JD had a bit more Time than I did and kindly sent me an article from 1930 which turns the tables on the filthy Swedes discussed this morning. It seems that towards the end of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship the Spanish postal service issued a stamp of Goya’s unshaven maja desnuda. Time writes:
The stamps (29,800) [...]

People in Barcelona have started relating the apparently low mortality rate among Chinese residents to identity theft in the way they did in London a few years back, but we’re never going to get back to the good old days before forensic tools like DNA testing, finger printing and ubiquitous photography.
There’s an entertaining story [...]

In my mail this morning: someone calling himself Miguel Yasuki Hirota is giving a talk on complementary currencies for sustainable development at 19:30 on the 15th at Argentona 11. Gugel reveals that “Miguel” is a fan of the author of The natural economic order, of whom almost everyone’s favourite (since last month, anyway) liberal fascist [...]

As well as dancing the old fandango, being a brigand on the mountains, etc. His father was a something from Barcelonia. Here. Can anyone make out the entire text? (This isn’t Funiculì funiculà.)

Josep Pla, El quadern gris, November 6 1918:
Coromina and my brother–a chemistry student–get entangled in an endless discussion about science. Coromina attacks–to my great surprise–my brother’s rooted conviction of the absolute priority of science in any system of human knowledge. Like all anti-rationalists, Coromina creates beautiful, brilliant phrases: he says, for example, that the discovery [...]

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 [...]

The following description of birdsong contests is taken from Josep Pla’s brilliant anecdotography of Rafael Puget, Un señor de Barcelona, and is mid- to late-19th century (esp):
Singing competitions
A fondness for birdsong has existed in Manlleu, Barcelona province for as far back as my memory reaches. The “Societat d’aucellistes”, the Society of Bird-Fanciers, is very old [...]

This isn’t about who invented bar snacks, or about why one particular gibber of Catalan nationalism should want to deny having invented them.
Someone speculated drunkenly last night that, since tapas appears in English from the 1950s (C Salter in OED, “In Spain, when you order a drink in a bar.., you will always be [...]

Take Goig Heroin Elixir:

From La Vanguardia anno 1912. Their current principal source of immoral earnings, apart from editorial-related state subsidy and tax-(ahem-)efficient paid-for journalism, is, of course, brothel advertising. I seem to recall it worked out at around €1M pa, but now most things do. The first ever front page of this then conservative, Catholic [...]

19th century newspapers had better names.

Re Erasmus students returning from Spain with an incomprehensible Andalusian accent, here’s Rafael Alberti learning how to tort proper at the dame’s school to which he has been sent following some inappropriate excretion chez the Sisters of Carmel:
With Mrs Concha I learnt some Biblical History, being very impressed by Joseph, who was sold by his [...]

Sevillanadas has photoshopped back into place one of the Moorish city’s gates, demolished in 1868 by the same man who restored it twenty years earlier following a serious bout of generalised brotherly hate. Will it now be rebuilt?

It now seems that Iceland has defaulted, apparently believing Russia will be foolish enough to attempt to protect what’s left of its cod against ETA trawlers from Bilbao. Spain is not going down that road, at least not yet, but one of the more-quoted papers on the subject (De Paoli, Hoggarth & Saporta, Cost of [...]

From El Imparcial, 18/01/1912:
Rome, 17th (9.20 pm)
This morning a telephone subscriber asked the Central to put him through to the offices of the Palace’s chief huntsman. A considerable period of time passed without response, and the subscriber became impatient and vigorously protested the delay. The young lady responsible for the service replied that no one [...]

I know something of Belgian military bicycling bands. Here from 1909 is another photogenic but doomed military enterprise:

Keep taking the drugs, Riccardo. The photo is from the November 1909 edition of Por esos mundos, which concluded that the French could beat the Germans, that the British had successively reformed their military following lessons learned in [...]

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 [...]

Whoever wrote for them back them believed in providing kicks for his/her bucks:
At daybreak in Huelva a sleepy police man named Joaquin Segovia was stopped by two cars, asked the way to Portugal. Officer Segovia raised his rifle. Without more ado General Sanjurjo hopped out of the first car, shook the policeman by the hand. [...]

Another sentimental tango from from Tio de la Tiza and the Bebabouched Moors demonstrates a firmly-rooted belief in 1891 Cadiz in the Decadence of the Nation, even before the disaster of 1898 and its long aftermath exacerbated the gulf between a diligently managed press and wild popular fears:
Una inocente niña llorando estaba
y con acento [...]

Here. Just about to become completely useless, as work started on tearing up the medieval town from Urquianona more or less via Bilbao and the Plaza del Ángel to the Plaza Antonio López. The Barceloneta bullring is still there (closed 1924), the port has real boats, the basilica of the Merced and the cathedral face [...]

Daisy chaining: Cadiz declined after the War of Independence against the French and suffered the final blow with the loss of the last colonies in 1898, but, if it never achieved the notoriety of Barcelona, it was still an interesting mix of people. Here’s one of my favourite songs, from one of carnival’s great personalities, [...]

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 más bellas
y un vino blanco [...]

Calle Ferran de Barcelona, invierno de 1911. La calle se distingue por su concurrencia y por la ininterrumpida presencia de tiendas y escaparates. Nos encontramos sin duda en una de las calles más animadas de la ciudad y al parecer vía predilecta de tiendas de gran prestigio: nos cruzamos con la pastelería Massana [Mr Massana [...]

Literally:
When at Seville in 1809, Lord Byron lodged in the house of two unmarried ladies; and in his diary he describes himself as having made earnest love to the younger of them, with the help of a dictionary. “For some time,” he says, ” I went on prosperously, both as a linguist and a lover, [...]

Re yesterday’s post on the Santa Majestat in Caldes de Montbui, here’s some anti-Catholic propaganda from the time of George Borrow, taken from the The life of Ramon Monsalvatge:
On the 8th of December, 1832, I was sent from the convent of Sabadell to that of my native town, Olot, to study philosophy. I continued there [...]

Some old photos over at the NOAA library, some new ones here. Not much of that any more. Farmed tuna doesn’t sound particularly attractive. I suppose we could always keep one in the bath.

Processing is underway into diverse preserves of the considerable quantities of blackberries and figs gathered this afternoon with la Primitiva Hermandad de la Primera Sueca on a variant of this walk. Some of the blackberries are being turned into liquor, and I found this whilst fishing around for a more unsuitable recipe:
A very laughable story [...]

Since both Spanish prostitution and Henry Mayhew came up yesterday, I thought it would be interesting to combine them and copy-paste from the excellent (though slow) Perseus database at Tufts the latter’s view of the former. I assume his street prostitutes who “traffic for the bare means of subsistence and submit to any and every [...]

A double reflection makes up the man who was born on the thirteenth day of the moon, lost his
throne on the thirteenth day of the moon, and fought the battle of Waterloo on the thirteenth day of the moon:

I wonder if Josephine’s astrological babblings didn’t cause Napoleon’s natural military interest in the moon to be [...]

At the beginning of the last century one Professor Max-Bembo published La mala vida en Barcelona: anormalidad, miseria y vicio, which in authentic Daily Mail style vaguely enjoined the government to do something about the social and sexual degradation he profited from in such loving and lascivious detail. Here’s the section on wankworkers, copy-pasted from [...]

With the vaguest of references to i-shepan-im here’s Kirby’s wonderful and scientific museum in 1820:
The fecundity of the rabbit is truly astonishing ; it breeds seven times in the year, and generally produces eight young at a time ; from which it is calculated, that one pair may increase in the course of four years, [...]

Here.
The film is by the Barcelona film-maker, Ricardo de Baños, whose oeuvre, produced for an audience including Alfonso XIII, combined Barcelona storm scenes with early flamenco, as well as porn flicks like Consultorio de señoras and anti-Protestant erotica like El confesor. (BTW I wonder whether the otherwise excellent Ferdinand von Galitzien is not mistaken [...]

MM posts re the alleged use by German lawyers of American law. I think it might actually make sense to adopt US law in other jurisdictions (including Louisiana, ho ho): Hollywood achieves far greater public scrutiny of controversial legislation than, for example, Spanish democracy. (But is Hollywood law the same as US law?) National pride [...]

“Coal and iron in Spain”, 16/11/1877: “From Vich, the present terminal point, to the coal mines of San Juan de Abadesas of the railroad which some day in the future will be the grand trunk line to Paris, the Government has built a good substantial stage-road to Ripoll.” The railway arrived in Sant Joan de [...]

Here. They only let you download five daily. (Debussy never dreamt that l’après-midi d’un faune would become a tech joke.)

Michael Gilleland believes it was coined by Ezra Pound (”It occurs in one of the Pisan Cantos, dated 1948″). I wonder if the Spanish-speaking peoples, who have considerable experience in the field, may not have been first. José Ortega Munilla’s Chispas del yunque were published in ABC 1920-2, and in GBS’ useless snippet view he [...]

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 [...]

Over at Amigos del Circo.

Check out some local talent (@Museu d’Història de la Medicina de Catalunya) over at Morbid Anatomy. (Via Tecnología Obsoleta)

Étienne Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie (excerpt) is his novelised idealisation of Napoleonic nationalist totalitarianism: if not exactly a New Jerusalem, then certainly a New Paris, built around a New Seine, designed by its dictator, the Icar. This book and its hype led hundreds of families, mainly French, principally artesans (sez James Chastain) to doom and [...]

Some Civil War street plaques sound a dissonant note with respect to the official Popular Front “historical memory” dogma. St James’ chapel dates from the 17th century and, we are told by Sant Martí de Centelles council, “like the majority of churches in the Congost valley, was sacked and burned in 1936. Subsequently the chapel [...]