Tag: José Martínez Ruiz
Tapas bars, a British invention?
1908 driver’s-eye film of a Barcelona tram travelling from Paseo de Gracia via Salmerón (Gran), Lesseps, and República de Argentina to Graywinckel (Craywinckel)
Literary feet
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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…
“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…
Unlike Carlos, I’m actually rather fond of Albacete, and not just because its ugliness is on a smaller scale than Birmingham’s. Although generally more energy tends to be devoted to damnation than to praise, I found out the other night, flicking through a book called Historia de la provincia de Albacete, that I’m not the…
In Amor se escribe sin hache (Amor is written without H, 1929), “an almost cosmopolitan novel,” Enrique Jardiel Poncela describe Birmingham as “the Albacete of the United Kingdom.” Not to be outdone, José Martínez Azorín (who also gave the Generation of 98 its name) baptised Albacete “the New York of La Mancha.” That all this…
Great tunes, great doggerel, small simians