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 [...]

James Howell, Epistolae Ho-Elianae: Familiar Letters Domestic and Foreign (1754):
I am now in Barcelona; but the next Week I intend to go on through your Town of Valencia to Alicant, and thence you shall be sure to hear from me farther, for I make account to winter there. The Duke of Ossuna passed by here [...]

Sylvain Gouguenheim’s ‘“Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel” (Editions du Seuil), while not contending there is an ongoing clash of civilizations, makes the case that Islam was impermeable to much of Greek thought, that the Arab world’s initial translations of it to Latin were not so much the work of “Islam” but of Aramaeans and Christian Arabs, [...]

Olympic torches on a Parisian bus reminded me of Josep Pla, smoking merrily away on oil tankers in the famous 1976 A fondo interview with Joaquín Soler Serrano:

Not having heard other recordings, I continue to wonder whether don José wasn’t playing up the accent for the occasion.

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 [...]

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 [...]

I omitted one feasible fraudulent etymology from the Viadós post because the etymon in question is little known and less read, even in his own country, whichever that was. Here he is anyway, in another anecdote from Cela’s late but frequently excellent A bote pronto:
Some 65 years ago, more or less, possibly more, when I [...]

Unusually, the Spanish entry is more complete than the English one, mentioning the numerous illegitimates he fathered in Yegen, so numerous, in fact, that it is said that he resisted returning for fear of finding more. Was their omission from South from Granada an editorial decision, or was that just the way the upper classes [...]

Here’s a slightly paraphrased anecdote from Ramon Miquel i Planas’ El llibreter assassí de Barcelona (1928), which his footnote seems to imply was taken from Le livre, vi, 131 (Paris, 1885):
Emile Girardin and Charles Latour-Mézeray are two young literary bohemians running round 1820s Paris. Girardin has just published a novel and is feeling fairly desperate [...]

We all know, don’t we, that riffraff is from
Middle English riffe raffe, from rif and raf, one and all, from Anglo-Norman rif et raf, rifle et rafle : Old French rifler, to rifle; see rifle2 + Old French raffler, to carry off (from raffle, act of seizing; see raffle1).
So, nothing whatsoever to do [...]

Here from Braudel (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II/El Mediterráneo y el mundo mediterráneo en la época de Felipe II) is some context for today’s Libro verde item on the fall of Barcelona to Juan II’s great beasts:
At the end of the fourteenth century, the Mediterranean belonged to its [...]

Daft slogans are, for tourists, the most visible evidence of Barcelona’s role as a Disneyland of absurd and forgotten ideologies. The success of the dominant ultra-nationalist caste in Catalonia in stamping out Spanish and non-standard Catalan from public services is clearly reminiscent of that of Mussolini’s lot in mid-1920s Italy with respect to regional dialects [...]

From El llibre de tres (“The book of three”):
Tres plers són en aquest món: beure en taverna, jaure en bordell e cagar en prat.
Or:
Three are the pleasures this world us doth yield: to drink in a tavern, to screw in a brothel, to $hit in a field.
The edition currently available of this late C14th parody [...]

There’s a good organ miscellania page here. The Sultan and I anecdote was one of the few useful pieces of information I knew as a child. The Spanish connection lies in the Novelda rock organ, of which more here, and the information that “Spanish organs of the 18th century include a number of mischievous sound [...]

It’s a commonplace that essential similarities exist between the programmes of the Catalan left and the Spanish extreme right (I’m thinking in particular of ERC and the various Falangist splinters): an apparently psychotic obsession with the nation and its symbols, a determination to impose an all-powerful state, and a willingness (nay, a desire) to use [...]

Mare de Déu Fumadora, Mother of God Smoker, is a local name used in Arenys de Mar on Catalonia’s Maresme coast for the day before yesterday’s feast of the Immaculate Conception, la Purísima. According to the much-maligned Jordi Bilbeny, this is the day when children were allowed to smoke by their parents (picture of kiddie [...]

I just read Beth Marie Kosir’s interesting paper on the British codpiece and thought I’d have a quick look through some Spanish stuff. The Hispanic bragueta (I guess it comes from the French braguette, which is actually not a combination of baguette and bragas, “knickers”) seems to have been used first (in the late 15th [...]

A little more reading (Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, Hispano-Arabic Literature and the Early Provençal Lyrics) suggests (possibly unjustly) that Wallada was famous not so much for her poetry as for being the caliph’s daughter and having poetry written about her by Ibn Zaydun. It’s a shame that in our enthusiasm to find ancient heroines inoffensive [...]

Unlike Carlos, I’m actually rather fond of Albacete, and not just because its ugliness is on a smaller scale than Birmingham’s. Although generally more energy tends to be devoted to damnation than to praise, I found out the other night, flicking through a book called Historia de la provincia de Albacete, that I’m not the [...]

Where arse turns up regularly in jokes, proverbs and stories, bollocks–cojones–in CORDE’s version of sixteenth century Spain seem to be confined to medical treatises and to a verse novel of quite extraordinary and possibly unsurpassed filth. The anonymous Carajicomedia (1519) consists of the adventures of the noble Diego Fajardo’s one-eyed trouser snake, which is said [...]

Vaguely re this, I was surprised to find that medieval Spanish local legal codes are thick with arse. Fueros sometimes proscribe face-arse contact and are generally quite stern about insertions of any nature, unless of course they form part of fun-for-all, legally sanctioned punishments. By the sixteenth century arsebanditry has become slightly more fun–unless, of [...]

Wondering on a London bus this morning about suicide bombers (why don’t we just get rid of shoelaces–damn fiddly, prone to blow up in one’s face–and acquire slip-ons?), I chanced on the following passage in Menéndez Pelayo’s Historia de los heterodoxos/History of the heterodox (1880; previous post):
During the tyranny of the Spanish king in Barcelona, [...]

In between pints of Summer Lightning I’ve been reading bits of Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo’s account of heresy in Spain, Historia de los heterodoxos españoles. Menéndez Pelayo does not allow himself the populist virulence of George Borrow’s anti-Papism, but one does have a delicious sense of scores being settled when he writes re Borrow’s dissemination of [...]

Glad to see the French are bemoaning the death of Cockney. There’s a lovely bit in George Borrow’s Romany Rye where he has moved into an inn in which
there was a barber and hair-dresser, who had been at Paris, and talked French with a cockney accent; the French sounding all the better, as no accent [...]

Xavier (check his crazy blog, Le dicon) in an interesting comment has introduced me to Jean-Pierre Brisset. Brisset is interesting because he anticipates Derrida (différance) by taking a a lexical trick that works only in French and using it as the basis for universal theory, despite most of us not having been blessed with an [...]

Two old people were arguing this afternoon under the memorial to Joan Amades on Calle Carmen in the Raval about whether the pigeons should be fed. The argument proceeded along roughly the same lines as in the 1950s Parisian skirmish recorded in Juan Goytisolo’s Señas de identidad (1966), in which the old man is determined [...]

Amando de Miguel notes the commonsensical notion that two people will tend to speak the language that supposes the least combined effort for them (all other things being equal), and proposes naming this law for his correspondent, Candela Zamora. You all know what a candela is, of course.
De Miguel refers in the same piece to [...]

Surprise has been expressed in circles, squares and other pleasingly simple geometrical arrangements of peapoles, that revolutionaries should want to destroy those who, according to Ken Livingstone and other prophets of the New Municipalism, are their nearest and dearest. What folly, my darlings!
We creaky reactionaries know that revolutions always destroy society (and often themselves) from [...]

“The Parallel has tree faces,” writes Max Aub in Campo cerrado, “day, night, and Sunday morning.” The Parallel–crammed with artistes and whores–was a key location in the rise of the anarchist gangsters for whom Orwell fought, yet the Church of England’s favourite anarchist seems to have missed it and various other crucial locations on the [...]

Last night someone passed me, and I speed-read, Entre el roig i el negre (previous ref), a historical novel that claims to be based on the memoirs of an anarchist gunman. As a novel it has little value. The expository device–documents found in an English flat relating to a mysterious Spanish Civil War past–will be [...]

A 16th century recipe you may not want to try at home.

Fine upstanding gentleman, prepare your great serpent to play the lovely Encarnación’s fandango.

Where did he get that vernacular?

Political repression and the relative positions in the league of FC Barcelona and Real Madrid

“On Ponent Street lived another woman known as the Queen because she was daughter of one of the Three Kings”

We just had a typically ill-informed discussion here about how Narcís Monturiol’s second submarine, Ictíneo II, worked. Robert Hughes’ Barcelona says that
for surface running, Monturiol decided to save the muscles of his crew and install a six-horsepower steam engine. But you could not run a steam engine underwater: it would use up all the oxygen [...]

I used to sing and play lead moon-whistle with a novelty orchestra which had somehow come to the understanding that when the drummer cried, “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Reggie Perrin!”, we would manoeuvre clumsily into a decrepit Jamaican shuffle of a type which would probably not have won the favour of Mr Marley. That was [...]

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

The Moors go ballistic

Frequently racist paranoia vis-à-vis “imperialistic cultures” like the “Anglo-Saxon and Germanic” (with particular reference to the former) has permeated political thought of most varieties here for a long time and has been particularly evident in the last year or so. Sometimes, however, conflicts of interest arise.
José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) was an elitist liberal and [...]