Christianity – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

The debasement of the European mind

A populist US senator meets an Italian organ-grinder in Rome in 1859.

Did the house that Jack built come from Spain?

Or, How to cook the old lady who swallowed a fly without stooping to cannibalism. Cumulative songs (and monstrous nested stuffing recipes) in Quixote and Estebanillo González, with the grossest video you’ll see today.

Cruikshank, The progress of passion (1792).

Christmas carousels

Impossible automata for my street organ this holiday season. Featuring Georg Büchner, Ignaz Bruder, German Christmas pyramids, dancing Hasidim, Lieutenant Kijé as you’ve probably never seen it, Le Tigre, and a crustacean.

Monkeys here, monkeys there, monkeys everywhere

Victor Hugo puts on his black cap.

Forget the foot fetishism: Madame Bovary is Punch's role-reversed Judy (Jan Klaassen show above) and Lheureux the dog that drags her to Hell.

Mind over mutter: Céline on the challenges of speech production

Other doctor-novelists; why musicians can’t write.

Strength to sweetness

“Lions Bible”, from 1804: 1 Kings 8:19 reads “thy son that shall come forth out of thy lions”, rather than “loins”. What would the world have been like had the Lyle’s Golden Syrup tin borne a picture of the rotting carcass of some loins with a swarm of bees? (Via a lovely guy who seems…

Sandwish

“All day I’ve faced, the barren waste,without a taste of… Can you see that big green tree,Where the sandwish’s running free,And it’s waiting there for you and me?” I do Cool Water with the organ, and it’s a great favourite, but the other day I made the mistake of introducing the mirage song as a…

My top 10 boxing songs

All-star bill featuring Dan Mendoza aka the fighting Jew, manly Victorians, Joe Louis and the Dixieaires at the Battle of Jericho, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, Rocky Graziano aka the Maharishi Yoghurt, Bob Dylan and Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, Muhammad Ali and over-reliance on computer technology, Rich Hall and the George Foreman Grill, Wesley Willis and Batman, and Ivor Cutler.

Richard Humphries' second blocks a crucial blow from Daniel Mendoza in the 1788 bout.

The worst translator in the world? “Quoth she, so much I hate this nation, / I’ll damn this author in translation”

The London Magazine, 1734: Verses occasioned by Mr. Budgel’s modest Proposal, in the Daily Post-Boy of Aug. 31. to give the Publick a new and accurate Translation of a late celebrated French Treatise, on the Causes of the Grandeur and Declension of the Romans, and which has been already translated. Dulness, good goddess, chanc’d to…

Is the concept that certain concepts are untranslatable itself untranslatable (FR->EN)?

The Vocabulaire européen des philosophies has now been versioned in English as Dictionary of untranslatables and Spanish as Diccionario de intraducibles. Here Mark Liberman cites Adam Gopnik, who seems to think the book is self-refuting Sapir-Whorfism, and here Jacques Lezra, coordinator of the English-language version, seems to be indulging the following incoherence: linguistic relativism is…