Interiors in NW Spain

Check Bert Teunissen (via JPQ). For me it’s less Spanish-country-house than displaced Vermeer with the light and life sucked out of it, but maybe I’m missing the miserable side of life.

Context is king

Re the trials of Josh Bell (via FiE): what happens if you put a bad violinist in a penguin suit? (I have a couple, just in case you wondered.)

The oldest surname in the world

Ramón J Sender’s La tesis de Nancy is the account of an affair between strawman and strawwoman, in which Curro, Work, a part-gypsy ingénu-cynic from the Seville town of Alcalá de Guadaira “who devotes himself to the resale of bullfight tickets in the summer and to wine-tasting for the rest of the year” leaves Dutch…

Cab drivers show porn films

My dentist in Holland used to lower a telly over the chair and you could watch all manner of goings on, but this level of customer care is apparently considered offensive in Mexico, of all places.

Nostradamus and the Spanish Civil War

If we take it as axiomatic that books with blue and pink covers are published by nutters, then McClaine Lee’s book will contain few surprises. However, a bit of Nostra-madness does no harm, surely.

Ships of fools

Andrew Scull digs up and burns Foucault in the TLS: Foucault’s account of the medieval period fares no better in the light of modern scholarship. Its central image is of “the ship of fools”, laden with its cargo of mad souls in search of their reason, floating down the liminal spaces of feudal Europe. It…

Man shares house with 80 sheep

Sorry, but this is not big news where I am this week, and the upstairs/downstairs arrangement is normal too. I used to play in a band with someone who lived with his elderly parents and a dozen pigs and cows in a one-storey Saxon loshoes in a German border swamp. From the rich sounds that…

Google MT interview

Doubts re the wisdom of using UN and EU texts aside, it seems to me that Franz Och is being unduly modest about the current state of affairs–the free Google service is already better than a lot of the €0.04/word Spanish-English guys out there. (Via the excellent Onze Taal)

Ugly authors

They’re photoshopping Jane Austen, so where will it stop? One writer who could do with some help is Al-Jahiz (776-868). Now known as something of a medieval Gollum, he killed and sold fish along the canal in Basra as a small boy, progressed into being a “notably ugle writer with ‘goggle eyes'” (hence جاحظ العينين)…