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.
The Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901 is now remembered mainly for the assassination of McKinley by a Polish-American anarchist follower of Emma Goldman. However it was yet another triumph for Thomas A Edison, Inc and its electric chairs, X-ray machines (McKinley might have survived had an Edison X-ray machine been allowed to locate the…
This isn’t about who invented bar snacks, or about why one particular gibber of Catalan nationalism should want to deny having invented them. Someone speculated drunkenly last night that, since tapas appears in English from the 1950s (C Salter in OED, “In Spain, when you order a drink in a bar.., you will always be…
One of the many etymologies of flamenco is rather curious. From the typically poor Spanish-language entry in Wikipedia: Durante el siglo XVIII el asistente Olavide pretendió combatir el bandolerismo instaurando colonias de catolicos alemanes y flamencos (tenidos por disciplinados y laboriosos) en el Alto Guadalquivir. El fracaso de adaptación de muchos de ellos engrosó las…
The monument is a quality marble tomb round about where the sea gate was, on which Habsburg general Josep Moragues’ head hung in a cage for 12 years from 1715-1727, his body having previously been quartered on the Ramblas. This for surrendering on a Bourbon pardon at the end of the War of the Spanish…
Unnerved by the publicity this year for La Romería de la Primera Sueca/The Pilgrimage of the First Swedish Totty, the committee decided to undertake a dry run dress rehearsal the day before. During this expedition the focus shifted from quality to quantity, with the unfortunate result that the entire committee found itself incapable of performing…
April 1939, and the Valencian communist and later Mexican entrepreneur Arturo García Igual (Entre aquella España nuestra … y la peregrina, available in part on GBS) has, as a Stalinist commissar, been sent to the elite camp at Agde, France, where night after night unsuspected talents [took to] an improvised stage: actors, comics, illusionists and…
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