Just in case any of you are experts in this kind of thing, here’s where I’m at: Data collection is fine. My Garmin eTrex Vista HCx doesn’t get near the sales claim that “Deep foliage, nor canyons phase the rugged eTrex Vista HCx”–it gets lost quite easily between quite modest buildings in down-town Barcelona–but it’s…
A popular photography course, copied from a neighbourhood magazine produced by Alejandro Pérez, an enterprising Nou Barris estate agent, encountered on this walk: I imagine the Bayeux Tapestry was planned in similar fashion.
Étienne Cabet‘s Voyage en Icarie (excerpt) is his novelised idealisation of Napoleonic nationalist totalitarianism: if not exactly a New Jerusalem, then certainly a New Paris, built around a New Seine, designed by its dictator, the Icar. This book and its hype led hundreds of families, mainly French, principally artesans (sez James Chastain) to doom and…
Nice story here about underpaid author Thomas Kohnstamm, who wrote his Lonely planet guide without going to Columbia. (Or did he go there and have to deal coke to survive? LD is characteristically confused.) Guidebooks are so superficial, and information online so plentiful, that there’s actually no reason now why they shouldn’t be written from…
Just before he died, says Cecil Parrott in The bad Bohemian, the author of The good soldier Å vejk (that’s Shvake: “No one pronounces it Shvike–not even in Germany”) drafted a letter to the district police: I, the undersigned, ask respectfully to be kindly given the necessary passport for a stay in Spain (Barcelona, Calle Rosellos…
Letters of Alexander Von Humboldt to Varnhagen Von Ense (GBS): On the 9th of June, 1839, Varnhagen writes in his diary: “Humboldt agrees with me in the assertion made by me at different times, that too much cannot be inferred from the silence of the historians. He refers to three highly important and undeniable facts,…
Emanuel del Mar, Nuevo guía para la conversacion, en español é inglés (1839, via GBS): Una golondrina no hace verano. One swallow does not make spring. Both spring and summer are used in both languages, but you’d kind of expect northward migration to take swallows to Spain in spring and then England in summer. Perhaps…
The other night I stayed with a neo-peasant Catalan hippy couple living in a grace and favour masia in the hills, for which you and I and anyone else without the requisite ethnic badge would probably have to lay down something in the region of €750K. The guy, son of Andalusian barkeepers, agreed that affection…
Shop deliveries free on foot in Leeds LS1-8 & LS13. Dismiss