had awakened. Even avowed atheists with impious customs tried to educate their offspring under the precepts of any of the many Protestant variants to choose from or the Roman Catholic, if they had Irish or Italian ancestry. Americans under the old-fashioned concept of a Christian nation rather than being godless commies.

In this particular temporal and social context and avoiding the intellectual bias of presentism, I entertained