There’s a curious rant over at the Guardian by A Sivanandan, “a leading black intellectual and anti-racist campaigner” (does concealing one’s first name make one seem more intellectual?), in which he claims that Margaret Hodge, the Work and Pensions Minister, blamed a surge in white, working-class racism on its black victims’ failure to ‘integrate’… In…
This morning we went looking for gypsies and birds at the northern end of Collserola. When it suddenly started looking like it was going to rain very heavily–it subsequently did–we came down off the hills, overtaking old men carrying mushrooms and the occasional deckchair, and did a quick improvised tour of bars (Chuck Norris on…
Nineteenth century nationalism and anti-Papism made it easy to forget the extent of Spanish influence in the Low Countries during the sixteenth century. Much of this influence was literary, with translations and localisations of Spanish classics appearing rapidly and serving as models for several generations of Dutch authors, but Iberia’s greatest gift to the Provinces–like…
David E Vassberg (Land and Society in Golden Age Castile) writes: There exists also an old proverb (of unknown vintage): En tierra de señorío, almendro o guindo; en tierra real, noguera o moral (In seigneurial lands, almond or cherry; in royal lands, walnut or mulberry), which the editor of the collection of proverbs [Bergua, Refranero…
A life-long pessimist suggests that the news that the Dutch parliament complex, ‘t Binnenhof, has been “hermetically sealed” is the police’s way of saying, “Either they’ll blow you up or we’ll suffocate you.” One of the guys arrested, suspected of trying to collect guns and explosives to attack government figures and buildings, was cleared earlier…
Mad Werner Georg Patel wants to be a politician. Here‘s a classic example of his public utterances, and here and here‘s him accusing me of being Spanish and English and a translator (he claimed somewhere else that I do drugs–chance’d be a fine thing…). For the more conservative among you, here‘s a picture of two…
Via après moi, le déluge, the online collection of the Portuguese National Library, with yet another interface to learn. (Why don’t they just give their money and projects to Google?) I didn’t know that Portugal fought in the Great War, but here’s the German Master Race Spider, a Portuguese soldier, and a poster from 1923…
Why is written music featured on birthday cards and in ads always gibberish? Don’t Barclays International care that the musically literate think them a bunch of peasants?
It doesn’t seem to show on Amazon, and it has little to do with Spain, but I’d like briefly to recommend most highly Antoon Aukes’ Second Line. 100 Years of New Orleans Drumming (the website is also his). Antoon is amongst other things a tapdancer, but don’t let that put you off.
Someone has been trying recently & kindly to hammer into my thick skull the nature and depth of early Irish ties with Iberia. Here’s a bleeding chunk from a piece called The City of the Tribes: Italian Memories in an Irish Port in a recently cited James Joyce anthology (Occasional, Critical, and Political Writings): The…