Apparently it might incite violence. Particularly, one suspects, if the directors of the taxpayer-funded Permanent Seminar on International Migration and Foreigners (“an open space for Interculturality and Human Rights“) in Aragon attend home matches of SD Huesca, whose major achievement to date was fifth place in the Second Division in the 1950-1 season. Via Miguel…
Baltasar Porcel is a Mallorcan writer who is said to believe that his Nobel is grossly overdue. I find his columns and novels unbearably egoistic and confused, and the excellent Carles Miró in a brief review of Porcel’s career and latest novel suggests that I am not alone.
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…
So printed off a couple of this silhouette. Isaac Meyer Marks, Fears, phobias, and rituals: “Wild turkeys of any age try to escape from anything appearing above them in dark silhouette against a lighter background and moving with a certain angular speed relative to the size of the object. Similar escape reactions occur from a…
César-Javier Palacios reports on the cyclist, shot dead by a hunter who mistook him for a boar. When in death’s dark vale loud singing usually suffices to drive off hell’s hunters. Hunters know this too. In his romance, Count Arnaldos, hungry hawk in hand, falls prey to a sailor (love, glory or death, true or…
One of Spain’s greatest 20th century plagiarists intertextualisers was the novelist Valle-Inclán. His gypsies are substantially borrowed from George of that name, but as far as I know it is only in the following passage from La corte de los milagros, a novel set in the period when Borrow was in Spain, that he refers…
Sylvain Gouguenheim’s ‘“Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel” (Editions du Seuil), while not contending there is an ongoing clash of civilizations, makes the case that Islam was impermeable to much of Greek thought, that the Arab world’s initial translations of it to Latin were not so much the work of “Islam” but of Aramaeans and Christian Arabs,…
Olympic torches on a Parisian bus reminded me of Josep Pla, smoking merrily away on oil tankers in the famous 1976 A fondo interview with Joaquín Soler Serrano: [Full video seems to have disappeared, so these are a couple of excerpts] Not having heard other recordings, I wonder whether don José wasn’t playing up the…