JD had a bit more Time than I did and kindly sent me an article from 1930 which turns the tables on the filthy Swedes discussed this morning. It seems that towards the end of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship the Spanish postal service issued a stamp of Goya’s unshaven maja desnuda. Time writes: The stamps…
As well as dancing the old fandango, being a brigand on the mountains, etc. His father was a something from Barcelonia. Here. Can anyone make out the entire text? (This isn’t Funiculì funiculà.)
Josep Pla, El quadern gris, November 6 1918: Coromina and my brother–a chemistry student–get entangled in an endless discussion about science. Coromina attacks–to my great surprise–my brother’s rooted conviction of the absolute priority of science in any system of human knowledge. Like all anti-rationalists, Coromina creates beautiful, brilliant phrases: he says, for example, that the…
The Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901 is now remembered mainly for the assassination of McKinley by a Polish-American anarchist follower of Emma Goldman. However it was yet another triumph for Thomas A Edison, Inc and its electric chairs, X-ray machines (McKinley might have survived had an Edison X-ray machine been allowed to locate the…
Take Goig Heroin Elixir: From La Vanguardia anno 1912. Their current principal source of immoral earnings, apart from editorial-related state subsidy and tax-(ahem-)efficient paid-for journalism, is, of course, brothel advertising. I seem to recall it worked out at around €1M pa, but now most things do. The first ever front page of this then conservative,…
Re Erasmus students returning from Spain with an incomprehensible Andalusian accent, here’s Rafael Alberti learning how to tort proper at the dame’s school to which he has been sent following some inappropriate excretion chez the Sisters of Carmel: With Mrs Concha I learnt some Biblical History, being very impressed by Joseph, who was sold by…
Sevillanadas has photoshopped back into place one of the Moorish city’s gates, demolished in 1868 by the same man who restored it twenty years earlier following a serious bout of generalised brotherly hate. Will it now be rebuilt?