With a sublime little parody of romantic nationalism from Camilo José Cela, who has his own particular view of this bothersome culture vs civilisation thing.
There are various explanations of Spanish anti-Americanism. The post-colonial hypothesis is popular: Spain is bitter about its loss of empire, its defeat in 1898, its not being invited to the G-whatever. An alternative hypothesis is that anti-Americanism is frustration arising from the idea that an implicit bilateral dollars-for-favours deal has been violated. In Luis Berlanga,…
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…
Here. The film is by the Barcelona film-maker, Ricardo de Baños, whose oeuvre, produced for an audience including Alfonso XIII, combined Barcelona storm scenes with early flamenco, as well as porn flicks like Consultorio de señoras and anti-Protestant erotica like El confesor. (BTW I wonder whether the otherwise excellent Ferdinand von Galitzien is not mistaken…
Yesterday in town it was remarked on the benefits to allkind that would accrue from exchanging our customary diet of Big Macs for one of roadkill and Fucking pigeon (what’s the Latin?). Celtiberians consulted state that their race does not partake of the pigeon, and Juan Bautista Carrasco’s Mitología universal (1864) suggests that this may…
Ulysses: “I suppose the people gave him that nickname going about with his tube from one woman to another.” Junius Henri Browne wrote in 1873 that he “gained a much worse reputation [in the US] for licentious stories than he deserved, from the spurious and prurient rubbish that used to be put off on the…
“En Santander. El pez y el reloj” in Los pueblos, ducking out of eternity and the meaning of life, Azorín is fetishising feet at the Cantabrian beach resort: Little feet, arched and clad in elegant new shoes, are one of the most attractive features of a woman. I contemplate them all with the discretion with…
I’ve always wondered where Spanish judges, particularly local ones, find justification for their habit of ignoring judicial precedent and ruling whatever the hell they feel like. Having read Azorín’s Los pueblos (1904) yesterday evening, I think I’m getting closer. It contains the story of Don Alonso, a rural judge in Ciudad Real, who is presented…
RAE 2.0 is a cool little gadget if you’re sick of the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española’s clunky interface: append the word you’re after to the URL and http://rae2.es/abracadabra or http://rae2.es/abraxas or whatever. (Via JPQ)
Shop deliveries free on foot in Leeds LS1-8 & LS13. Dismiss
