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 [...]

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: [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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.

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 [...]

The sports stars interviewed here by Pennsylvania’s Patriot-News confirm what every Dutch child knows already: watch television in your target tongue and you can skip those expensive and boring language classes. Different alphabets are another kettle of fish, however:

NRC Handelsblad, Holland’s most respected rag, says that the French commission that advocated banning the headscarf was strongly influenced by what it was told during a fact-finding trip to Holland in November. The two out of three members of the delegation contacted by the paper said they were shocked by the situation and in particular [...]

This suggests that it may not be as easy as I had thought to have myself declared a latter-day Celtiberian.

It may seem childish, but it did please me to discover that Doris Moreno Martínez was supervised for her thesis on the Inquisition in C16th Catalunya by one Ricardo García Cárcel. Having survived his encarcelación in these parts, Abenatar Melo escaped to Amsterdam where he wrote a verse version (1626) of the Psalms of David, [...]

Theatre that really sucks

I suggested to Mark Liberman the other day that the word Frank turns up in western Arabic in the C8th. A provisional apology is due because the first reference I’ve found in a hitherto brief search is not until the first half of the C9th, when ʻAbd al-Malik b Habīb (display problems?) of Granada uses [...]

“Definitely not for those with scrupples. “

New York heeft er 300, en de druk is zo moordend dat sommige Chinese verslaggevers een dagelijkse quota van 2000 karakters krijgen.

El nom de noi més popular a Amsterdam, La Haya, Utrech i Rotterdam és Moham(m)ed. La mort també està canviant, escriu La Vanguardia avui, i segons José Cornet, director de les pompes fúnebres municipals, el problema és l’espai:
Mohamed Chaib, presidente de la asociación cultural Ibn Batuta, dice que “nuestra norma dice que el difunto [...]

Call me a barbarian, but I honestly didn’t know that le Petomane was a Catalan trombonist, nor that he wound up running a biscuit factory. I would be fascinated to hear if Josep Pujol was related in any way to our Jordi.
Buy Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader:

Just a brief follow-up on the post dealing with the curse of the bratwurst/bratswurst, the frankfurt/frankfurter and the hamburger/hamburguesa/hembluguesa: the NYT today notes the increasing assimilation into the mainstream of Ridgewood’s German community. Says Elfriede Parthe, “Life is a journey, and you know what, nothing ever stays the same.” (In a separate contribution to this [...]

The joy of the poor is brief,
My friends, how soon it’s past!
Just when everything’s going so well,
The donkey breathes its last.

John Carlin, in a rejig of chunks of a 2002 article in El País, says that Barcelona, not Paris, is now Telegraph readers’ favourite city (where are the stats?). This has taken a while coming - the NYT did a head-to-head a couple of months back - but still: ouch. Here’s a more interesting (Spanish) [...]

Transblawg has a translation of the Berlin police report of the capture of a Nigerian fraudster practising the famous 419 fraud. There’s now a growing industry of people pitching for readership by publishing (probably fictional) accounts of how they responded. The Raving Atheist is still my favourite:
The Directors were immensely gratified that you are a [...]

It looks like the city’s Asian Festival is turning into an annual event. Last year’s was frighteningly embarrassing: marvel at the the profundity of the Japanese! and how spiritual the Tibetans are! (and the Indians too!). Chinese and Pakistani culture was in fairly short supply, which is strange given that the festival is located in [...]