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Dos de Mayo shootings

“José Lone, natural de Madrid, casado con Francisca de San Pedro, de la que tenía un niño de 7 meses, de oficio tendero en la plazuela de Santo Domingo, núm.6, faltó de su casa desde el dia 2 de Mayo á las cinco de la tarde: su madre María Riscos dijo que tenía la […]

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Justo Bueno chiselled out of historical memory

This is the anarchist serial killer who, according to a good series of articles by Josep Maria Sòria in La Vanguardia in 2003,

in April 1936 shot dead Miquel Badia. (To be fair, Badia had it coming, as he himself acknowledged: failed regicide, fascist bootboy and strikebreaker for “our caudillo” Francesc Macià, head of security under […]

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Adam Aston singing Czerwone maki na Monte Cassino

One of the first times I played in public as a kid was at the local Polish club, and I remember trying to figure out what all these old folks were doing in this neighbourhood, amid numerous refugees from newer tyrannies in Asia and Africa and Latin America. After that it was a short conceptual […]

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Der Engel

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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Spaniard found not guilty of theft because of poor language skills

The proceedings of the Old Bailey are now searchable to 1913. Apart from anything else they are an interesting source of information re the misfortunes of London’s Spanish population, from the refugees from Fernando VII to the anarchist trials in the 1890s. The following testimony to the traditional linguistic handicap of the Iberian tribes was […]

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Three versions of “El relicario”

Raquel Meller, the most successful Spanish artist of the 20th century, struggling with pitch and pace in 1914:

Sara Montiel, who made her name in the 50s singing old Raquel Meller songs, only much better:

Rudolph Valentino, who would have struggled to compete with barnyard animals had films not been silent:

Maybe the X Factor isn’t so bad […]

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“Sorceress” Raquel Meller, TIME Magazine cover

This delectable flor del mal from Barcelona’s Poble Sec district is a daisychain from A Nun’s link to a review of a book dealing with degradation and deviancy in the same neighbourhood. New York, April 26 1926:
Ushers with tall combs and white mantillas stole back up the aisles as the house lights faded out. The […]

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The Dreyfus affair

Still showing along the Sequia Comtal in Clot, by then incorporated into Barcelona. The date is 1914, which is to say 20 years later, and just as Dreyfus was limbering up to go to war once more. I suppose the flick must have been French translated into Spanish. Incidentally, goats make excellent cinema audiences and […]

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“My great uncle took the Spanish government into exile”

From the often superb BBC WWII site:
As France fell my great uncle Ioannis (John) Colentzos was captain of a Greek freighter berthed in Bordeaux. He a did not wish to remain in the port as he was uncertain of what the outcome might be for his vessel once the Germans got there. Greece was not […]

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I met man who almost killed Orwell

Sez No Good Boyo:
“If you’d known who he was, would you have killed him?” “Of course. He was fifth-columnist, Trotsky-Maxtonite traitor to worker class. My boys would have tattooed hammer and sickle on his head with bullets. We had many. Soviet economy strong.”

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Get another of Paul de Kock’s

Ulysses: “I suppose the people gave him that nickname going about with his tube from one woman to another.” Junius Henri Browne wrote in 1873 that he “gained a much worse reputation [in the US] for licentious stories than he deserved, from the spurious and prurient rubbish that used to be put off on the […]

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Jaroslav Hašek in Barcelona, almost

Just before he died, says Cecil Parrott in The bad Bohemian, the author of The good soldier Švejk (that’s Shvake: “No one pronounces it Shvike–not even in Germany”) drafted a letter to the district police:
I, the undersigned, ask respectfully to be kindly given the necessary passport for a stay in Spain (Barcelona, Calle Rosellos [sic: […]

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Washing machine invented in Barcelona?

I ask because the chattels of the gentlemen right fore in this early nineteenth century image of the Palace of Barcelona clearly include a front-loading automatic:

(Full image on single-post page.)
Blasco de Garay, eat your heart out.

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Barraquismo

Valencia, late C19:
Batiste no dudó que aquellas gentes se vengarían. Conocía los procedimientos usuales en la huerta. Para aquella tierra no se había hecho la justicia de la ciudad; el presidio era poca cosa tratándose de satisfacer un resentimiento. ¿Para qué necesitaba un hombre jueces ni Guardia civil, teniendo buen ojo y una escopeta en […]

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Gran Vía, heading north out of Barcelona

Actually Ludwig Hilberseimer, Entwurf für eine Hochhausstadt/Design for a high-rise city (1924). Hitler exported idealistic architects rather than bombs to the US. Hilberseimer ran the Chicago planning department for a while, and they and other public institutions have spent the last ten years tearing down projects built by him and other Bauhaus luminaries.
Enthusiasm in […]

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A heathen named Guiri

“The Mahávansa and the Rájaratnákari state, that the king Walakanabhaya, or according to the latter work, Deveny Paetissa, caused the temple of a heathen named Girrie (doubtless Giri) to be destroyed, and caused to be constructed upon its site twelve temples consecrated to Sákya, which communicated with each other; and in the midst of which […]

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Professor Blumenbach of Göttingen’s views on beauty in women

T Bell, MD, Kalogynomia, or the laws of female beauty (1821):
Professor Blumenbach of Göttingen, whose profound science and perfect impartiality no one can doubt, does not hesitate to say, that the English are the most beautiful people on the globe. Nor is this wonderful when we consider that ENGLAND, perhaps exclusively, presents the combination […]

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Not the Mataró I know

A short story “El lobo de las sierras” published in The new monthly magazine in 1851 evokes a typical day in the life of a British railway engineer on the Catalan coast (the Mataro-Barcelona line opened in 1848):
It was enough to have disquieted a man of stouter nerves than Tom, who, torn, stupid and intoxicated […]

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Quantitative analysis by language of Barcelona publications in British Library Integrated Catalogue

The Catalan government continues to claim that public use of Catalan was prohibited during the dictatorship, but everyone sensible now agrees that this was not so, and that publishing in Catalan–which is what we are interested in today–was never banned.
Xavi Caballé today posted several lists estimating numbers of publications in Catalan (where?) for some […]

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Taken by death

The famous “Kiss of death” memorial sculpture in Poble Nou cemetery, photo by the excellent izarbeltza, regularly visited on one of these Barcelona walks:

A more earthy interpretation, from a Chinese shop, also in Barcelona:

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Tagline error in early Indian Chaplin film poster

I think the laugh/laughter thing is probably quite a hard mistake for non-natives to spot. I am consciously aware of about as much grammar as is your dog’s posterior end, so don’t ask me to explain why it’s wrong. (From CaixaForum’s exhibition.)

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The Spanish nightwatchman

A revealing note from Fran Harper’s Spanish phrasebook (1963, “text by Joan I de Corvera”):
If you stay in a hotel or private boarding house which has no all-night porter, and return after 10.30 p.m. in winter, or 11 p.m. in summer, the outer door will be opened by the “Sereno,” who is a kind of […]

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Debauchery at midnight mass, disorderly organists

I’ve only ever been a witness of vomiting and fighting at midnight mass, but none of this is new. One of today’s Libro verde items records that until a few years [before 1848], mass was sung at one in the morning, but that the irreverences of the ignorant made it impossible. Henceforth it was celebrated […]

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Disastrous weather in Barcelona

The papers are running their usual “worst weather ever” stories, but 163 years ago here massive floods signalled an end to a period of abnormal cold–snow lay on the land around town–and a Norwegian brig was lost in storms at the mouth of the Llobregat.

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Sinamay

I’ve spent the past half hour helping a milliner source sinamay, the principal material used in the confection of hats. It is made using small quantities of silk and the fibres of the abacá, a species of banana from the Philippines. Joaquín Martínez de Zúñiga (Estadismo de las Islas Filipinas, researched 1803-5) writes that the […]

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Holy Thursday Jew-killing games in Lleida

BS has kindly pointed out that Lérida has a selective digitalised press archive going back to 1896. With ref to this, he notes the existence of similar commemorative genocidal banging by children in the city in the early twentieth century (?):
–Where are you off to this early?
–To kill Jews, mum!
–Don’t you know that that’s in […]

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Practical Christianity

From the SPCK’s Saturday magazine in 1823:
During the siege of Barcelona by the Spaniards and English, in the war of the succession, in 1705, an affecting incident occurred, which is thus related by Captain Carleton, in his memoirs. “I remember I saw an old officer, having his only son with him, (a fine man about […]

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Fights of nations

“‘Mexico vs. Spain,’ the first scene, shows the rejected Mexican suitor, in a jealous rage, watching the love-making between Carlos, the Spaniard, his hated rival, and the beautiful senorita. With drawn stiletto, he pounces upon the Don, but the senorita seizes his arm, thus saving her lover from a horrible death. After a terrific hand-to-hand […]

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Elementos de geografía física

From the Diario de Barcelona, quoted in Manuel Martínez de Morentin, Estudios filológicos (1857):
—¿Qué se entiende por España?
—Una Nacion como otra cualquiera, pero con la particularidad de haber de todo menos españoles.
—¿En qué climas se halla?
—En tres; frio, caliente y templado: en invierno es cuando regularmente se siente el frio, lo que motiva el fenómeno […]

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Catalan cannibal song

Demanding a paella of the Moderates, in today’s entry over at the new libro verde. Sequel: a week later, with defeat imminent, the same people sang, “Now it’s us in the frying pan.” (The 1843 Jamancia, from jamar, to eat, is one of Barcelona’s forgotten revolutions. Only a fool or a saint would attempt to […]

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Doris Lessing i el meu besavi

Amb els seus 21 anyitos i sense ser colonista ni cabró ni ningú especial el meu besavi anglès es va fer arrancar totes les dents de la mateixa manera. Era més xic, una qüestió d’estil. La setmana després se li va caure el pèl–pel sustu, suposem–i es va quedar calb per tota la vida. No […]

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Rab’s family

It turns out that an occasional commenter here has a blog of his own, From Catalonia to Caledonia, in which, from a Catalan nationalist perspective, he whinges about the Spanish, the English, ungrateful immigrants and stuff. However, his family turns out to contain the odd cockatoo cuckoo too:
My parents are just another example of this. […]

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Did Columbus actually ever come to Barcelona?

Letters of Alexander Von Humboldt to Varnhagen Von Ense (GBS):
On the 9th of June, 1839, Varnhagen writes in his diary: “Humboldt agrees with me in the assertion made by me at different times, that too much cannot be inferred from the silence of the historians. He refers to three highly important and undeniable facts, which […]

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Barcelona manufacturer offers 3-in-1 billiard table + grand piano + harmonium

Ah, Spanish engineering in the 1860s! Since the factory only turned out two billiard tables a week, it’s difficult to see how they would have got round to satisfying the demands of smaller establishments with this kind of device, but never mind.

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The Basque race and the horse

“The Basque type is, amongst all the human races, that which is most different from quadrupeds. The posture of the head and the form of the jaw is in the Basque the least animal of all in existence.” Telesforo de Aranzadi, ¿Existe una raza euskara? Sus caracteres antropológicos. San Sebastián, Imprenta de la Provincia, 1905 […]

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Pause + Antonio Fuentes anecdote

An expedition to examine the remains of Moorish castles and drink village wine on the Albacete-Jaén borders means that things will be fairly quiet around here until perhaps September 5, when last minute preparations will commence for the launch of a revolutionary new communications model at the Albacete Fair.
The Feria de Albacete is not only […]

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Relocated

It’s difficult to conceive of figures with blue eyes and blond hair populating Gustav de Smeet’s Amsterdam. I think this is actually an Amsterdam as it might have been re-imagined by the considerable numbers of people of Mediterranean descent who live there and in the other great ports along that coast.

The Sagrada Familia is significantly […]

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Return of the demon barber of Calais

Such was the worldwide stir caused by my revelation that the Sweeney Todd story is at least a century older than previously thought that I know many of you will be impatient to read this new story of sinister stylists across the water. It’s from a French tutor, Méthode rationnelle suivant pas à pas […]

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The Spanish Prostitute Moment in pre-war French popular novels

This is a crucial element in what remains of French realist writing in the 1920s and 30s, which, for this reason and others, was more popular than praised. Based on some reading and no maths, I would venture that in a book of (x + y) pages (not counting the open letter of support from […]

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Daniel Heinsius’ solitary phoenix and the final words of the beastly bookseller of Barcelona

In 1927 the Catalan literary researcher and writer, Ramon Miquel i Planas (1874-1950; henceforth MiP) wrote a little book, published in a bibliophile edition, called La llegenda del llibreter assassí. In it he reflects on the origins and recycling of “Le bibliomane ou le nouveau Cardillac”, an anonymous tale published as if true in 1836 […]

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Montjuïc cemetery publishes a little map which, interested in historical renown, guides you past the generally terribly tedious tombs of well-known Barcelona citizens (good, bad, ugly) and thus omits the quite extraordinary artistic achievements of some of its less well-documented residents. Here is one of the finest funeral monuments, built by people who have clearly inherited something of the spirit of the pharaohs of the land whence they say they came:

gorreta
There’s another splendid example nearby dedicated to a young man–strong as a horse, ringed by them–who shares his name but little else with an ex-foreign minister of Chile, and there are many more. It would be a nice irony if these folks were to be remembered after all the bloody Batllós and Ferrer i Guardias are forgotten.

And here’s a fine slash-and-burn assault on the show trial in a Barcelona court of some dirty bloody foreigners. Perhaps the most extraordinary wrongdoing in the whole affair is that over a number of years the police, which is to say the mayor, tolerated a squat run by a psychotic whose raves kept a densely packed residential area awake every weekend and served as a major focus for dealers.

Asks Mr O’Brien: “[A]re foreign funding agencies getting any smarter about how to get more of their countries’ literary works translated into English? The answer is “not much,” or not at all. The country that has made this easier, for Dalkey Archive at least, is Japan. Other countries are on a kind of cusp: Romania, Switzerland, Latvia, Estonia, Norway, Mexico, Lithuania, and Spain. The countries that remain nearly intransigent to changing old practices are France, Germany, Austria, and Italy. The latter group continues to fail to understand that paying for the cost of the translation (or part thereof) is of little help; nor does providing funds to send unknown authors to the States to do tours help at all unless there are substantial marketing funds made available that will help to promote the authors’ books before and after such tours.”

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