A little more reading (Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, Hispano-Arabic Literature and the Early Provençal Lyrics) suggests (possibly unjustly) that Wallada was famous not so much for her poetry as for being the caliph’s daughter and having poetry written about her by Ibn Zaydun. It’s a shame that in our enthusiasm to find ancient heroines inoffensive…
I think a public intellectual must be rather like a public house, where over-consumption of what seems so attractive at the time shortly and surely leads to idiocy and ruin. All that glitters etc etc (via Barcepundit).
“The whole municipal district of Fuentes de Ebro found itself invaded by a terrible plague of locusts which covered all the irrigated and dry fields so that as far as the eye could see appeared to be dyed brown, since you couldn’t see the earth”
The public left-wing aggression, organised via mobiles, that I think most people accept was crucial in the Spanish elections this year is often taken as having been the first successful application of flash mobbing to politics. Dheera Sujan, in Gods and Monsters: the Saffronisation of India, a programme on the Dutch International Service, suggests that…
The 4th International’s Peter Symon cloning conspiracy, exposed: Peter Symon, General Secretary, Communist Party of Australia (here responding in a spirit of comradely generosity to a critique of his flawed, theist interpretation of Big Bang theory); Petro Symonenko, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, who is a boxer and…
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.…
