Episode Details

Once upon a time there was Michael Morris, a professor trying to instill at eight in the morning a sliver of love for novels in a bunch of teens, who were either yawning with sleep or simply not paying attention. Because the rush of hormones disturbed them terribly within the shadow of young girls in flower. I was one of his students, stuck there and convinced that no one was going to teach me anything relevant about literature, given that I had been an avid reader since childhood.

As for the beauty sitting by my side, Mary Palmer, I let her write in the margins of the textbook the word “sleepy” as many times as she pleased and with whatever calligraphy she pleased. If she had asked me, without hesitating an instant, I would have also let her write on my hand, on my forearm. And if I had been alone with that freckled girl of curly mane, even on my chest I would have let her write the word “sleepy”, where my heart beat out of pure desire, thinking about each of her wet kisses.

Michael, that literature professor, I wouldn’t say his job enthused him either, but it was his only source of income. He showed up to morning classes smoking his pipe and in a mild state of intoxication with some sufficiently discreet substance—gummies, perhaps? A cold beer for his whole breakfast? There was no way of knowing. Or we were projecting our crazy fantasies, which might also be the case.

Instead of boring us even more, if that were possible, by patiently instructing us in endless tropes or figures of speech—as so many other professors had done before—he took advantage of every opportunity to read out loud whichever author he felt like. Like Edgar Allan Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym, a gripping story of shipwrecked sailors who draw straws to kill the youngest among them—and eat him.

One morning he brought with him a boombox and played us a jazz piece by Dizzy Gillespie so we would wake up once and for all. Next he told us the reason why he had brought the boombox, which was none other than to prepare us for the reading of Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar, an Argentine expatriate author in 1950s Paris, whose pages are soaked with multiple references to the venerated jazz musicians of that era.

And not only jazz, but also time jumps, counterpoints, doublings, disordered chapters, or alternate reading orders. That’s why Dizzy Gillespie. And Benny Carter, Earl Hines, Lonnie Johnson, Coleman Hawkins. Good God! The f*****g book that Cortázar had written in the manner of a game for mischievous children was an encyclopedia.

Wherever professor Michael Morris is—which might be heaven—I want to thank him for that spring morning of 1983. Because he instilled in me not a sliver of love for groundbreaking novels, like Hopscotch, but a boundless passion.

It is no exaggeration to say I must have read Hopscotch fourteen times over—which is to say, endlessly—not only because Cortázar built a labyrinth, but because it poses a trial for someone with mild dyslexia—that chaste kiss the archangel Metatron gives on the forehead to certain writers who proceed by slow degrees. And the maze is not deep down a trial, all things considered, but a lovely cure.

Today, sitting at my console with a Substack feed ready to drop, I have everything I need to build an audiobook of Hopscotch myself—weaving those jazz tracks straight into the narration. It remains one of those books I have dreamed of, and never could have—a seamless score Cortázar could only imagine.

That said, today I am radiant, as usually happens to me whenever it rains. Why might that be? Let me explain. Old Bill—William Faulkner, to drop the familiarities—wrote The Sound and the Fury in 1929, to my understanding the best novel ever written using the narrative technique of stream of consciousness. For the sake of conciseness, I am not going to get into the highbrow considerations behind this statement. Faulkner dema