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New Girl. FOX (Promotional Advertisement).

Ángela Zambrano was not only one of the most eminent writers of the last times in this country, a dense pen and thorough kind of writer, whose work will probably remain in the annals of the literary history, along with Donoso or María Luisa Bombal, there, in the highest letters of the last century; but also was a huge fan of some very unorthodox (in a manner of speaking) kind of creations related to the pop culture; such unorthodox that if it had been out of the open, she would have easily gained the most embarrassing discredit among the intellectual world, that granted her the most unconditional approval.
 To a writer of her stature, in a country like this, it can be highly acceptable eat potito’s sandwiches, smell like juicy empanadas, say “damn a shit” and “fuck”, or any of those quaint expressions from the popular folklore, no matter how lack of refinement they could seem. Even the most damnable insipidness can be tolerated inside those circles, as long as they have a taste of popular and idiosyncratic roots (El corralero, Corazón de escarcha, Little White Dove, Gracia and the Stranger, The Boy Who Became Mad in Love, Amy, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, whatever you choose from Condorito). But if it smells as a blockbuster in big entertainment industries for mass consumption, and especially if it smells as gringa hollywood industry, then the thing gets serious. More than serious.
 When in late 2011 the success of the sitcom New Girl, broadcasted by Fox, started to become viral, nobody in the intellectual circles gave a shit. Just because it was another production overexposed in the media to enrapture an amorphous mass of uncritical beings, who only wanted to laugh for a bit at the dumbness of some characters as dumb as them, while the will of questioning their own reality was drained, in addition of a good amount of monthly money by hire the last cable television premieres, whereby, by the way, the major television networks made most of their fortune. Unthinkable that an intellectual of that stature were a fan of such franchises, till the point of having a secret life in the media as one of the most enthusiastic fans of New Girl, even founding several websites devoted to the series, always in English and under the nickname Nessy, alluding to her special fondness for the main couple in the series, Nick and Jess, names that the fans used to merge into a single word (Ness), replacing the initial letter of Jess for Nick’s.
 It was after a year from her dead that a curious web surfer discovered the mysterious link between Nessy the fan and the reputed writer. As soon as the rumor was spread into the network, those who guarded the image of the writer roundly denied the veracity of such a rumor, though secretly they started a full research about her online activity, contravening every internet private policy, something that, for their surprise, was far easier than the useless effort trying to avoid the questionable Literature National Prize conferred to Isabel Allende years ago. Just was enough to force an innocent verification mail to find out a wide and overwhelming network of fan pages, dicussion forums, Fans Choice Awards campaigns, and the horror over all horrors: a lot of fanfiction (and not some kind of fanfiction, but the silliest, corniest and tawdriest ones).
 They just needed a short and quick glance to understand that if they did not stop the network leak swiftly, the result would be a cultural catastrophe of proportions. Thousand consumers of junk culture justified by a renowned figure would be worse than granting the Pulitzer to creators of The Simpsons, and after that pretend to put that prize back on the paths of the journalistic reliability (if something like this was still possible nowadays). It was absolutely peremptory detract from the rumor, leaving no doubt. So they used the simplest and most classic strategy existing in internet: running another rumor, and spreading it through the cyberspace, using every platform and media power they had, that were immensely wider than those of any average fan. After that, it was just a matter of presenting some proves taken from here and there, and the support of a pleiad of renowned intellectuals, with signature included.
 That’s the way how Nessy, one of the most devoted fans of New Girl, happened to be considered just a bizarre invention, made viral by thousands of fans talking and commenting thousands of stupid things per second.


Originally published at searingwords.wordpress.com on June 26, 2016.