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…
I’ve been merrily dilettanting away recently with a couple of literary robberies and forgeries, so it’s good to see that Zazie over at cocanha found a really great one. What he has are extracts from a book published in 1842 in Porto, Portugal under the promising title, Cartas d’el Rei Don Fernando, O Catholico, a…
From Ibn ‘AbdÅ«n’s rulebook for Seville market, translated by Bernard Lewis: “Truffles should not be sold around the mosque, for this is a delicacy of the dissolute.” (Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources, ed Olivia R Constable) There’s no reason to believe this ties in with the prohibition on the use of…
A while later, some of us did a cameo somewhere else in a tranny cabaret show. As S observed, tranny shows here (at least the ones that appear in public theatres with subsidies) are all the same and have more to do with religious ritual–Easter in Seville, Castro speeches–than art, intellect or invention: men acquire…
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…
Of course it is the fault of those damn Muslims: The Marchenero is one of the oldest pouter breeds, and it is a breed that was developed in Spain in a period of time covering almost on thousand years. In order to understand the beginnings or ancient history, a brief history lesson is in order.…
… are going from bad to worse. First there was the defeat of a tawdry bunch of Manchester liberals by a rabble of saucepan- and mobile-wielding Marxists. Then 70K kids left behind 20 tons of rubbish in a couple of Seville suburbs during an impromptu spring party – organised by phone. And now a colleague’s…
Half of Spain has been walking round for the past decade chanting “Aznar, murderer,” which is demonstrably untrue, and nothing at all has happened. Now a kid down in Seville has put a picture on his website of some virgin (sorry, Our Lady of Hope of Triana) with a willy in her hand and a…
Drie manieren om te verliezen: De databronnen zijn vervuild of de integratie klopt niet: denk even na over het eerste voorbeeld op het (klikbare) plaatje. De tijden kloppen wel maar vandaag niet: zie voorbeeld 2. Niemand in el Papiol weet waarom de trein pauzeert buiten het station gedurende twee eenzame weken in september. Met de…