Looby needs your money

To take a stage version of a mad Ukrainian novel to Edinburgh this summer (budget here). If I had the money, the time and the talent, I’d try to buy myself the part of Junkie.

Too hot

Given the spectacular contribution of Iberian merchants to the spice trade, why is it that none of my local friends will go anywhere near a lamb vindaloo?

French regional and minority language policy

If you believe that Brussels is more than happy to see powerful member states neutralised by internal division–as is increasingly Spain’s case–then it becomes easier to understand the promotion by official EU “news” agency Eurolang of a French electoral lobby devoted to obtaining official status for the country’s smaller languages. Like all European initiatives of…

Interiors in NW Spain

Check Bert Teunissen (via JPQ). For me it’s less Spanish-country-house than displaced Vermeer with the light and life sucked out of it, but maybe I’m missing the miserable side of life.

Context is king

Re the trials of Josh Bell (via FiE): what happens if you put a bad violinist in a penguin suit? (I have a couple, just in case you wondered.)

The oldest surname in the world

Ramón J Sender’s La tesis de Nancy is the account of an affair between strawman and strawwoman, in which Curro, Work, a part-gypsy ingénu-cynic from the Seville town of Alcalá de Guadaira “who devotes himself to the resale of bullfight tickets in the summer and to wine-tasting for the rest of the year” leaves Dutch…

Cab drivers show porn films

My dentist in Holland used to lower a telly over the chair and you could watch all manner of goings on, but this level of customer care is apparently considered offensive in Mexico, of all places.

Nostradamus and the Spanish Civil War

If we take it as axiomatic that books with blue and pink covers are published by nutters, then McClaine Lee’s book will contain few surprises. However, a bit of Nostra-madness does no harm, surely.