JOSEP M. JUJOL & SANT JOAN DESPÍ, SHARING HISTORY

Musings of The Grandma...

There are architects whose work belongs to museums, guidebooks and histories of art. And there are architects whose work becomes inseparable from a place. Josep Maria Jujol i Gibert belongs to both categories.

His name inevitably appears beside that of Antoni Gaudí. His imagination can be found in some of the most celebrated creations of Catalan Modernisme. At Park Güell, Casa Batlló and La Pedrera, Jujol's extraordinary ability with colour, materials, surfaces and decorative invention contributed to works that millions of people now associate almost instinctively with Gaudí.

But perhaps there is another way to understand Jujol. Leave Barcelona. Follow the Llobregat. And stop at Sant Joan Despí. Here, Jujol was not simply the collaborator of a famous architect. Here, he became part of a town. 

It is difficult to imagine Sant Joan Despí at the beginning of the twentieth century if we only know the town today. Modern Sant Joan Despí belongs completely to the Barcelona metropolitan landscape. Roads, railway lines, apartment blocks, industries and services connect it to the enormous urban organism surrounding the Catalan capital. 

It is known throughout Catalunya as the home of TV3, the Catalan public television broadcaster. Football supporters associate it with FC Barcelona's Ciutat Esportiva Joan Gamper.

For decades, industry has also formed part of its identity. But the Sant Joan Despí that Jujol encountered was very different. It was still essentially agricultural. Fields surrounded a relatively small settlement. Wheat, maize, vegetables, hemp and vines had traditionally been cultivated there. At the beginning of the twentieth century, industry was still remarkably limited. This was the landscape into which Jujol introduced his imagination. And that matters. Because Jujol did not impose an urban architecture upon a rural world. He listened to the place. 

Jujol's relationship with Sant Joan Despí began in 1913 with the Torre de la Creu, commissioned by Josefa Romeu. Imagine its appearance then. Not surrounded by the dense metropolitan city we know today, but emerging within an agricultural landscape. Five intersecting cylinders. Curved roofs. Colour. Ceramic surfaces. An architecture apparently determined to ignore the straight line whenever imagination offered a more interesting alternative. The building must have seemed extraordinary. But Jujol did not treat rural Sant Joan Despí as an empty stage upon which an architect could display his genius.

The relationship gradually became deeper. He met local families. He received further commissions. He worked with local craftsmen. He transformed existing buildings. He designed new ones. Eventually, he worked for the Town Council itself. During the last decades of his life, Sant Joan Despí was no longer simply somewhere Jujol happened to have projects. It was one of his places. 

Perhaps nothing explains Jujol's relationship with Sant Joan Despí better than Can Negre. The building already existed. It was a seventeenth-century farmhouse. Another architect might have regarded the old structure as an obstacle to modernity. Jujol did something much more interesting. He transformed it. He preserved and reinvented. Traditional materials and techniques coexist with extraordinary forms, religious symbolism, colour, wrought iron, plaster, wood, ceramics and that astonishing carriage-shaped gallery dominating the façade. The old farmhouse does not disappear beneath Modernisme. It becomes something else while remaining recognisable. And perhaps this tells us something important about Jujol himself. His creativity did not necessarily require a blank page. He could begin with what was already there. A wall. A farmhouse. A discarded material. A landscape. An imperfection. For Jujol, limitations were frequently invitations to imagine. 

By the 1920s, Jujol's relationship with Sant Joan Despí had become institutional as well as artistic. He was producing reports for the Town Council and in 1926 became its auxiliary municipal architect. His association with the municipality would continue through the final decades of his life. This changes the way we should look at his legacy there. Jujol was not merely designing beautiful houses for individual clients. He was thinking about the town itself. Streets. Connections. Buildings. Public space. Growth. How should an agricultural village become something larger without losing the logic of its landscape? That question became particularly visible in one fascinating project.

During the first decades of the twentieth century, landowners began considering the development of the Samontà area, above the railway. Pere Negre entrusted Jujol with an urbanisation project. For years, Jujol studied the land. His proposals attempted to follow existing paths, property boundaries and natural changes in elevation rather than simply drawing an abstract geometric grid over the countryside. The plan was formally presented in 1926. It was never built. And here history becomes fascinating. Because the land did not remain agricultural forever. The future arrived -simply not the future Jujol had drawn. 

After the middle of the twentieth century, Sant Joan Despí began changing dramatically. The 1953 regional plan designated land for industrial development outside Barcelona. The area that Jujol had once imagined being urbanised would eventually form part of the Fontsanta industrial zone.

Gallina Blanca was among the first major companies to establish itself there. Others followed. Factories replaced fields. Employment attracted new inhabitants, including many families arriving from other parts of the State. New neighbourhoods developed to accommodate a rapidly increasing population. Sant Joan Despí was becoming industrial. The transformation was not unique. Similar processes were changing the entire Baix Llobregat and much of metropolitan Barcelona. Agricultural land became industrial land. Villages became towns. Paths became streets. Farmhouses found themselves surrounded by apartment buildings. A landscape that had developed over centuries changed within a few decades. And Jujol's buildings remained. 

This is perhaps where Jujol's importance to Sant Joan Despí becomes greater than architecture itself. His buildings became witnesses. The Torre de la Creu remembers a Sant Joan Despí in which an eccentric summer house could suddenly appear beside fields. Can Negre remembers the agricultural world of the Catalan masia while simultaneously transforming it into something fantastical.

Casa Rovira still carries decoration inspired by fields and fruit. Even Jujol's unrealised urban plans preserve evidence of a moment when the future of Sant Joan Despí had not yet been decided. Buildings can do this. They store time. Not metaphorically, but physically. A wall may survive after the field beside it disappears. A farmhouse may remain after agriculture ceases to define the local economy. An architect may die while the town continues changing around his work. Architecture becomes a form of memory that cannot easily be erased. The transformation continued.

The industrial town gradually became part of the contemporary metropolitan city. Today, someone hearing the name Sant Joan Despí may think of very different things. TV3. The Ciutat Esportiva Joan Gamper. FC Barcelona players arriving for training. The Fontsanta industrial area. The railway. The tram. Schools, hospitals, businesses and residential neighbourhoods. Almost none of these things belongs to Jujol's Sant Joan Despí. And yet Jujol still belongs to theirs. That is the fascinating paradox. The town changed almost beyond recognition, but the architect became one of the threads connecting its different identities. Agricultural Sant Joan Despí. Modernista Sant Joan Despí. Industrial Sant Joan Despí. Metropolitan Sant Joan Despí. They coexist in the same streets. 

There is another reason Sant Joan Despí matters. It allows us to see Jujol without constantly looking over his shoulder for Gaudí. This is important. Jujol's collaborations with Gaudí were extraordinary. His contribution to works such as Park Güell, Casa Batlló and La Pedrera forms an essential part of his legacy. But collaboration can sometimes cast a long shadow. The enormous international fame of Gaudí has inevitably caused many visitors to encounter Jujol first as Gaudí's collaborator. Sant Joan Despí reverses the relationship. Here we encounter Jujol as Jujol. Architect. Designer. Painter. Craftsman. Urban planner. Municipal architect. Neighbour. Here his imagination does not occupy one corner of somebody else's masterpiece. It occupies the town. 

There is something else particularly appropriate about Jujol working in an agricultural town. He possessed an extraordinary ability to see possibilities in modest things. Fragments. Ceramics. Iron. Wood. Plaster. Objects and materials that other people might overlook. Today we might instinctively associate this with recycling, but Jujol's attitude was more profound than simply reusing materials. He appeared capable of recognising beauty before beauty was obvious. A broken piece was not necessarily waste. An irregularity did not necessarily require correction. An old building did not necessarily need demolition. A humble material did not need to pretend to be expensive. Transformation could begin with what already existed. Perhaps this is why his architecture feels so organic. It does not merely imitate nature. It behaves a little like nature. It adapts. It incorporates. It transforms. 

Cities often preserve individual monuments while destroying the relationship that once existed between those monuments and their surroundings. Sant Joan Despí offers something more interesting. Jujol has become part of its identity.

Can Negre is now a cultural centre devoted to his legacy. His works form an architectural route through the town. His name remains attached not simply to individual buildings but to the cultural understanding of Sant Joan Despí itself. The agricultural village disappeared. The industrial town changed. The metropolitan city continues evolving. But Jujol remains. And perhaps that is the most beautiful way to understand the relationship between an architect and a place. Not as ownership. Not even as influence. But as conversation. Jujol listened to Sant Joan Despí when it was still surrounded by fields. Sant Joan Despí gave him somewhere to experiment, build, transform and imagine. Then history transformed the town in ways neither could have predicted. Factories arrived. Population grew. Fields disappeared. Television studios appeared. Footballers began training nearby. And through all those changes, Jujol's strange curves, colours, inscriptions, ironwork and fragments remained.

Today, walking through Sant Joan Despí means walking through several towns simultaneously. The agricultural town. The Modernista town. The industrial town. The metropolitan town. And somewhere between them all stands Josep Maria Jujol. Not simply as the architect who built in Sant Joan Despí. But as the architect whom Sant Joan Despí made part of itself.

More information: Jujol 140

There is another reason why Sant Joan Despí has always been much more than a place on a map to The Grandma. Part of her family lives there. Her uncle worked at Gallina Blanca, one of those factories that transformed the old agricultural town into an industrial one. He and her father even played football for the company's team.

And football would eventually become part of her own Sant Joan Despí, too. As a teenager, she played for La Llevantina, later, the club also known as Llevant-Les Planes. At a time when being a girl who wanted to play football was not always easy, she found there something extraordinarily simple that should never have been extraordinary at all: the possibility of playing.

She played in a mixed team. She was not asking to make history. She was not trying to prove anything. She was an adolescent who loved football and wanted to enjoy it under the same conditions as her teammates. Eventually, the team became boys-only. And that was the end of her football career. Life continued. But so did football.

La Llevantina eventually became Llevant-Les Planes, a club with an important place in the history of Catalan women's football. The landscape changed too. FC Barcelona built its Ciutat Esportiva in Sant Joan Despí, and beside it came the Johan Cruyff Stadium.

More than thirty years after playing on those dusty pitches, she found herself returning to almost the same territory to watch professional women's football. Sometimes history has a strange sense of geography. The girl who had once been allowed to play only until the team became exclusively male could now sit in a stadium built specifically to host, among others, one of the greatest women's football teams in the world. She would love to say that the circle has been completed. It has not.

Women's football has changed enormously, but equality is not a destination we have completely reached. There is still work to do. And perhaps that makes the journey even more meaningful. Whenever she return to Sant Joan Despí, she still remember those old dirt football pitches. She fell and left part of her knees behind. She arrived home covered in dust, scratches and what she proudly considered her battle wounds. And she was happy. Terribly happy.

Because sometimes the places that remain most deeply inside us are not the beautiful ones. They are the places where we were allowed to become ourselves. Jujol's Sant Joan Despí was a landscape of fields. Her uncle's was a landscape of factories. Hers was a landscape of dirt football pitches. Today's Sant Joan Despí has television studios, the Ciutat Esportiva and the Johan Cruyff Stadium. Different landscapes. Different generations. Different stories. And yet something remains. Jujol's buildings remain. Memory remains. And, wonderfully, so do the friends with whom she shared those football pitches all those years ago.

Perhaps places are a little like people. They change enormously and somehow remain themselves.

Today marks 147 years since the birth of Josep Maria Jujol i Gibert. Let us enjoy his legacy.

More information: The Guardian

L'obra de Jujol és contramonumental; 

és el dia a dia convertit en extraordinari.

Jujol's work is anti-monumental; 

it is everyday life transformed into something extraordinary.

Josep Llinàs

CAPTAIN AMERICA, COURAGE TO STAND FOR AN IDEAL

Today, The Grandma has been doing one of the things she likes best: reading comics, and she has chosen one of the Marvel heroes -Captain America.

There is something wonderfully contradictory about Captain America. He wears the flag of the United States on his body. His shield carries its colours. Even his name seems to transform an entire country into a superhero. And yet Captain America has endured for more than eighty years because, at his best, he is not really a story about a country. He is a story about an ideal.

Steve Rogers is not interesting because he is strong. He is interesting because of what he believed before he became strong. That distinction contains almost everything we need to understand Captain America. 

Joe Simon and Jack Kirby created Captain America in 1940, and the first issue appeared at the end of that year with a March 1941 cover date. The famous cover showed Captain America punching Adolf Hitler. That image was not politically neutral.

The United States had not yet entered the Second World War. Simon and Kirby, both from Jewish families, created their hero while Nazi Germany was devastating Europe and antisemitic persecution was escalating. Simon later recalled that Hitler seemed like the obvious villain because he was, in his words, a maniac. The creators received threatening letters after publication, while New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia reportedly reassured them that they would be protected.

Captain America was therefore political before he was commercial mythology. His first enemy was not an imaginary monster. It was fascism. But Simon and Kirby made another decision that would ultimately prove even more important than the costume. Their hero begins as a physically weak young man.

Steve Rogers wants to fight, but his body prevents him from doing so. What makes him worthy of becoming Captain America is therefore not physical superiority. It is his character. The serum does not create the hero. It gives the hero the physical ability to act upon values he already possessed. That is the foundation of Captain America's moral identity. 

Superhero stories frequently ask what a person would do if suddenly given extraordinary power. Captain America asks a slightly different question: Who should be given power?

Steve Rogers is significant because strength arrives after morality. Before the muscles, before the shield and before the uniform, there is a young man who cannot tolerate seeing others abused. That reverses the traditional logic of power. Steve does not defend vulnerable people because he is powerful. He becomes powerful because he already wanted to defend vulnerable people. This distinction explains why Captain America would be a fundamentally different character if Steve Rogers were merely a perfect soldier. He is not. He doubts. He questions. He disagrees. And throughout his long publication history, writers have repeatedly confronted him with conflicts between authority and conscience.

Captain America can obey an order. Steve Rogers must decide whether the order deserves to be obeyed. 

This is where Captain America becomes much more complicated than his costume suggests. The easiest interpretation of the character is that he represents America. A more interesting interpretation is that he represents what America says it wants to be. Freedom. Equality. Justice. Democracy. Human dignity. The difference matters enormously. Governments make  decisions. Institutions fail. Political leaders change. Nations contradict their own principles. An ideal can be used to judge all of them.

Consequently, Captain America's loyalty has often been portrayed not simply as loyalty to authority but as loyalty to principles. At different moments in the comics, Steve Rogers has questioned institutions, abandoned the Captain America identity and confronted people exercising legitimate power when he believed their actions contradicted those principles. That does not make him less patriotic within the logic of the character. It asks what patriotism means. Is loving your country the same thing as believing that your country is always right? Or can love of country include demanding that it live up to its own ideals?

Captain America has repeatedly provided Marvel writers with a character through whom to explore that tension. There is also something beautifully symbolic about Captain America's most recognisable object. A shield. Not a sword. Not a gun. A shield. Of course, he uses it offensively too. Comics require considerably more action than philosophical essays. But symbolically the choice is remarkable. A shield exists primarily to protect. It places Captain America's power within an ethical framework: strength should stand between the aggressor and the vulnerable. That may be one reason the shield has become one of the most instantly recognisable objects in popular culture. It tells us what the character is supposed to do before he says a word. Protect.

Then there is another essential dimension of Steve Rogers: he does not entirely belong to the world in which he lives. The famous "man out of time" concept transformed Captain America from a wartime superhero into something psychologically richer. Steve carries one world inside him while living in another. People he knew have disappeared. Social values have changed. The country he remembers has changed. Even the meaning of his own uniform has changed. This gives the character a permanent melancholy.

Captain America can therefore embody something surprisingly universal: the experience of discovering that time has moved on without us. Most of us will never wake after decades frozen in ice. But almost everyone eventually looks at the world and thinks: When did everything change? A street disappears. A familiar building is demolished. Technology transforms everyday life. People we loved are no longer there. Words change their meanings. Customs vanish. 

New generations inhabit a world that seems perfectly normal to them and slightly strange to us. Steve Rogers exaggerates that experience until it becomes mythology. He is permanently negotiating between memory and the present. And importantly, his challenge is not simply to preserve the past. It is to decide which values deserve to survive it.

Captain America also offers an unusual model of masculinity. Steve Rogers is physically extraordinary, but physical domination is not supposed to be his moral centre. His defining qualities are usually loyalty, courage, empathy, perseverance and responsibility. He knows what weakness feels like because he has experienced it. That memory matters. The skinny Steve Rogers remains psychologically inside Captain America. Without him, the muscles mean very little. Perhaps this is one of the character's most enduring messages: never forget who you were when you had no power. Because power reveals something about character. Someone who remembers vulnerability may use strength to protect. Someone who despises vulnerability may use strength to dominate. 

Captain America is built around that difference. Why has Captain America survived? Many superheroes created during the Golden Age of comics disappeared. Captain America did not. Part of the explanation is obviously cultural and commercial. Marvel reinvented him for new generations; generations of writers and artists reinterpreted him; television, animation and especially cinema dramatically expanded his audience. But longevity alone cannot explain affection. Captain America survives because the central conflict within the character can never really be resolved. What should we do when reality fails to live up to our ideals? Every generation can ask that question. The historical circumstances change. The enemies change. The politics change. The meaning of America itself changes. But the tension remains.

Captain America therefore functions almost like a mirror. Different periods of American history have looked at Steve Rogers and asked different questions through him. What is patriotism? When should authority be questioned? What responsibility accompanies power? Can principles survive political disappointment? What does a good person do inside an imperfect system? Those questions are much larger than superhero comics. 

Perhaps this explains why Captain America has become so deeply embedded in popular culture. Steve Rogers does not need to represent what Americans are. He can represent what a society hopes it might become. And there is an enormous difference between those ideas. The first would turn Captain America into propaganda. The second allows him to become criticism. If America automatically embodied everything Captain America represents, there would be very little reason for Captain America to exist. The character becomes interesting precisely when reality and ideal separate. Then Steve has to choose. And the best Captain America stories understand that the choice cannot simply be: My country, right or wrong. It must be more difficult: What are the principles that made this country worth defending in the first place? Why we still need Steve Rogers Perhaps that is ultimately why Captain America has travelled so successfully beyond the country whose name he carries.

You do not need to be American to understand Steve Rogers. You only need to understand what it means to believe that strength creates responsibility. To know that legality and morality are not always identical. To believe that vulnerable people deserve protection. To understand that institutions should serve principles rather than replace them. And to recognise that courage sometimes means standing alone. The costume is American. The question underneath it is universal.

What do you do when you finally have the power to change something? Steve Rogers had already answered that question when he was still a skinny young man from Brooklyn. The serum only made everyone else notice. And perhaps that is Captain America's greatest message. A hero is not someone who becomes good when given power. A hero is someone we can trust with power because they were already good without it.

More information: The Virtues of Captain America

The price of freedom is high; it always has been. 
And it's a price I'm willing to pay.

Steve Rogers

'SYV UNGDOMSFORTELLINGER' & THE WOUNDED SOUL

Claire Fontaine and The Grandma share many interests -among them, a love of literature- and if there is one author they both consider pivotal, it is Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Claire is a linguistic prodigy and an accomplished polyglot; today, she has decided to reread Syv ungdomsfortellinger -a Norwegian version of a collection of seven stories: En annens hustru og Ektemannen under sengen (Another Man's Wife and a Husband Under the Bed), Jul og bryllup (A Christmas Tree and a Wedding), Polzunkov, Herr Prokhartsjin (Mr Prokharchin), Roman i ni brev (A Novel in Nine Letters) and En ærlig tyv (An Honest Thief), that explores themes central to Dostoevsky's psychology, such as the solitude of the soul.

We are living through turbulent times (though when have they not been?), and looking back to seek out great literary touchstones is an exercise in both social responsibility and spiritual peace.

There are writers who describe human behaviour, and there are writers who seem to enter the hidden rooms in which that behaviour is born. Fyodor Dostoevsky belongs unmistakably to the second group.

In Syv ungdomsfortellinger, what matters is not so much what happens as what happens inside a human being. The external events are often modest, sometimes almost insignificant. A meeting, a conversation, a disappointment, a moment of embarrassment, an unexpected gesture of kindness may be enough to open an entire psychological universe.

Dostoevsky understood something extraordinarily modern: human beings do not experience reality objectively. We experience it through our wounds, our expectations, our fears, our memories and, above all, through the image we have constructed of ourselves.

That is why his characters can suffer enormously from apparently small events. A word can become an insult. A silence can become rejection. A glance can destroy an illusion. And a simple act of compassion can suddenly restore someone's sense of dignity. The battlefield is not the street. It is the mind and the terrible need to be seen.

One of the strongest psychological forces in these early tales is the need for recognition. Dostoevsky's lonely characters do not merely want company. They want someone to confirm their existence. They want to be noticed, understood and accepted. This distinction is essential. 

Loneliness in Dostoevsky is rarely just physical isolation. It is the much deeper experience of feeling that one's inner life has no witness. A person may walk through crowded streets, live among thousands of people and still experience profound loneliness. The tragedy begins when the individual starts creating an imaginary world to compensate for what reality refuses to provide. Fantasy then becomes both refuge and prison. It protects the dreamer from disappointment, but it also makes genuine contact with other people increasingly difficult. The imagined world is safer because it can be controlled. Real human beings cannot. They disappoint us. They misunderstand us. They leave. And yet they are precisely what we need. This contradiction lies at the heart of Dostoevsky's psychological universe: we are wounded by other people, but we cannot become fully human without them.

Dostoevsky writes about humiliation as a psychological wound. Few writers have understood humiliation as deeply as him. Poverty in these tales is therefore more than an economic condition. It becomes psychological. To lack money may also mean having to ask, wait, depend, apologise, endure contempt or become conscious of one's clothes, one's home, one's position and one's apparent insignificance in the eyes of others. Material inequality slowly becomes emotional inequality. This is one of Dostoevsky's most powerful social insights. A society does not only distribute wealth unequally. It can also distribute dignity unequally. Those at the margins gradually learn how society sees them. Eventually, that external judgement can become an internal voice. The poor man begins to feel ashamed of being poor. The rejected person begins to believe that rejection proves something about their worth. The lonely person begins to suspect that perhaps they deserve loneliness. Social violence has completed its work when the victim starts carrying it inside.

Dostoevsky also understood that humiliation does not necessarily produce humility. Sometimes it produces pride and it is the armour of the vulnerable. His vulnerable characters can be extraordinarily proud precisely because their dignity is constantly threatened. Pride becomes armour: a desperate attempt to protect the last territory over which they still have control -their own sense of self. This explains one of the great paradoxes of Dostoevsky's psychology

A person may desperately need help and simultaneously reject it. They may long for affection and behave in ways that make affection impossible. They may desire understanding while hiding behind sarcasm, fantasy, silence or resentment. From the outside, such behaviour may appear irrational. From the inside, it makes perfect psychological sense. To accept help can mean admitting vulnerability. To declare love means risking rejection. To trust another person means giving them the power to hurt us. The wounded individual therefore develops strategies of self-protection. Unfortunately, those strategies often create exactly the suffering they were designed to prevent.

The dreamer is one of Dostoevsky's most fascinating human types. Dreaming is not presented simply as imagination or romantic sensitivity. It can become a psychological strategy for surviving an unsatisfactory reality. The dreamer constructs possibilities. Imaginary friendships. Imaginary conversations. Imaginary futures. In those fantasies, the self can finally become everything reality has denied it: loved, admired, courageous, important. But there is a price. The more perfect the imagined world becomes, the more disappointing reality appears. Dostoevsky therefore asks a disturbing question: Can imagination save us from loneliness without eventually deepening it? There is no easy answer.

Imagination gives meaning to existence. Without dreams, human life would be unbearably narrow. But when dreaming replaces living, imagination becomes another form of isolation. The dreamer is simultaneously rich and poor: rich in inner experience, poor in shared experience.

Another remarkably modern element in Dostoevsky is his understanding of self-deception. His characters frequently believe that they understand their own motives. They do not. They rationalise jealousy as justice, fear as prudence, pride as dignity and obsession as love. This is perhaps one reason Dostoevsky still feels psychologically contemporary. Long before modern psychology gave us a vocabulary for defence mechanisms, projection or rationalisati on, he was dramatizing something fundamental: the human mind protects itself by rewriting its own motives.

We tell ourselves stories about who we are. We are generous. We are victims. We are misunderstood. We are morally superior. We are acting rationally. And then reality interrupts the story. At those moments, Dostoevsky's characters often discover that the person they imagined themselves to be and the person revealed by their actions are not quite the same. That discovery can be painful. But it can also be the beginning of moral awareness.

Dostoevsky's compassion is powerful precisely because it is not sentimental. He does not suggest that suffering automatically makes people virtuous. People who suffer can become generous, but they can also become bitter. They can love and manipulate, forgive and resent, sacrifice themselves and hurt others. The wounded person is still morally complicated. This matters enormously. True compassion does not require idealising another human being. We can recognise someone's contradictions and still understand their suffering. Perhaps this is one of the deepest ethical lessons of these tales. Understanding is not the same as excusing. But judgement without understanding is incomplete.

Dostoevsky is often described as a psychological writer, but his psychology cannot really be separated from society. His characters do not suffer in a vacuum. They inhabit a world structured by money, status, gender, reputation, employment and social expectations. Their anxieties are personal, but the forces producing those anxieties are often social. This is where Dostoevsky becomes more than an observer of individual psychology. He shows how society enters consciousness. Poverty becomes shame. Hierarchy becomes inferiority. Rejection becomes self-hatred. Isolation becomes fantasy. Powerlessness becomes resentment. The external world becomes an internal voice. And once that happens, oppression no longer needs to remain outside the individual. A person may begin policing, humiliating and punishing themselves. That is an extraordinarily powerful idea for a nineteenth-century writer -and an unsettlingly familiar one today.

Yet Dostoevsky does not leave us entirely in darkness. Against humiliation, isolation and despair, he repeatedly places something apparently fragile: human connection. Not grand heroism. Not abstract ideology. A conversation. A moment of recognition. Someone listening. Someone refusing to humiliate another person. Someone treating an apparently insignificant human being as significant. These gestures matter because Dostoevsky understands dignity relationally. We discover something about our own humanity through the way other people respond to us. Cruelty can therefore destroy far more than a moment. But kindness can also restore far more than a moment. Sometimes being genuinely seen by another person is enough to interrupt an entire narrative of worthlessness.

The word youth in Syv ungdomsfortellinger can also be read beyond biological age. Youth is the period in which the self is still unstable. Who am I? How do others see me? Am I worthy of love? What will become of me? What happens when reality refuses to resemble my dreams? These questions do not disappear when we grow older. Perhaps that is why these stories remain so recognisable. We carry versions of our younger selves throughout our lives: the person who wanted to belong, the person who feared ridicule, the person who imagined another future, the person who desperately wanted someone to say: I see you. Dostoevsky understood that much of adulthood consists of negotiating with those earlier selves. 

The greatness of Dostoevsky does not lie in providing psychological answers. It lies in asking questions from which we cannot easily escape. How much of our personality is genuine, and how much is defence? How often does pride hide fear? How often does resentment hide humiliation? How much of what we call love is actually a desire to be recognised? How many of our convictions are stories we tell ourselves in order to survive? And what happens to a human being when society repeatedly tells them that they do not matter? Dostoevsky does not observe these questions from a comfortable distance. He places us inside them. That is why reading him can sometimes feel uncomfortable. We recognise behaviours we would prefer to attribute only to fictional characters. The jealousy. The fantasy. The self-pity. The need for approval. The wounded pride. The absurd internal conversations. The desperate desire to be understood. Dostoevsky's characters may belong to nineteenth-century Russia, but their minds do not. They belong to us. 

Perhaps the most important social message running through these tales is that no human life is psychologically insignificant. Society creates categories: successful and unsuccessful, respectable and ridiculous, powerful and powerless, visible and invisible. Dostoevsky enters the lives of those who might otherwise remain invisible and reveals the extraordinary complexity hidden behind an ordinary face. The person passing unnoticed in the street contains memories, fears, fantasies, humiliations, hopes and entire imaginary worlds. That person is not a secondary character in their own existence. Nobody is. And perhaps this is the quiet revolution at the centre of Dostoevsky's early fiction. To look seriously at another human being is already an ethical act.

Across Syv ungdomsfortellinger, different characters, circumstances and emotions eventually seem to converge on the same fundamental question: What does a human being need in order to feel human? Money matters. Security matters. Social position matters. But beneath them lies something even more fundamental: dignity, recognition and connection. We need to know that someone can see us without reducing us to our poverty, our mistakes, our social position or our failures.

Dostoevsky understood the terrible consequences of a society that denies people that recognition. But he also understood the extraordinary power contained in the opposite gesture. To listen. To recognise. To show compassion. To refuse humiliation. To see the person whom everyone else has decided not to see. Perhaps that is why these youthful tales still feel so alive.

Dostoevsky was writing about nineteenth-century Russia. But he had already discovered something timeless: the deepest human battles are often invisible, and sometimes the smallest act of recognition can prevent another human being from disappearing inside them.

Mre information: Dostoevsky Society

Hvordan kan en tyv være ærlig? 
Jeg mente bare å si at han virkelig 
var en ærlig mann, og likevel stjal han. 
Jeg syntes rett og slett synd på ham.

How can a thief be honest?
I only meant to say that he was an honest man, 
sure enough, and yet he stole. 
I was simply sorry for him.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

J'ENTENDS LE CHANT DES OISEAUX DANS LE CIEL...

J'entends le chant des oiseaux dans le ciel
Au pied de l’arbre, au bord de l'eau, ou sur tes ailes

Je peux me reposer
Tu peux me raconter
Comment

Sauver la Terre des mains des Hommes
Avant que tout soit en poussière
Sans faire la guerre, le vent d'automne
Nous portera vers la lumière
Sauver la terre pour que résonnent
Les voix puissantes de nos mères
Et pour la guerre, on vous pardonne
Si vous nous laissez tout refaire

Dans tes cheveux aux couleurs du soleil
Il y a les promesses d'un nouveau monde dans lequel

Tu peux te reposer
Je peux te raconter

Sauver la Terre des mains des Hommes
Avant que tout soit en poussière
Sans faire la guerre, le vent d'automne
Nous portera vers la lumière
Sauver la terre pour que résonnent
Les voix puissantes de nos mères
Et pour la guerre, on vous pardonne
Si vous nous laissez tout refaire

Et dans tout ça on trouvera la liberté, enfin
On la chérira comme une pluie fine en été, comme un câlin
A chaque fois que la peur nous fera douter sur le chemin
On chantera lalalala, sans s'arrêter, ce doux refrain

Sauver la Terre des mains des Hommes
Avant que tout soit en poussière
Sans faire la guerre, le vent d’automne
Nous portera vers la lumière
Sauver la terre pour que résonnent
Les voix puissantes de nos mères
Et pour la guerre, on vous pardonne
Si vous nous laissez tout refaire

I hear the birds singing in the sky
At the foot of the tree, by the water's edge, or upon your wings

I can rest
You can tell me
How

To save the Earth from the hands of mankind
Before everything turns to dust
Without waging war, the autumn wind
Will carry us toward the light
To save the Earth so that the powerful voices
Of our mothers may ring out
And for the war, we forgive you
If you let us start it all over again

In your hair, the color of the sun
Lie the promises of a new world where

You can rest
I can tell you

To save the Earth from the hands of mankind
Before everything turns to dust
Without waging war, the autumn wind
Will carry us toward the light
To save the Earth so that the powerful voices
Of our mothers may ring out
And for the war, we forgive you
If you let us start it all over again

And in all this, we will find freedom, at last
We will cherish it like a gentle summer rain, like an embrace
Whenever fear makes us doubt along the way
We'll sing "lalalala" -without stopping- this sweet refrain

To save the Earth from the hands of mankind
Before everything turns to dust
Without waging war, the autumn wind
Will carry us toward the light
To save the Earth so that the powerful voices
Of our mothers may ring out
And for the war, we forgive you
If you let us start it all over again

 More information: Instagram-Pomme

 J'ai cultivé très peu d’autres choses

que la musique dans ma vie.

 

I've cultivated very few things 

in my life other than music.

Pomme (Claire Pommet)

ENJOY ASTÉRIX & THE MANSIONS OF THE GODS IN LYON

Joseph de Ca'th Lon, Claire Fontaine and TheGrandma have just arrived to Décines-Charpieu to enjoy an interesting football match and see the Northern Star.

After spending La Diada (the Catalan National Day) in Perpinyà, Catalunya Nord, the three friends have caught a train to Lyon. During the trip, they have been reading another interesting adventure of Astérix le Gaulois, this time, one titled The Mansions of the Gods.

The Mansions of the Gods, in French Le Domaine des dieux, is the seventeenth graphic novel of the Astérix comic book series, written by René Goscinny and illustrated by Albert Uderzo. Originally released as a serial for the magazine Pilote in 1971, it was later made into a graphic novel, with an English translation released in 1973. The story focuses on Asterix and the Gauls attempting to thwart the latest Roman plan against them, when Caesar decrees that the forest surrounding them be converted into a new Roman colony for the wealthy.

Set in ancient Gaul during the Roman occupation, the story revolves around the indomitable Gaulish warrior Astérix and his faithful companion Obélix. Famed for their uncanny strength, Astérix and Obélix live in the village of the indomitable Gauls, who are the sole survivors resisting the Roman conquest.

In The Mansions of the Gods, the Roman Empire, represented by its executor, Julius Caesar, hatches a new plan to finally conquer the stubborn Gauls. Not content with repeated military failures, Caesar comes up with a different approach. He decides to build a luxurious Roman housing development, The Mansions of the Gods, right next to the Gaulish village. The aim behind this project is to Romanize the Gauls gradually, diluting their identity and assimilating them into Roman culture.

While some Gauls are initially enticed by the prospect of a luxurious lifestyle, Astérix and Obélix, with their ever-vigilant resistance to Roman domination, are determined to thwart Caesar's ultimate scheme. As construction on the mansions begins, Astérix and Obélix, employing their wit, skill, and magic potion, embark on a series of comedic adventures to disrupt the Romanization efforts and preserve their village's unique identity.

The Mansions of the Gods brilliantly showcases the satirical and humorous elements that define the Astérix series. Goscinny's sharp and witty writing, combined with Uderzo's vibrant and detailed illustrations, create a visually captivating narrative that appeals to readers of all ages.

The book highlights crucial themes such as resistance to imperialism, cultural preservation, and the consequences of assimilation. Through its engaging storyline and memorable characters, The Mansions of the Gods offers a thought-provoking commentary on the collision of different cultures and the importance of preserving one's identity while resisting attempts at forced homogenization.

The Mansions of the Gods has garnered immense popularity and critical acclaim since its release. Translated into numerous languages worldwide, the book has captivated millions of readers, becoming a beloved classic within the realm of comic literature. Its success has also led to an animated film adaptation, which further propelled the legacy of Astérix to new heights.

Ultimately, The Mansions of the Gods stands as a testament to the enduring appeal of the Astérix series, showcasing its unique blend of humor, adventure, and social commentary. Through its timeless narrative, the book continues to entertain and inspire readers, fostering a love for the Gaulish heroes Astérix and Obélix, and their unwavering spirit of resistance against imperial powers.

Following the French riots of May 1968, Goscinny made increasing references in Astérix to current political events in France. In Mansions of the Gods he caricatures modern technocracy (the young urban planner), the gigantic villes nouvelles (new cities) of high-rises, and especially advertising.

The interaction between Squaronthehypotenus and the slaves resembles that of modern-day employers, trade unionists, and workers on strike.

The quizmaster in the Circus Maximus who coerces the reluctant winner to accept his prize is a caricature of the French television entertainer Guy Lux.

The character named Flaturtha was a reference to the nascent modern flat Earth movement of the 1970s, and a reference to the Numidian king Jugurtha.

A Lusitanian who makes a brief appearance among the slave workforce returns as a main character in the later album Astérix in Lusitania.

Key Lessons From The Mansions Of The Gods

-Satire of urbanization and modernity. The Mansions of the Gods provides a satirical critique of urbanization and the impact of modernity on society. It depicts the Roman city of Rome-Not-So-Eternal as a symbol of the encroaching urban expansion and its detrimental effects on the traditional Roman way of life.

-Clash of cultures. The book explores the clash between the Roman culture and the invading Gauls. It highlights their differences in terms of values, traditions, and ways of life. This clash serves as a humorous commentary on cultural assimilation and the challenges that arise when two cultures collide.

-The power of resistance. The Gaulish village in The Mansions of the Gods serves as a symbol of resistance against the Roman Empire and its attempts to colonize Gaul. The villagers' unwavering resistance and determination to preserve their way of life demonstrate the power of resilience and standing up against oppression.

-The futility of materialism. The book mocks the Roman obsession with wealth, luxury, and material possessions. It portrays the Romans as shallow and materialistic, constantly seeking new ways to acquire and display their wealth. This critique serves as a reminder of the emptiness and futility of solely pursuing material wealth.

-The importance of community. Throughout the story, the Gaulish villagers rely on their strong sense of community and unity to resist Roman influence. The book emphasizes how collective action, support, and a strong sense of community can be a powerful force in protecting one's values and way of life. It underscores the importance of solidarity and collaboration in the face of challenges.

Download The Mansions of the Gods by R. Goscinny & A. Uderzo

Si nous parvenons à faire vivre des Romains 
dans le voisinage de ces Gaulois, 
nous aurons, non seulement veni et vidi, 
mais nous aurons vraiment vici, en plus!

If we manage to get Romans 
to live alongside these Gauls, 
we shall not only have veni and vidi, 
but we shall truly have vici as well!

Julius Caesar

...FIDELS PER SEMPRE MÉS AL SERVEI D'AQUEST POBLE

Ara digueu: la ginesta floreix

I arreu el camp hi ha vermell de roselles

Amb nova falç comencem a segar

El blat madur i amb ell les males herbes

Ah, joves llavis desclosos després de la foscor

Si sabíeu com l'alba ens ha trigat

Com és llarg d'esperar

Un alçament de llum en la tenebra

Peró hem viscut per salvar-vos els mots

Per retonar-vos el nom de cada cosa

Perquè seguísseu el recte camí

D'accés al ple domini de la terra

Vàrem mirar ben el lluny del desert

Davallàvem al fons del nostre somni

Cisternes seques esdevenen cims

Pujats per esglaons de lentes hores

Ara digueu

Nosaltres escoltem les veus del vent

Per l'alta mar d'espigues

Ara digueu

Ens mantindrem fidels per sempre més

Al servei d'aquest poble

Ara digueu

Ens mantindrem fidels per sempre més

Al servei d'aquest poble

Ara digueu

Ens mantindrem fidels per sempre més

Al servei d'aquest poble

Ara digueu, ara digueu, ara digueu

Ara digueu

Ens mantindrem fidels per sempre més

Al servei d'aquest poble

Ara digueu, ara digueu, ara digueu

Salvador Espriu i Castelló

MALVASIA DE SITGES, TELLING ITS STORY THROUGH WINE

There are places that become so famous for what they are today that we sometimes forget what they were before. Sitges is one of them.

Today, its name evokes the Mediterranean, beaches, festivals, Modernisme, celebrations and visitors from all over the world. 

But long before all this, Sitges was something much simpler and perhaps much more essential. It was land. Land to cultivate, land to graze animals, land to store food, land to grow vines. And beneath the streets of the old town, archaeology still preserves the memory of that forgotten Sitges. 

The history of Sitges did not begin with tourism, nor with the elegant houses facing the sea. Its origins go much further back. Archaeological excavations in the old town have revealed numerous underground silos used during Iberian, Roman and medieval times. These cavities were dug into the ground to store grain and other agricultural products, protecting the harvest that would feed the community throughout the year.

Those sitges -the Catalan word for silos- are generally considered to be behind the medieval name of the town. There is something wonderfully appropriate about it. The name of one of the best-known towns on the Mediterranean coast may ultimately come from something as humble as a hole in the ground where farmers stored grain. Before Sitges became an image, it was sustenance. Before it welcomed travellers, it stored harvests. And before its inhabitants looked towards distant horizons, they looked at the soil beneath their feet.

The landscape explains much of the story. Sitges and neighbouring Sant Pere de Ribes occupy a fascinating territory between the limestone massif of the Garraf and the Mediterranean Sea. It is not an easy landscape. The soil can be poor and stony. Water is scarce. Summers are dry. The mountains seem to descend almost directly towards the sea. But Mediterranean agriculture has always been an extraordinary exercise in adaptation. 

Cereals, olive trees and vines became fundamental crops throughout this part of the Mediterranean world. Archaeological evidence from the Roman period in the area confirms precisely this agricultural pattern. Wheat and other cereals provided food. Olive trees provided oil. And vines provided wine. Three crops. Three pillars of Mediterranean civilisation. Bread, oil and wine. Products that were not merely food and drink, but elements of economy, trade, ritual and identity.

The Romans did not invent wine in the Iberian Peninsula. Vines and wine were already known here before Rome arrived. What Roman civilisation did extraordinarily well, however, was organise agricultural production and connect it to a vast commercial network. Wine could travel. Amphorae carried it along roads and across the Mediterranean, linking farms, settlements and ports with cities hundreds or even thousands of kilometres away. And Sitges was not isolated from this world.

Archaeological discoveries in its old town include imported materials from the central and eastern Mediterranean, evidence of the commercial importance of this coastal settlement during Antiquity.

The sea that today seems to define Sitges as a place of leisure was already defining it two thousand years ago as a place of communication. The Mediterranean was not a frontier. It was a road. 

We cannot draw a straight historical line from the Roman vineyards of Sitges to today's Malvasia de Sitges. Centuries separate them. But we can speak of something perhaps more interesting: continuity of landscape. Generation after generation, people learned that vines could survive here. They learned the soil. They learned the wind. They learned the influence of the sea. And at some point during the Middle Ages, Malvasia became part of this landscape.

The grape has Mediterranean origins and its name is generally associated with Monemvasia, the Greek port from which wines of this type were traded throughout the Mediterranean. According to a beautiful local legend, the first Malvasia vines reached Sitges in the fourteenth century, brought back by an almogàver who had travelled east with the expedition of Roger de Flor. Whether the legend is literally true matters less than what it tells us. Once again, Sitges was connected to the Mediterranean. And once again, the sea brought something that the land would transform.

The grape adapted extraordinarily well. Over the centuries, Malvasia became so deeply associated with the town that it eventually acquired its own identity: Malvasia de Sitges.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, it was already one of the most important crops in the municipality. Historical research based on the 1716 cadastre shows that Malvasia occupied approximately 24 per cent of all cultivated land in Sitges. That is an extraordinary figure. Imagine the landscape. Forget the hotels. Forget the apartment buildings. Forget the crowded beaches. Forget the traffic. Look inland instead. Vines. Dry-stone walls. Farmhouses. Paths. Farmers. Animals. Carts carrying grapes after the harvest. Barrels waiting in cellars. That was also Sitges. And Malvasia was one of its treasures.

It was demanding to cultivate and produced less fruit than other varieties, but its wine was particularly valuable. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Malvasia from Sitges travelled far beyond the Garraf and became a prestigious commercial product. A tiny territory beside the Mediterranean was producing a wine capable of travelling across Europe and overseas. The land had become commerce.

But landscapes change. So do economies. Other grape varieties were more productive. Malvasia required considerable care. Then came phylloxera, which devastated European vineyards during the nineteenth century. Later came urban development. The land itself became valuable for something other than agriculture. Vines disappeared. Fields disappeared. The agricultural Sitges slowly retreated beneath the modern town. And Malvasia nearly disappeared with it. 

Its survival owes much to one man: Manuel Llopis de Casades. When he died in 1935, aware that this centuries-old wine was in danger of vanishing, he left his vineyard at Aiguadolç and the family wine business to the Hospital de Sant Joan Baptista de Sitges, on the condition that the institution continued producing Malvasia. It was an extraordinary act of cultural preservation. He did not simply save a wine. He helped save a fragment of a landscape. 

And this story does not stop at the municipal border. Sant Pere de Ribes belongs to the same agricultural world. Sitges and Ribes share the Garraf, the proximity of the Mediterranean, the vineyards, the farmhouses and generations of people who learned to work a difficult but generous landscape.

Today, Malvasia de Sitges is once again being cultivated and produced by wineries in this wider territory, including Sant Pere de Ribes. And perhaps that is exactly as it should be. Wine has never understood administrative borders particularly well. Vines understand soil. They understand rain. They understand sunlight. They understand wind and sea. 

A friend of mine, Pep, recently gave me a bottle of Malvasia de Sitges produced in Ribes. And looking at that bottle made me think about everything contained inside it. Not only wine. There are centuries inside that bottle. There is the Mediterranean. There is the limestone of the Garraf. There are farmers whose names we will never know. There are Roman fields of cereals, olives and vines. There are underground silos where ancient inhabitants stored their harvests. There are medieval merchants. There are vineyards that once surrounded Sitges. There is the devastation of phylloxera. There is Manuel Llopis trying to save something he knew was about to disappear. There are the people who continued cultivating the grape when doing so was neither easy nor particularly profitable. And there are today's winegrowers who have decided that this old variety still deserves a place in the landscape.

Perhaps this is why wine can be so much more than a drink. Sometimes, wine is memory made liquid.

Gràcies, Pep

So this post is my way of saying thank you.

Thank you, Pep, for the bottle.

But especially, thank you for making me stop and think about the land it comes from. The next time I look at Sitges (and Ribes), I will try to look beyond the town we all know. I will imagine the silos beneath it. The grain stored underground. The Roman farmers. The olive trees. The vineyards. The animals and farmhouses. The harvests. And somewhere between the Garraf hills and the Mediterranean, rows of Malvasia vines catching the sea breeze.

Because places are not only what we see today. They are everything that happened there before us. And sometimes all we need to rediscover that history is a bottle of wine given by a friend.

To Pep  -and to the land that remembers.

More information: Celler Can Pagès

Es la rica malvasía
de Sitjes; lo vi més grat
al paladar, comparat
per lo qu'es bó, á l'ambrosía.

It is the rich Malvasia of Sitges,
the wine most pleasing to the palate,
compared, for its goodness,
to ambrosia.

Lo millor de Sitjes, L'Esquella de la Torratxa (7 de maig de 1897)