“The Parallel has tree faces,” writes Max Aub in Campo cerrado, “day, night, and Sunday morning.” The Parallel–crammed with artistes and whores–was a key location in the rise of the anarchist gangsters for whom Orwell fought, yet the Church of England’s favourite anarchist seems to have missed it and various other crucial locations on the…
“Nazi-onanism” for “nationalism,” in a good piece by Vicente Álvarez (via Libro de Notas) on the growing intolerance and aggression of regional movements in Spain.
Jose Cohen@Desde Sefarad notes that local left-wing odd bod Pilar Rahola has been given a prize for fighting anti-Semitism. (There’s a better piece by her here.) Barcelona council may specialise in banalising the Holocaust, but there’s a current of unembarrassed denial here with much older roots. The other day a middle class, middle aged guy…
Carlos Ferrero wonders in an interesting post whether translators see themselves as builders of Europe. At the current rate of budgetary progress on language issues, I think we (I do the odd bit of Dutch- and Catalan-English) may actually succeed in destroying it.
Non-resident kitsch freaks may enjoy some of the texts contributed to the Catalan language police’s good cop’s latest bizarre spending spree aimed at beating the language market. I used to conduct one of Holland’s last communist choirs, but even they’d have collapsed in a combination of laughter and horror at the Ecological Pasodoble. The following…
Last night we were singing at a function and I started needling the French alto about Trafalgar, so she hit me hard with the new “Brits only care about drinking, fucking and fighting” survey, and then we moved on to the “hey, well at least we don’t beat our wives” refrain. A few days back…
Brits tend to see Trafalgar (search) as the stage on which British naval hegemony was established. The French official view, on the other hand, is that it is just another anniversary. For some Spaniards, meanwhile, apart from being a reminder of the perils of entrusting project management to the French, it recalls imperial glory (we’re…
Enjoy El Periódico’s deputy director José Sorolla getting his intellectual knickers in a twist trying to figure out how Ahmadinejad can be an ultracon and Rafsanjani a leftie when Rafsanjani is a fan of the Ultracon States of America. Someone explain multi-axis analysis to him. (Jean Véronis@Technologies du Langage notes droitisation and droitiser. Spanish goes…
The temperature is up in the 30s, so Miguel Guash via Amando de Miguel wonders why words for “night” and “eight” are similar in some Indo-European languages. Since even the derangedest of astrologers acknowledge that the notion of there being eight moon phases is culturally relative (damn, we can’t even agree on the Number of…
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