The raven didn’t hear me coming, so it broke away from the cliff at the last moment, struggled to remain airborne, and then climbed with a clumsy whooshing of wings out of the shadows and above the ridge, where it found the thermal, flexed its wing-fingers, and hung motionless for an age, the sun glinting…
Reading (and trying to sing) bits of Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues over lunch, I came across the following in the 118th chorus: It’s all the same to meThe radio I dont wanta hearAnd cant have to hearPlays one thing and anotherOf great Sarah Vag A musician once told me that, during one of Ms…
Here, from Emil Helfferich (1878-1974)‘s Südostasiatische Geschichten (Jever/Oldenburg, 1966), is an account of what happened to another German-speaker who made light of girlie-men: He was German, early 30s, and came from a forest ranger’s family in Hannover. If not poverty, then extreme thrift had probably stood at the cradle of him and his numerous siblings.…
This morning in one of Barcelona’s beach-side districts, Barceloneta, l’Agrupació Coral Humorística “El Rossinyol”, founded 1925, was singing the following ditty, accompanied by a band that in Holland would be referred to as a boerenkapel: MIDI Sa-le_el sol por la ma-ña-na, por la ma-ña-na sa-le_el sol. Los bor-rachos por la tar-de, y por la no-che_el…
Waszynski’s extraordinary 1937 Dibuk still drifts into the occasional dream. Der Volf was written by another Polish Jewish artist, H Leivick at around the same time as the play on which Waszynski’s film was based. Both introduce the supernatural in order to help us understand why it is wrong to do wrong, but where Der…
John at Barcablog claims to have a cunning plan. I do not, but here is a punning clan: The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair is being shown around an Edinburgh hospital. Towards the end of his visit, he is shown into a ward with a number of people with no obvious signs of injury. He…
No help for the beardless wonder in the search for Conan Doyle’s Reminiscence of Cricket, but I did find two wonderful poems by South Asian schoolboys. Cricket Teams by Raza Shahban Ali of Fatimiyah Boys School, Karachi would have been an outstanding review of the world scene, had his laudatory couplet about England not been…
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