anythingarian bubbles and troubles from the land of the fretting nun
/ kalebeul / category / of poets / max aub /
Were Zapatero to read the Bible as thoroughly as we Carpathian Independents, he’d be in a better position to understand the significance of the first photo-album of his glorious Alliance of Civilisations: the crowds sent to die in a desert in connivance with Morocco, the stigmata on the hands of those who make it over […]
Seeing hordes of plump Barcelonans engaged in public Tai-chi–imagine Jackie Chan on lard–and reading of the dreadful internal purges inflicted by Johannes Itten–who seems to have believed himself a Tibetan monk–on Bauhaus students before the parties started, I remembered that I was going to translate a bit more Aub’s Campo cerrado. So here, at top […]
“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 […]
One of the surprises of Sergio Vila-Sanjuán and Sergi Doria’s Passejades per la Barcelona literària (“Walks in literary Barcelona”) is that it ignores Max Aub, whose Campo cerrado, the first part of a six-volume account of the war, is probably the best fictionalised version of the period leading to the events of July 1936 in […]
Mark Liberman is being nasty to our beloved intellectuals, most of whom we manage to ignore most of the time. His frustration may arise from a misunderstanding of the role of the intellectual in European society, which is something like that of a Catholic bishop in the States. I think I recall somewhere in Campo […]
Check out and contribute to Joan Ducròs’ compilation of literary extracts based in Barcelona (via Carles Mirò). It includes inexplicable exclusions from a similarly themed book I read recently (eg Max Aub), and I’m sure it will shortly add great stuff like self-confessed con-artist Jan Cremer’s encounter with the Guardia Civil and the prostitutes of […]
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Edward Fennell writes: “Looking ahead to the height of summer, I must commend to sunseekers a place at the specialist course that the City Law School is to run in Barcelona… Those who successfully complete the programme will be awarded a certificate of achievement. Those who fail to complete will earn a suntan (cum laude) instead.” Let there be no misunderstanding: the Il·lustre Collegi d’Advocats de Barcelona is an extremely serious organisation and as such puts on fine choral concerts in St Whatsisname on Rambla de Catalunya. (Merci MM)
Didn’t expect this one: “Not inviting Catalan authors writing in Spanish was, in my opinion, a big error. They should have positioned the Catalan culture as an open culture with excellent contributions in our mother tongue and also in other languages like Spanish. They could have even tried to find Catalans who write in other languages like English, French, German or Swedish (actually, there is afew of us) and give us a booth too. What about me?, I write in English, am I not considered Catalan culture?, apparently not, at list, for Carod-Rovira.” All I need now is for Joan Laporta to resign, and life could be a dream.
All praise to Lenox over at Spanish Shilling, who got the shot without getting his head punched. “During the second half, perhaps inspired by a herd of goats being led past by a dusty looking old shepherd and a couple of dogs, the Cabras rose to even greater efforts and by the final whistle (and a few sums performed by the referee), it emerged that the local boys had won the day with 30 - 26.”
Today in 1565 the True Cross was taken and dipped in the sea in order to assuage the great drought. Doesn’t look like that’s going to be needed this year after all. (Kalebeul’s History of Barcelona now does moveable feasts, although not quite in the way it would like. It is also unsure to do with generalised descriptions of moveable feastdays that are however very clearly rooted in a particular time. If this description of Pentecost published in 1848 is assigned to Pentecost, 2008 it makes no historical sense, but if it is plonked on Pentecost, 1848 it makes no ritual sense, since Pentecost is moveable. What to do?)
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