You know those huge billboards announcing the tour dates of big rock bands? Those broadsheet-sized advertisements where you notice the stadiums that Luis Miguel, David Bisbal or the latest reggaeton star will tour? Those huge pieces of paper soaked in glue that appear in the interstitial spaces of the walls, sometimes accumulating layers and layers of sticky paper like a geological substrate?
The Anagrama publishing house has thus announced the presentation tour of Mariana Enriquez's new book, and thus one day Barcelona and Madrid woke up, full of those large posters in which this time no one was promoted. rockstar stadium-buster but a writer who was going to speak in small bookstores and libraries. It is well done, because Enriquez, in addition to being a novelist, has passionately cultivated rock journalism: she has even published a book about her “love story” with the band Suede.
“Mariana Enriquez has gained incredible strength and has become an international literary reference. At the events she celebrates and book launches, she receives fan art [obras de arte hechas por los fans]bracelets, dolls, records that his followers give him, more recurring phenomena in the world of music, but not so much in the world of literature,” says Rafael Luna, director of marketing from Anagrama, in reference to the inspiration of the campaign.
It is a fresh and surprising idea, a surprise that has not been seen since Kiko Matamoros began prescribing books, and it turns out that they were good books. And it puts high literature to compete in the field of mass pop culture. Surely some clueless passerby has initially thought that Enriquez is not a writer, but rather the latest technopop sensation with autotune: You will be searching for it on Spotify instead of downloading it to your Kindle. How different are the forms of socialization in literature and music, and how different is the public life of their most successful creators.
Writers, I once heard it said, are people who write in their pajamas for people who read in their pajamas. From one solitude to another solitude, chain of the book through. A world that leaves one brain to enter another in another way. There is an epic lack, there is little body, the writers do not write live: a lot of teleworking, little in-person presence. Reading is an intimate, personal and non-transferable vice. Instead, musicians can share their creations in an atmosphere of euphoria and communion, like that found at a concert. Sometimes they throw themselves on top of the audience during their live performances. Writers, at most, can throw their words at the reader… and in a delayed manner.
For a good part of the 20th century, Spanish literature was the business of very serious gentlemen, with lots of suits and little hair, who never moved their pelvis, as if literature were not a party. Even so, some writers have been accused of rockstarsas was Ray Loriga in The New York Times. He has the pose. Michel Houellebecq also has it, apathetic like a twilight Lou Reed. Maybe Hunter S. Thompson, with his journalism gonzo and their outdated and lysergic experiences, can accumulate the anecdotes that accumulate in a mindless and drug-addled punk band.
The French symbolist poets, with their fatal passions and their lives of bohemianism, laudanum and absinthe, could well be precursors of the cursed rockers; in fact, I once saw Patti Smith reading poems by Rimbaud (and a story by Bolaño, another damn one) at La Casa Encendida in Madrid. The truth is that Enriquez, often black and with gray hair, would also make a statement as frontwoman from a gothic band of those that he likes. But it's not the same. “I have never been a rock star, I don't even know how to play the bandurria,” Loriga once said in La Sexta. And then there is Bob Dylan, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Rockers, for example, can order roast chicken, bourbon and cocaine from the dressing room. Writers, in their literary festivals and presentations, who come to cover, in a calm manner, the socialization needs of a discipline that involves so much distance, do not usually have a dressing room, and what they put on the round table is a bottle of water. without gas (then, hopefully, they are invited to dinner). At the music festival people go too many hours (or days) without sleeping. At literary events you run the risk of falling asleep halfway through.
An idea of merchandising for future campaigns: authors' t-shirts, like the ubiquitous Ramones t-shirts, which sold more than their records. Much better than a bookmark!
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