Born, not made

The Spanish, making progress with a backlog of untranslated English snowclones?

Perfume

Some great location- and Catalan actor-spotting fun at Méliès last night, where we saw Tom Tykwer’s version of Patrick Süskind’s Perfume. Easy enough: the torture-turned-orgy scene in El Pueblo Español; the various use of Girona’s Pujada Sant Domènec, with the palace arch and the view up the steps to Sant Martí Sacosta, and the little…

Charles Nodier on marginal languages

Nodier was a distinguished bibliophile and member of the Académie Française who ran the library at the Parisian Arsenal, which, according to Musset, was where romanticism set up shop. (Émile de Girardin says in Mme de Girardin that Hugo, like everyone else, fell in love with Mrs and called her Notre-Dame de l’Arsenal.) His novel…