There is no literary fandom as active, muscular and organized as that of the so-called Janeites, the staunch readers of Jane Austen, a phenomenon that also changes continuously as networks and platforms are added. The corner of Tik Tok that deals with the author of Pride and Prejudice, for example, is the most dynamic. But the waters do not flow placidly like an autumn afternoon in Bath among the "Janeites." Some younger representatives of the group have split from JASNA (the Jane Austen Society of North America) because they believe the group is not inclusive enough, and even call for a boycott of its activities. On the Internet, this battle materializes in humorous meme accounts such as Jane Austen First Drafts and Drunk Jane Austen, who do not want to know anything about the more veteran Janeites whom they call “Lady Karen” and who move mainly through Facebook. The Lady Karens are the ones who get angry when the audiovisual adaptations of Jane Austen (such as Sandition and Netflix's Persuasion) take license and begin to include black performers and add LGTBQ plots.
MY COUNTRY, WHICH ARE YOU
The plastic artist María Tinaut is exhibiting these days (until mid-November) at the Rosa Santos gallery in Madrid an exhibition titled and September’s clear and blue again, which is based on the epistolary relationship between Carmen Conde and Amanda Junquera. “I will take back my country, which is you. “Immovably,” Conde says to Junquera, for example, in one of her letters from 1958, in one of the phrases that appear in the exhibition reproduced on a wall. The two writers became lovers in 1937, when both were spending time in Calpe, geographically separated from their husbands, who were at the front, fighting on the Republican side. They had to wait until they were both widows, in 1968, to move in together, although for decades they spent many vacations together, with their respective husbands. Conde, the first woman to enter the RAE, dedicated dozens of poems to Junquera, written with ambiguous language. Her love story was not fully known until 2007 when José Luis Ferris published Carmen Conde: life, passion and verse of a forgotten writer (Topics of Today).
STUDYING ALBA FARELO
Bad Gyal also stars in the summer beer campaign, which collects a Vanguard Award from the Kings that becomes an object of academic study. Anna Pérez Sarlé has completed a Master's degree at Carlos III with a TFM titled The representation of urban artists in the Spanish press (2016-2022): The case of Bad Gyal, in which she analyzes the media treatment that the artist has received from Vilassar de Mar in three types of media: general press, a digital medium like Vice and a website specialized in urban music. After reading 139 articles that mention her she has drawn several conclusions. The first, that the signatures of the music press continue to be eminently male (only 44 were signed by women) and that in recent years they have tended to amalgamate “female artists”, as different as Rosalía, Rihanna or Billie Eilish and have splashed their chronicles of concepts such as “empowerment” and “feminism” without the texts themselves having a feminist perspective. In addition, she plans the situation of her own media at work. “With the migration of websites, there are files that are impossible to find and volatile sources, precarious conditions… All of this plays an important role in how the history of women creators of urban music is known and makes us wonder how it will be recognized in the future,” Pérez Sarlé reflects.
MANUAL FOR TALKING WITH THE DEAD
In 2018, Quebec writer, playwright and director Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard read an article in Wired magazine about a person who had experimented with Artificial Intelligence to give his deceased father a second life. That was five years before AI became everyday tools as easy to use as Google and as dangerous as [fill in your favorite metaphor here, depending on your level of technological panic]. Baril Guérard wrote a novel, Manual for Wildlife (Barrett, 2021), about a businessman who sets up a system that allows him to talk to the dead using their digital footprint, and then he himself adapted it as a six-part series, which ends brand new on Filmin.
RAMBALÍN IS NOT FORGOTTEN
The FICxixon was in the end the reason for the break between the Asturias Forum and Vox at the head of the Gijón City Council. The far-right party wanted, among other things, to stop awarding the Rambal award, which is awarded to films with an LGTBI theme. The award is named after a drag queen who was a mythical figure in the Cimadevilla neighborhood who was stabbed to death and then burned in a homophobic crime in 1976. A couple of years ago, the drag queen received two tributes in the form of a song by Asturian artists. Pablo und destruktion included these verses in his song Gijón: “in the port of Gijón / there Rambal was / at night female / during the day boy.” And Rodrigo Cuevas dedicated an exciting song to him, Rambalín, from his previous album, in which he sings with the Coro Minero de Turón.
