For decades, there has been a program to promote reading in American schools that it would not be bad to copy here, if any Primary teacher is encouraged. It's called D.E.A.R., an acronym for "Drop everything and read", that is to say "drop everything and read". And it consists of organizing a day in which an entire school group goes to class in pajamas, with a pillow and a book or several. And the only program of the day is: find a comfortable corner and start reading. All day, and that's it. In some schools they do some stretching in the middle of the day and they put bowls with fruit to snack on, but otherwise there are no dynamics, no activities or anything, just sitting and reading all day. The D.E.A.R. is associated with the author of LIJ Beverly Cleary, who died last year, because she was a great promoter and included it in one of the books of her famous Ramona Quimby saga (which, by the way, is now impossible to find in Catalan and Spanish) . That's why many schools celebrate their pajama book day on April 12, which was Cleary's birthday.
THE DIETRICH CONNECTION OF THE POET OF 27
It is not a well-known fact but the poet Josefina de la Torre, considered one of the forgotten of the Generation of 27, whose study has always focused on male names, was also a dubbing actress. In the 1920s, she was hired by Paramount Pictures to dub Marlene Dietrich and at the Benito Pérez Galdós House-Museum in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, which keeps the legacy of the poet, there is a photo dedicated to her by the actress from El Ángel blue. In reality, De la Torre managed to pursue parallel careers in film and literature until the 1980s, when she had a role in the series Rings of Gold, by Ana Diosdado. She also wrote novels under a pseudonym and acted as assistant director on films directed by her brother, Claudio de la Torre.
NEW HOUSE FOR (LITERARY) SPECULATION
A new label in the Catalan language, Specula, dedicated to sci fi, fantasy and science fiction, will be launched in the fall. The intention is clear from the covers, with a retro air like those of the pulp novels of the mid-20th century and that promise to become collectibles. The editorial editor is the writer Jordi Casals, who is going to be in charge of putting together a catalog of four annual titles that will cover all the subgenres of speculative fiction. The first three titles, which will arrive between September this year and February next, are by Jaume Valor, who has written Les causes invisibles, a steampunk ucronía, Isabel del Río, with the science fiction novel Mare and Inés MacPherson, that mixes fantasy and terror in Els fils del mar.
THE MILLION DOLLAR CLUB
In the last days of the generalist channel sitcom, when Friends and The Big Bang Theory seated millions of people in front of the TV, at a specific time, all the cast of those two series reached the magic number of a million dollars per episode. In the age of platform television, that has become a bit complicated. The only ones who charge a million per chapter are stars, generally men (the only woman in that club is Helen Mirren, who has charged them for a series still unreleased, 1923) who drag their fame from the cinema: Mahershala Ali, who has brought in 1.3 million dollars per chapter for the series The Plot, Will Ferrell and Paul Rudd, who go out to a million each in The Shrink Next Door and Kevin Costner, who charges for Yellowstone. The curious thing is that not all of these series are successes and instead the fictions that are sweeping (Stranger Things, Bridgerton) can afford to pay their interpreters much less because it is considered that what is really important is the franchise, and not the cast, which can be interchangeable. And an actress like Elizabeth Moss, who has made her entire career, from The West Wing of the White House to The Handmaid's Tale, on the so-called prestigious television without going through the cinema, has only reached half a million.
RED FLAGS IN CREATIVE WORK
The editorial office of the digital It's Nice That, dedicated to illustration and graphics in all its facets, has produced a practical guide in the form of a bingo with all the "red flags" that designers who work with corporate clients should take into account. It also works for writers, copywriters, illustrators, translators and other creative contractors. In bingo they warn: if the first thing the client says is “here we are like a big family”, the creative had better run away or at least double the budget. Other red flags: if they try to contact the professional on several platforms and too often, the phrase “this is great, can we make a few small changes?”, “the budget has changed but the ambition is the same”, when they describe something as “sexy” and when payment is hampered by intolerable bureaucracy.
