On Laforja a shop called Cásual Wear. (“Casual wear” is often hyphenated in Spanglish. I’m just trying to figure how it will be written in Catalan when it goes completely native.)
Here’s another daisy for my chain of Spain-goes-south posts, unlikely to be of interest to anyone at all, although the ads may amuse. Vital Fité’s Las desdichas de la patria viewed China as an imperial basket case. Ricardo Beltrán y Rózpide in La geografía en 1898 (1899) explains why it was to remain so: The…
One of the surprises of Sergio Vila-Sanjuán and Sergi Doria’s Passejades per la Barcelona literària (“Walks in literary Barcelona”) is that it ignores Max Aub, whose Campo cerrado, the first part of a six-volume account of the war, is probably the best fictionalised version of the period leading to the events of July 1936 in…
I’ve just been reading a fantastic selection (La fiera corrupia, ed JM Rexach) of ballads and the like printed by Coromines of Lleida/Lerida in the mid-nineteenth century. As well as classics like The Beast of Jerusalem, sundry executions, famines, hail storms, and the obligatory poop-piece, it includes a very cute lovesong by F(r)ederico Logroño, First…
Here’s another nugget from that dark and dirty vein, Spain’s colonial adventures. It’s from Vital Fité’s Las desdichas de la patria (The misfortunes of the motherland; 1899), in which he reflects on national destiny following the disastrous loss to the US of Cuba and the Philippines: If others’ troubles could console us, a brief examination…
Akiane’s poem no 1 (via Stefan@MemeFirst), with a couple of small changes, brings to mind a story someone else tells about when the municipal cops rushed into a building, truncheons at the ready, to arrest a notorious heroin junk, only to discover, slipping and sliding, that he’d had a little accident: I slipped on the…
Comment spam has dried up over the last couple of months (along with comments), but I do get the occasional strange message from nutters who want to correspond with me or mow my lawn or whatever. One such writes every now and again in Spanish to suggest meeting up so that she (lots of allegedlies…
Eulàlia Petit@Barcelonetes is right about exhibitions at Barcelona’s CCCB–too much curation, not enough content. She says a variety of interesting things about the current one, West by East (which actually deals with “Muslim” representations of “the West”), and quotes the Iranian writer, Sorour Kasmaï. Kasmaï says that for her the novel is what defines the…
Since my reader in the northern hemisphere is spending all his time hanging around in a beach bar, hoping someone will talk to him, I’m going to post the occasional bit of new-to-me nonsense from down south until things cool down again in September. I think there’s no question that we’re all going to end…
[link] and no one can remember who stuffed her in there in the first place. That’s a different girl from Spike Jones’ Brownie with the light blue jeans, who was as sweet as liquorice beans, in case you’d forgotten. Nor did the Spice Girls sing, “The race is on to get out on the bottle,”…
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