“The Parallel has tree faces,” writes Max Aub in Campo cerrado, “day, night, and Sunday morning.” The Parallel–crammed with artistes and whores–was a key location in the rise of the anarchist gangsters for whom Orwell fought, yet the Church of England’s favourite anarchist seems to have missed it and various other crucial locations on the [...]

“Nazi-onanism” for “nationalism,” in a good piece by Vicente Álvarez (via Libro de Notas) on the growing intolerance and aggression of regional movements in Spain.

Jose Cohen@Desde Sefarad notes that local left-wing odd bod Pilar Rahola has been given a prize for fighting anti-Semitism. (There’s a better piece by her here.) Barcelona council may specialise in banalising the Holocaust, but there’s a current of unembarrassed denial here with much older roots. The other day a middle class, middle aged guy [...]

I have noticed that serious websites have pictures of women smiling and men shaking hands.

I would like briefly to draw your attention to the fine services offered by PopulationSix.com, info available in English, French and Spanish.

Carlos Ferrero wonders in an interesting post whether translators see themselves as builders of Europe. At the current rate of budgetary progress on language issues, I think we (I do the odd bit of Dutch- and Catalan-English) may actually succeed in destroying it.

Non-resident kitsch freaks may enjoy some of the texts contributed to the Catalan language police’s good cop’s latest bizarre spending spree aimed at beating the language market. I used to conduct one of Holland’s last communist choirs, but even they’d have collapsed in a combination of laughter and horror at the Ecological Pasodoble. The following [...]

Last night we were singing at a function and I started needling the French alto about Trafalgar, so she hit me hard with the new “Brits only care about drinking, fucking and fighting” survey, and then we moved on to the “hey, well at least we don’t beat our wives” refrain. A few days back [...]

Brits tend to see Trafalgar (search) as the stage on which British naval hegemony was established. The French official view, on the other hand, is that it is just another anniversary. For some Spaniards, meanwhile, apart from being a reminder of the perils of entrusting project management to the French, it recalls imperial glory (we’re [...]

Enjoy El Periódico’s deputy director José Sorolla getting his intellectual knickers in a twist trying to figure out how Ahmadinejad can be an ultracon and Rafsanjani a leftie when Rafsanjani is a fan of the Ultracon States of America. Someone explain multi-axis analysis to him. (Jean Véronis@Technologies du Langage notes droitisation and droitiser. Spanish goes [...]

The temperature is up in the 30s, so Miguel Guash via Amando de Miguel wonders why words for “night” and “eight” are similar in some Indo-European languages. Since even the derangedest of astrologers acknowledge that the notion of there being eight moon phases is culturally relative (damn, we can’t even agree on the Number of [...]

On Laforja a shop called Cásual Wear.
(“Casual wear” is often hyphenated in Spanglish. I’m just trying to figure how it will be written in Catalan when it goes completely native.)

Here’s another daisy for my chain of Spain-goes-south posts, unlikely to be of interest to anyone at all, although the ads may amuse.
Vital Fité’s Las desdichas de la patria viewed China as an imperial basket case. Ricardo Beltrán y Rózpide in La geografía en 1898 (1899) explains why it was to remain so:
The most enthusiastic [...]

One of the surprises of Sergio Vila-Sanjuán and Sergi Doria’s Passejades per la Barcelona literària (“Walks in literary Barcelona”) is that it ignores Max Aub, whose Campo cerrado, the first part of a six-volume account of the war, is probably the best fictionalised version of the period leading to the events of July 1936 in [...]

I’ve just been reading a fantastic selection (La fiera corrupia, ed JM Rexach) of ballads and the like printed by Coromines of Lleida/Lerida in the mid-nineteenth century. As well as classics like The Beast of Jerusalem, sundry executions, famines, hail storms, and the obligatory poop-piece, it includes a very cute lovesong by F(r)ederico Logroño, First [...]

Here’s another nugget from that dark and dirty vein, Spain’s colonial adventures. It’s from Vital Fité’s Las desdichas de la patria (The misfortunes of the motherland; 1899), in which he reflects on national destiny following the disastrous loss to the US of Cuba and the Philippines:
If others’ troubles could console us, a brief examination of [...]

Akiane’s poem no 1 (via Stefan@MemeFirst), with a couple of small changes, brings to mind a story someone else tells about when the municipal cops rushed into a building, truncheons at the ready, to arrest a notorious heroin junk, only to discover, slipping and sliding, that he’d had a little accident:
I slipped on the mirror
full [...]

Comment spam has dried up over the last couple of months (along with comments), but I do get the occasional strange message from nutters who want to correspond with me or mow my lawn or whatever. One such writes every now and again in Spanish to suggest meeting up so that she (lots of allegedlies [...]

Eulàlia Petit@Barcelonetes is right about exhibitions at Barcelona’s CCCB–too much curation, not enough content. She says a variety of interesting things about the current one, West by East (which actually deals with “Muslim” representations of “the West”), and quotes the Iranian writer, Sorour Kasmaï. Kasmaï says that for her the novel is what defines the [...]

Since my reader in the northern hemisphere is spending all his time hanging around in a beach bar, hoping someone will talk to him, I’m going to post the occasional bit of new-to-me nonsense from down south until things cool down again in September.
I think there’s no question that we’re all going to end up [...]

[link] and no one can remember who stuffed her in there in the first place. That’s a different girl from Spike Jones’ Brownie with the light blue jeans, who was as sweet as liquorice beans, in case you’d forgotten. Nor did the Spice Girls sing, “The race is on to get out on the bottle,” [...]

Turks care about 5 times more about the living conditions of their fellow Europeans than the Spanish, says this chart, more freebies here. Someone who takes this stuff at face value has got to be pretty damn stupid.
(The survey sponsor is the University of Tilburg (UvT), which used to be called the Catholic University [...]

Zapatero is biding his time, is the premonitory drift of Quarrell betweene the Dutch & English by Anon (via Polly Curtis@Guardian):
The Belgick Frogge, out of the bogge, with Brittish mouse doth strive:
The Iberian Kite meane while by slight, surprizeth both alive.
While for their shares, of Indian wares, English & Dutch doe brawle;
The Spanyards watch, advantage [...]

The Guardian: I never said we should end the CAP now or renegotiate it overnight.
Le Monde: Je n’ai jamais dit que je voulais changer la PAC maintenant ou la renégocier en une nuit

I suspect Amando de Miguel’s “se deliveran groserías” comes from Alfredo Ochoa’s “se deliveran grocerías” and that it’s an invention designed to discredit the EU’s future sole official language, Spanglish. I’m not going to believe that a Dominican corner store in NYC would offer to deliver insults until someone shows me a storefront or flyer [...]

Spain has often been a (reluctant) Francophile, so it should surprise none but heartless materialists that–with an assist from Google Print’s OCR–“Napoleon had beer in secret correspondence with Charles [IV]’s son.” I knew that German technology took over from French after its successful demonstration in 1871, and I’d heard all about the post-WWII triumph of [...]

News from a Spanish newspaper of political affiliations unknown to me that Pinochet’s stroke is “developing satisfactorily” is not particularly helpful.

This and the huge and prosperous French population in SE England just go to confirm the notion that Britain is where the French go to work, while France decays gradually into a gigantic agricultural theme park dotted with wildlife reserves dedicated to obscurantist and ageing political dogmatists. Spain, on the other hand…

I’ve been on planet Mars, writing some arrangements and checking out the deeper side of big band theory, so I’ve only just discovered that the head of the conservative Partido Popular in Orense, Galicia, is a keen trombonist. Xosé Luis Baltar recently suggested to voters that Zapatero’s lot might try to steal the Galician elections [...]

Further proof of the irresistible rise of Nicolas Sarkozy, via Technologies du Langage.

Dr Weevil has noticed that Espasa-Calpe has published a collection of shorts by William Sidney Porter, misspelling his pen name. I thought at first that they’d Oirish-ised it for marketing reasons which I cannot conceive, but they’re just plain stupid. (Do writers whose first name begins with “o” avoid initialising it to prevent this kind [...]

The sublime Grammar Cop@Banterist (now at LS) has been on patrol at Coney Island. Ignatius J Reilly would be proud of him.

The state-sponsored Mediterranean Social Forum “demonstration” for “a conflict-free, peaceful Mediterranean” began with a huge punch-up between the Moroccans and the Saharouis, so I was reasonably optimistic that one of the post-march bands, Les Boukakes, would indeed stage a “sexual scene where many men masturbate on and give a ’semen bath’ to a willing submissive” [...]

Be there (ie Presentació Pública) or be something objectionable. Unfortunately I have a prior engagement with a spider.

Joan Barril suggests making orthography subject to the weather as one more means of diverting attention from the fact that most people can’t get the accents right in the simplest of Catalan. Erik Dams touches a related theme–writing implements designed to operate under meteorological conditions unsuited to their users–and Wim de Bie reports–one shouldn’t necessarily [...]

kalebeul’s favourite Marksist notes that a German comic is raising laughs in Britain. No hope of that here: in the course of a post claiming that customer service in Barcelona is worse even than in Rio de Janeiro, Sarita mentions the poster campaign for budget flyers, Germanwings:
Germanwings. Vuelos a Alemania desde 19 euros. No bromeamos, [...]

More revelations re the pharmaco-entertainment complex @ Arcadi Espada: “Más de treinta años hablando de Depp Throat.”

I’m right there (well, kind of) with Jordi Orwell, David Millán, and (really!) Francesc Ferrer on (sorry, against) the “Save the Family From Men in Frocks” demo. I can understand why the PP is promoting this ridiculous enterprise: they lost the last elections because they supported liberty abroad and have come to the natural but [...]

If you’re into the whole Borghild thing (and Wikipedia isn’t yet), then you really should try the surgical & secondary care products of Limbs & Things.

Istòria de Jacob Xalabín is a 15th century historical romance written in Catalan (or translated into that language) that recounts the adventures in the period 1387-9 of Jacob, son and heir of Sultan Murat I, and his death at the hands of his bastard brother, Beseyt, during the Battle of Kosovo, in which Murat also [...]