Killer cure

Stricken by Barcelona belly, I’ve been trying out this 19th century cholera cure. It’s better with rice, but I’m still surprised more people didn’t die. (Sublimated sulphur is used by modern-day lepers, says the chemist, so that wasn’t a problem.)

Brilliant gypsy grave in Montjuïc cemetery

Montjuïc cemetery publishes a little map which, interested in historical renown, guides you past the generally terribly tedious tombs of well-known Barcelona citizens (good, bad, ugly) and thus omits the quite extraordinary artistic achievements of some of its less well-documented residents. Here is one of the finest funeral monuments, built by people who have clearly…

Pilot overflows the Atlantic

Juan Manuel Durán y González (Jerez de la Frontera, 1899 – Barcelona, 1926). Aviator of the crew that flew from Seville to Buenos Aires in the aircraft called Plus Ultra, overflowing the Atlantic Ocean with seven stages between January 22, 1926, and February 10, 1926.

Boynamedsue has a blog

And here‘s a fine slash-and-burn assault on the show trial in a Barcelona court of some dirty bloody foreigners. Perhaps the most extraordinary wrongdoing in the whole affair is that over a number of years the police, which is to say the mayor, tolerated a squat run by a psychotic whose raves kept a densely…

Good piece on current American “translation will save the world” hype

Asks Mr O’Brien: “[A]re foreign funding agencies getting any smarter about how to get more of their countries’ literary works translated into English? The answer is “not much,” or not at all. The country that has made this easier, for Dalkey Archive at least, is Japan. Other countries are on a kind of cusp: Romania,…