Ah, but how long before it is rebuilt as a theme park? Plaza de San Felipe Neri is one of the most interesting examples of the latter in Barcelona. Only in the demolition of marginal and shanty towns have Spanish planners approached the rigour of the Chinese authorities. Half of the valley of Torre del [...]

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 [...]

Quite a lot of the Barcelona mapping at OpenStreetMap.org is already more detailed and reliable than some commercial products I’ve seen, although I briefly thought Plaça dels Angels had been mapped by skaters. Whatever happened to the UPC Barcelona mapping party?

Apparently it’s quite well-known, but I only found it this morning in HG Bohn’s A hand-book of proverbs (1855), in the household reading room:
To build castles in the air. Far castelli in aria.–Ital. The French say, Faire des chateaux en Espagne.
It is tempting although perhaps erroneous to believe that this derives from Frankish experiences with [...]

Generic Manu Chao-ist dumbagogy in Che Sudaka’s latest ¡uf!re, but a nice little Raval puppet theatre by Marta Pujol & Joan Picó:
Something with a bit more musical class (tho in playback) from pioneer Peret, Mataró-born and hence the only sensible reason why the genre is called rumba catalana instead of barcelonesa:

I sometimes wonder what would [...]

We say we’re anti-nuclear and then buy electricity from the French; we say we care about water conservation while doing everything possible to make Barcelona unsustainable; but if we’re going to keep on moaning about the fuel consumption of the unspeakable Yankees, at least we could end eco-Barcelona’s facking absurd ban on hanging washing to [...]

Nice story here about underpaid author Thomas Kohnstamm, who wrote his Lonely planet guide without going to Columbia. (Or did he go there and have to deal coke to survive? LD is characteristically confused.)
Guidebooks are so superficial, and information online so plentiful, that there’s actually no reason now why they shouldn’t be written from [...]

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: [...]

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 [...]

It hasn’t rained very much in Barcelona for quite a long time. You can see the filth awaiting this Renfe train as it passes the Fecsa power station heading south over the Besós.

This (thankyou, MM) is actually just about hair. Residents are to be ordered to drop the Croydon facelift and adopt the Barcelona mullet.

One of the few surviving 20th century walls in northeast Barcelona. I’d recognise it anywhere.

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 [...]

Mr. T. was struck with the number of lunaticks confined in the several provinces of Spain:

Emanuel del Mar, Nuevo guía para la conversacion, en español é inglés (1839, via GBS):
Una golondrina no hace verano. One swallow does not make spring.
Both spring and summer are used in both languages, but you’d kind of expect northward migration to take swallows to Spain in spring and then England in summer. Perhaps we don’t [...]

The other night I stayed with a neo-peasantist Catalan hippy couple living in a grace and favour masia in the hills, for which you and I and anyone else without the requisite ethnic badge would probably have to lay down something in the region of €750K. The guy, son of Andalusian barkeepers, agreed that affection [...]

Along with stuff like the banning of the sardana and of Catalan, this is another of the absurd lies told about the Franco regime by Catalanist victimists and by those they manage to con, typically left-leaning Brits and Americans. Here, for example, is the Lonely Planet entry on Barcelona, which is presumably taken seriously at [...]

The university tower:

The convent church over at the Spanish castle district:

A rather superior old folks’ home:

I’m a bit ambivalent about straight lines. Flying into Amsterdam the order below makes me want to weep, but I wouldn’t mind living in the third of these.

Urquhart, The Pillars of Hercules, Or, A Narrative of Travels in Spain and Morocco in 1848: “I observed, on a placard, the two following signs of progress and civilization, in titles of new works: ‘The defender of the fair sex,’ and ‘The Ass, a beastly periodical.’ The words were ‘Il Burro, periodico bestial.” Re the [...]

Genetic data doesn’t actually suggest that the Turks brought it with them and then rebranded themselves as Etruscans in order to sell into European markets.

The sheep and goats above have just arrived back in Plan from low pastures to spend the summer in the mountains, rather like schoolchildren coming back from a language exchange. Joaquín Costa’s Colectivismo agrario en España (1898), available in full on Corde, contains a number of accounts of communal herding arrangements in the Pyrenees:
The town [...]

This is the anjova (Pomatomus saltatrix) caught off Galicia. According to Europa Press, fisherman Pablo Oliver got in touch with the Spanish National Research Council/Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas and the Institute of Oceanography/Instituto Oceanográfico to tell them of his discovery and to enquire as to why this fish was in waters outside its known [...]

If you’ve left the stable door open then lunchtime is not a particularly good time for a free wash and brush-up in a bar. This can happen to the best of persons, but most of the gents one meets, struggling in cashpoints or on streets in Barcelona, netherwear clutched carefully at knee-height, are smackheads. [...]

I’ve republished my OCR-ed and translated version of sections of a Barcelona municipal almanac from 1848 here. It’s still in a very basic form, but at least the PHP doesn’t go apeshit any more. I’d like to think of a way to include the texts relating to movable feasts, and Catalan translations and suggestions would [...]

I’m unreliably informed that Real Zaragoza star Ewerthon Henrique de Souza’s dad couldn’t spell Everton rather than Erewhon (buy USA/UK). Not that anyone gives a feck, but by all means keep the tips flowing.

If only this had been written by an engineer and not a novelist.

Andrew Scull digs up and burns Foucault in the TLS:
Foucault’s account of the medieval period fares no better in the light of modern scholarship. Its central image is of “the ship of fools”, laden with its cargo of mad souls in search of their reason, floating down the liminal spaces of feudal Europe. It is [...]

With transportation delays of as much as six to nine months and very limited shipping capacity, this is surely a project less suited to MIT than to Correos, the Spanish postal service.

Check out these Russian scrapers. (Via BB; more Agbar here.)

Mmax says that, on February 14 1929, his great-uncle, Ralph Forte, was listening to Chicago police radio from the offices of AP when he heard some slightly unusual news from North Clark Street.
Apparently Mr Forte had just fled Italy after writing an article entitled “Everyone obeys Mussolini except the cats”. Can his welcome in [...]

Here, from Emil Helfferich (1878-1974)’s Südostasiatische Geschichten (Jever/Oldenburg, 1966), is an account of what happened to another German-speaker who made light of girlie-men:

Salvador Sostres & procreation

You’ve got to feel laugh at La Retaguardia which, in a piece on the hunger strike by illegals, describes Urdu as a “Pakistani dialect.” There are only about 20,000 mother- and second-tongue speakers in Barcelona, so it’ll take probably them a few more years to get it right.

Mark Liberman points to an article by Laura Durnford on the Radio Netherlands World Service site which describes how the C17th Fort Oranje on the Hudson River
and the town that sprang up around it, Beverwijck, was part of just one settlement within the Dutch colony of New Netherland. The other and more famous was New [...]

Recognising an urgent need, Barcelona’s excellent Institut Français has undertaken to explain love to the Catalans (translation Googlebotted for style, steam, and speed):

Condescending southerner David Green (he’s Manchester-based) has a piece on the Beeb listing the delights that await Rivaldo when he finally signs for Bolton Wanderers. What many people this morning find difficult to understand is why Rivaldo can’t be arsed to travel those extra 10 miles up the A666 to the Anchor Ground, home of [...]

Francesc Candel, Els altres catalans, “The other Catalans” (1964):
For some time the immigrants [to Catalonia], and specifically those from the south [of Spain], have been called “Koreans”. They are also called this in Bilbao and Avilés. It is curious that in Turin and Milan those who come from the south of Italy are also called [...]

There’s a good article in LaVa this morning by their man over the pond, Xavier Sala i Martín, in which he deplores the general tendency here to call one’s political opponents murderers. He goes on to point out that the attacks aren’t about Iraq but about a general hatred of the West and ends by [...]

The difficulty of interpreting intent in materials published in a different language and cultural context was one of the interesting facets of the case of the Fuengirola imam, convicted of publishing with malicious intent a manual on how to beat women without leaving scars. It’s not going to get any easier here once radio and [...]