Baltasar Porcel is a Mallorcan writer who is said to believe that his Nobel is grossly overdue. I find his columns and novels unbearably egoistic and confused, and the excellent Carles Miró in a brief review of Porcel’s career and latest novel suggests that I am not alone.
The Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901 is now remembered mainly for the assassination of McKinley by a Polish-American anarchist follower of Emma Goldman. However it was yet another triumph for Thomas A Edison, Inc and its electric chairs, X-ray machines (McKinley might have survived had an Edison X-ray machine been allowed to locate the…
There are various explanations of Spanish anti-Americanism. The post-colonial hypothesis is popular: Spain is bitter about its loss of empire, its defeat in 1898, its not being invited to the G-whatever. An alternative hypothesis is that anti-Americanism is frustration arising from the idea that an implicit bilateral dollars-for-favours deal has been violated. In Luis Berlanga,…
One of Spain’s greatest 20th century plagiarists intertextualisers was the novelist Valle-Inclán. His gypsies are substantially borrowed from George of that name, but as far as I know it is only in the following passage from La corte de los milagros, a novel set in the period when Borrow was in Spain, that he refers…
African-ish bands have been the talk of Andalusian ports since Cervantes. In 1935 the carnival association Orquesta Senegalesa didn’t win any prizes with this song: Aquí está la Orquesta Senegalesa que tocamos las notas con gran limpieza, llegamos desde Londres en un tranvía a visitar la tierra de la alegría. Hemos visto mujeres a cual…
There was a lot of it: Mirá, hay putas graciosas más que hermosas, y putas que son putas antes que mochachas, hay putas apasionadas, putas estregadas, afeitadas, putas esclarecidas, putas reputadas, reprobadas, hay putas mozárabes de Zocodover, putas carceveras: hay putas de cabo de ronda, putas ursianas, putas güelfas, gibelinas, putas injuinas, putas de rapalo…
Sez our foreign correspondent of Bar Agujas d’Ouro in Estremoz, Portugal. Its radical eclecticism picknmixery suggests the architect may have mistakenly interpreted the lack of aesthetic coordination in many cathedrals and other large, old, respectable buildings as the result of a synchronic design choice rather than the typical diachronic process in which committees regret the…
When I saw this first I briefly thought it was Montjuïc viewed from Maians Island, where Quixote first saw the sea. But the sun sets west, not south, and those are mountains in the background, not clouds. So it must be Italy, somewhere. Here’s the text.
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