What to do with falling boulders

On Thursday February 29 1912, the 300-tonne Restless Rock of Tandil, Buenos Aires plunged from its extraordinary state of hillside equilibrium to a granite trinity below. The residents rebuilt it last year, and it now pulls almost as many tourists as Swanmore Pond. Unfortunately, Cairo’s cliff-edgers built on sand.

Asturian to become an official language?

From George Ticknor‘s superb History of Spanish literature … a Gothic remnant fled from the Moors into the Alpine Asturias, carrying with them race, name, creed, language, and country—scotched but not killed. In that rocky school, and amid storms and war, the infant Spanish language—eldest child and heir to the Latin—was slowly brought up; seven…

The worms crawled in and the worms crawled out

Towards the end of La colmena (The hive), Cela’s portrait of a post-war Madrid devoid of heroes and on the brink of oblivion, The morning ascends, little by little, climbing like a worm through the hearts of the men and the women of the city. This reminds me of the episode in Pío Baroja’s morbid…