Explanations of bodagger and the like, over at SlangCity.com. Sez AC Kemp, slang operative since 1996, and now at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, “Last summer I even had a diplomat who wanted to learn slang to understand the jokes during cocktails.” (I don’t really understand why Spanish speakers lag so far behind English…
The other day I was walking across a field with a very old and pretty conservative farmer when he suddenly started singing The Internationale, which he was made to learn during Communist rule (1936-9). Not to be outdone, I sang a verse of the fascist anthem, Cara al sol, which I learnt in order to…
Unlike Carlos, I’m actually rather fond of Albacete, and not just because its ugliness is on a smaller scale than Birmingham’s. Although generally more energy tends to be devoted to damnation than to praise, I found out the other night, flicking through a book called Historia de la provincia de Albacete, that I’m not the…
Debunking still more the “Franco persecuted Catalan culture” myth, here’s a piece by Catalan dictionarian, Sebastià Oliveras, lamenting the loss of the cultural pluralism enjoyed in the 50s and 60s.
The whole Polisario/Morocco business is heavily politicised in Barcelona (I’m back tomorrow) where the Polisario is seen as a surrogate for Catalan separatism blah blah blah, so let’s hope Hale keeps posting over at Bloggin’ the Maghreb, albeit from North Carolina.
Thanks for the concerned mails. The cooperative gave us the day off, so I’m able to report that, far from being drunk or dead, I am in fact drownded, and that neither in the Jesus Sea, nor in the Odys-sea, but in the rippling Manchegan earthsea, where gypsies wear latex and smell of Eau de…
Literally everyone I know who has come to Barcelona in the past month has been robbed, most of them within an hour of arriving. With all due respect, no one gives a s**t about a new f***ing statute of autonomy. People would, however, really like some effective policing.
In Amor se escribe sin hache (Amor is written without H, 1929), “an almost cosmopolitan novel,” Enrique Jardiel Poncela describe Birmingham as “the Albacete of the United Kingdom.” Not to be outdone, José Martínez Azorín (who also gave the Generation of 98 its name) baptised Albacete “the New York of La Mancha.” That all this…
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