I’ve bumped into a number of Moorish poet-princes, but I’d never heard of poet-princess Wallada bint al-Mustakfi (994-1091). There’s a sensible, sourced account (in Spanish) here, and then there’s this. I had my doubts about Wijdan al shommari, and thought I’d be able to nail him/her on the basis of his/her (?) version of a…
This morning we went looking for gypsies and birds at the northern end of Collserola. When it suddenly started looking like it was going to rain very heavily–it subsequently did–we came down off the hills, overtaking old men carrying mushrooms and the occasional deckchair, and did a quick improvised tour of bars (Chuck Norris on…
David E Vassberg (Land and Society in Golden Age Castile) writes: There exists also an old proverb (of unknown vintage): En tierra de señorío, almendro o guindo; en tierra real, noguera o moral (In seigneurial lands, almond or cherry; in royal lands, walnut or mulberry), which the editor of the collection of proverbs [Bergua, Refranero…
Someone has been trying recently & kindly to hammer into my thick skull the nature and depth of early Irish ties with Iberia. Here’s a bleeding chunk from a piece called The City of the Tribes: Italian Memories in an Irish Port in a recently cited James Joyce anthology (Occasional, Critical, and Political Writings): The…
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…
Someone who thinks I was born yesterday tells me this word is applied to policemen who shoot street children. (BTW: The Guttersniper has frenemies, an updating of the good/bad cop routine.)
Glad to see the French are bemoaning the death of Cockney. There’s a lovely bit in George Borrow’s Romany Rye where he has moved into an inn in which there was a barber and hair-dresser, who had been at Paris, and talked French with a cockney accent; the French sounding all the better, as no…
Xavier (check his crazy blog, Le dicon) in an interesting comment has introduced me to Jean-Pierre Brisset. Brisset is interesting because he anticipates Derrida (différance) by taking a a lexical trick that works only in French and using it as the basis for universal theory, despite most of us not having been blessed with an…
In a piece here Amina Talhimet observes that in order to make it in southern Europe, it is no longer enough for African emigrants to be odd-job men. That’s true to a certain extent, but sometimes the skills that enable the boat people to earn a living here are obtained on the road. There’s a…