Spider styles

Gerald Howson’s The Flamencos of Cadiz Bay is a damn good book that stays well clear of the “Andalusia, soul of Spain” myth-making that poisoned much foreign writing from Washington Irving on. Catalonia was for a long time the home of Spanish bull-fighting and I reckon it also houses more of what I in my ignorance would regard as gypsies than Andalusia; it is in connection with the latter and their music that Howson says something very interesting:

This doesn’t click with me, but my last visit to a peña flamenca was highly instructive (as well as pretty bizarre) so I’ll ask next time round

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Comments

1. Jonathan sez:
   22 June 2005 at 12:38 AM

   Thanks for the tip. Cheaper, though probably less shiny, copies are available at http://www.bookfinder.com. Have you read Álvaro Mutis’s cracking poem about the Spanish city where I’d probably live if I didn’t live in Madrid? It’s at http://www.poesia-inter.net/amu016.htm.

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