“Jewish mountain” is currently hot favourite in Barcelona council offices because it is believed that this will attract well-off tourists from New York and Israel. Joan Amades says that at the end of the C19th, local sailors referred to gardens of St Bertrand as fossa del jueu, “the Jewish grave”, and indeed there were Jewish…
Mare de Déu Fumadora, Mother of God Smoker, is a local name used in Arenys de Mar on Catalonia’s Maresme coast for the day before yesterday’s feast of the Immaculate Conception, la Purísima. According to the much-maligned Jordi Bilbeny, this is the day when children were allowed to smoke by their parents (picture of kiddie…
Two old people were arguing this afternoon under the memorial to Joan Amades on Calle Carmen in the Raval about whether the pigeons should be fed. The argument proceeded along roughly the same lines as in the 1950s Parisian skirmish recorded in Juan Goytisolo‘s Señas de identidad (1966), in which the old man is determined…
Amando de Miguel notes the commonsensical notion that two people will tend to speak the language that supposes the least combined effort for them (all other things being equal), and proposes naming this law for his correspondent, Candela Zamora. You all know what a candela is, of course. De Miguel refers in the same piece…
Curiously, Joan Amades noted that Catalan parents used to terrify their children out of going to lonely spots on windy days by telling them that the breeze carried in it a ferocious and sequestracious demon called Cul Pelat, Cul Pelé in French, for which the only reasonable English equivalent I can imagine is Shaven Arse.…
“Shit, operating as the preeminent figure of self-alienation …, becomes a symbolic medium for questioning the place of the autonomous individual in new postcolonial societies.”
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