Cataloonia, Sweden on the Med

Jordi Pujol’s venerable dream appears finally to have been realised, although perhaps not quite as he anticipated.

Eternal values and the notary

RMF over at Fum i estalzi quotes Josep Pla (“Notaries live in central locations and tend to occupy spacious apartments with very high ceilings”) and links to a business listings map of Barcelona notaries. I suppose if you hacked the streetview feature you could check out the high ceilings bit.

Rationalists

Josep Pla, El quadern gris, November 6 1918: Coromina and my brother–a chemistry student–get entangled in an endless discussion about science. Coromina attacks–to my great surprise–my brother’s rooted conviction of the absolute priority of science in any system of human knowledge. Like all anti-rationalists, Coromina creates beautiful, brilliant phrases: he says, for example, that the…

Trouble on board

Olympic torches on a Parisian bus reminded me of Josep Pla, smoking merrily away on oil tankers in the famous 1976 A fondo interview with Joaquín Soler Serrano: [Full video seems to have disappeared, so these are a couple of excerpts] Not having heard other recordings, I wonder whether don José wasn’t playing up the…