Here’s an interesting little anecdote to add to my list of fake/bleached virgin stories: Barcellona [sic] has always been celebrated for the zeal of its priesthood, and for the pains taken by them to hoodwink the people; and even in these days, religious bigotry is far more prevailing than might be expected in a city…
Linguistic syncopes are confusing for musicians, who think of syncopation as redistributive rather than reductive. Confusingly, too, many of the syncopated words in Juan de Valdés’ gem of early descriptive linguistics and linguistic politicking, Diálogo de la lengua (late 1530s), are not produced by medial deletions. Here’s the conventional scheme of things (Hartmann & Stork,…
Today Catalonia celebrates its ecologist, anti-globalist credentials (on which, as a neo-liberal, Bush-babe, militaristic Anglo, I have been lectured so often) by importing millions of chemical roses from East Africa in the hope that their gift will lead to a decent shag. Don’t be fooled: Cervantes smells better, and a pine-needle bed at 1000m is…
Life is skittles, life is beer, and, where possible, life is adultery. There’s a lovely bit in Enrique Jardiel Poncela’s But … were there ever eleven thousand virgins? where he says that amor is Spanish for two people eating stew together. Resistance is futile, my dear, particularly with the roses up in the Cervantes gardens…
Someone told me once that the best brothel in Spain, ever, was a mythical one run in medieval Valencia by one Rei Arlot under licence from the King of Aragon. The reality is slightly more predictable: King Harlot was the popular name given to the government official charged with regulating prostitution, and the office was…
Toni is a retired fish porter in Barcelona harbour. I’ve lifted more weights than Arnol Shawarthanega, he says, and now I’m going to walk all day. Here’s a song he sings:
I don’t think author and diplomat Juan Valera (“Good should always be in fashion”) will mind me revealing his smoking fetish, now he’s been dead 100 years. Here‘s a quick tranny of an 1850 letter from Russia: On May 8th, Russian style, I left Saint Petersburg for Moscow on the noon train, accompanied by a…
The claim by jokers like Jordi Bilbeny that whatever contains the odd Catalanism must have been written by a Catalan is obviously and completely ridiculous because it ignores a basic truth of the Mediterranean littoral: that multilingual jostling and experimentation has been going on here for as long as people have had horses, boats and…
Moving house, so orders may take longer until mid-February - mail me first if in doubt. Shop deliveries free on foot in Leeds LS1-8 & LS13. Dismiss