This is the promised translation of the chapter in Pío Baroja’s serialised novel The adventures, inventions and mystifications of Silvester Paradox / Aventuras, inventos y mixtificaciones de Silvestre Paradox (1901) in which Silvester takes up with an English conman, quack, amateur pugilist and exponent of inventions such as the translatoscope called Macbeth. The source is…
Several Chinese have whispered me grossly inaccurate versions of this story, so here’s the truth, from the mouth of a horse who wouldn’t want his mum to read this kind of stuff on his blog: I was having a drink in La Penùltima on Barcelona’s Riera Alta when in came what turned out to be…
Someone told me once that the best brothel in Spain, ever, was a mythical one run in medieval Valencia by one Rei Arlot under licence from the King of Aragon. The reality is slightly more predictable: King Harlot was the popular name given to the government official charged with regulating prostitution, and the office was…
It was only after dumping her that he remembered that the tickets for Trent Bridge were on her credit card. (It’s becoming increasingly difficult to buy beer off Pakistani street vendors without getting into Flintoff vs Wasim discussions. Last night a single can cost me €1 and a 10 minute lecture on reverse swing in…
When I went back to live in Ingerland a few years ago, it took a month before I felt I knew what was going on in meetings where people used new expressions like “the dog’s bollocks” and “a load of arse”. This time I’m preparing my trip and today I discovered that England spin bowler…
Dirty smelly infant entomologists are the new elite in South Korea, reports Chosun. Apparently prices range from USD8.5-85 for ones with shells pretty as jewels. “There are an estimated 100,000 insect owners in the country and industry sources say the market is rapidly growing,” we are told, although there is a substantial Farmer Brown contingent:…
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…
Ronaldinho was following a venerable tradition when he broke a window in Santiago de Compostela’s cathedral while attempting a fancy kick for a TV spot. Bryan Griffiths tells us that back in 1330 the priest of Winkfield, William Pagula, wrote a Latin poem proposing an end to churchyard games: Bat & bares and suche play…
So there I was, dear reader, saying the nicest things about Margaret Marks. And now I discover, to my dismay, just the vaguest trace of irreverence in her posts (1/2) re John Cage’s 4’33”, implying that she secretly possesses seven heads, ten horns, various crowns, and upon her heads the name of heresy. For what better than a piece that can be performed by anyone, that provides automatic free updates reflecting changing soundscapes, and that reminds one of Thoreau when he writes:
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