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…
El Bibliómano covers Alibris’ arrival in the UK. Meanwhile we’re still waiting for Amazon to open a store in Spain. If they need encouragement, here‘s a photo posted by Alvy almost two years ago on Microsiervos, concluding that they could generate revenues of up to €30M here.
Javier Celaya y Luis Sábat are reported by El País as saying its partly down to fear and ignorance of the internet. Being Spain, I can’t help wondering whether it’s not some obscure new money-laundering wheeze. (Via El Bibliómano)
I believe the current early chronology of versions containing all the basic motifs is as follows: Joseph Fouché was a politician and administrator, and the delightfully wicked creator under Bonaparte of something vaguely resembling the modern police service. According to PBS, he wrote in something called Archives of the police of a series of murders…
Here, via WonkaPistas. If we forget Oaxaca and a couple of other disfunctional states, then in Mexico we find a much greater interest in providing value for money for parents and children than in Spain, where it is widely accepted that individual rights should be subordinated to those of invented collectives. You don’t have to…
The story of the Moroccans with keys to houses in Granada is well known. La Cruz, The Cross, a Catholic periodical carried what sounds like a variant of this in 1854, claiming that Prussian Jews were about to petition the Spanish court to abolish the 1492 expulsion decree. Léon Carbonero y Sol wrote: In truth…
Pleasingly, Bable is used as a synonym for Astur-Leonese, aka Leonese etc. The name was apparently popularised by someone called Xovellanos in the C18th and taken from someone else I’ve never heard of called González Posada. Its origin is (still apparently) unknown but its use is widespread and it appears in the inevitable references to…
Next month at the Filmoteca of Andalusia they’re putting on what they call an international congress under the title “Uros y Eros. Erotismo y Tauromaquia”. There’s some good stuff over at Burladero. Here’s a piece in which Albert Boadella calls–as he has done on various occasions–for the reconstruction of the link between bullfighting and the…
In some cases the frequency of Anglo-Saxon surnames is related more to the descendants left behind by old British mining concessions than to current emigration of retired Anglo-Saxons to the Andalusian coast.
In Spain it’s a cubana, a Cuban, the Uruguayans call it una paja rusa, a Russian wank (not to be confused with a Russian mountain, una montaña rusa, which is a big dipper in the nicest of senses), while José João Dias Almeida’s excellent dictionary of Portuguese argot (calaõ) and idiom informs us that his…
