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Asks Mr O’Brien: “[A]re foreign funding agencies getting any smarter about how to get more of their countries’ literary works translated into English? The answer is “not much,” or not at all. The country that has made this easier, for Dalkey Archive at least, is Japan. Other countries are on a kind of cusp: Romania, […]

–Hola, buenos días, ¿tienes ex-votos?
–Yo nada de botos señor, pero la suegra se ha dejado hacer las domingas y están bastante bien.
//
Later, someone is getting on the bus driver’s nerves. So:
–¡No me toques los botones!

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 […]

San Jordi in Barcelona, and millions of females who would be perfectly happy eating hay are receiving roses from males who have problems reading a football shirt, never mind the book of 500 Catalan jokes they will get in return for their floral investment. We ecolefties disincline naturally from needlessy fucking up Lake Victoria and […]

Raquel Meller, the most successful Spanish artist of the 20th century, struggling with pitch and pace in 1914:

Sara Montiel, who made her name in the 50s singing old Raquel Meller songs, only much better:

Rudolph Valentino, who would have struggled to compete with barnyard animals had films not been silent:

Maybe the X Factor isn’t so bad […]

Coverage of the Barcelona water crisis in yesterday’s Vanguardia was a standard victimist litany:

Our consumption per capita is low compared to other cities.
We have reduced consumption per capita significantly
It is like SO unfair that we’re all going to have to roll around in sand to get clean this summer.

I think the comparative stats quoted are […]

Latin American, actually, but you could have fooled me. Apparently (via), according to Mendoza/Montaner/Llosa:
The perfect idiot’s political tutelage included, in addition to connivings and resentments, a mixture of the most varied and confusing ingredients. First, of course, there is a lot of the Marxist vulgate from his university years. In those years, various introductory-level Marxist […]

Brief for Barcelona council
Eduardo Chillida sold us a “sculpture” called In praise of water/Elogi de l’aigua/Elogio del agua. In fact it is clearly nothing of the kind. It is a poorly-built orange-peel hydraulic grab, of the type used in quarrying. That explains why he had it put in the old quarry at Creueta del Coll. […]

A little experiment. Please tell me:

Bar / restaurant / hotel name
Street address, including number
Price (if there are different prices for bar/table/terrace, please specify)
Any other comments

Responses for as many establishments as you want:

Your email:

Bar name:

Bar address:

Café con leche price:

Comments:

Ferran Mascarell said a couple of months back that
Frankfurt perseguia tres objectius: millorar la presència de la literatura catalana en el món, entendre el paper fonamental de l’edició catalana amb els seus cinc segles d’història al darrere i ensenyar al món l’existència d’una cultura forta, plena i integral. El primer objectiu suposo que ha funcionat, […]

The Catalan government continues to claim that public use of Catalan was prohibited during the dictatorship, but everyone sensible now agrees that this was not so, and that publishing in Catalan–which is what we are interested in today–was never banned.
Xavi Caballé today posted several lists estimating numbers of publications in Catalan (where?) for some […]

The window display is so abundant that it’s difficult to see inside, so it might have been the butcher himself singing this morning in the shop at Asturias 47, Gracia, Barcelona.

Call me whatever you want, but that’s one flight we won’t be on tomorrow.

My/Miss Tits, where I buy all my lingerie:

I hope one day they’ll bring out a catalogue.
No idea what’s up with Bambi’ss Golosinas

Whirling brooms sweep bits of newspaper into a vacuum zone under the truck, whence they are pumped to the bin:

Driving lesson:

All is well and good in the house of Huaira.net and other quackshops in Barcelona in general and Gracia in particular, where Latins have rhythm, Africans have tribes and, of course, Yankeelandia has racists. This Brit admits to a tweak of vergüenza ajena.

Pilates Reformer sounds interesting: an obscure religion in which the biblical figure […]

Apparently there is a multi-ethnic casa de barrets (hat-house, from the number hanging there) at the top of the John Lennon Musical Garden–there hasn’t been any music there since people used to pop outside the city walls to have a crap:

Here’s the pricelist:

Argentines: 80€
Blacks: 30/60€
Catalans: 50€
Romanians: 30€
Columbians: ?
Ecuadorians: 25€
Pigs, bitches, cocksuckers, whores in general, etc: […]

“Neighbours and neighbouresses, this man injured a woman at knifepoint with the intention of raping her. We don’t want rapists in this neighbourhood [Gracia, Barcelona] or anywhere.” What am I meant to do if I meet him? Kneecap him?

None of the evangelists mention San José, electrician:

Here’s a lamb emerging from the tower blocks with which urban planners chose to blanket the lower half of the old market square, which has been jacked up to cover a huge underground carpark:

All on this walk.

I’ve spent the past half hour helping a milliner source sinamay, the principal material used in the confection of hats. It is made using small quantities of silk and the fibres of the abacá, a species of banana from the Philippines. Joaquín Martínez de Zúñiga (Estadismo de las Islas Filipinas, researched 1803-5) writes that the […]

Meet the guys who make the shirts you buy in Gracia on Saturday afternoons.

From George Ticknor’s superb History of Spanish literature
… a Gothic remnant fled from the Moors into the Alpine Asturias, carrying with them race, name, creed, language, and country—scotched but not killed. In that rocky school, and amid storms and war, the infant Spanish language—eldest child and heir to the Latin—was slowly brought up; seven […]

Bizet (2006), by Jaume Plensa (Barcelona, 1955), which went for around €12K + 20% government commission at Brok the other day:

Hypotheses:

Mr Plensa, a covert musicologist, has discovered extraordinary connections between Hector Berlioz, master of the grand and the imperial, and author of the works listed, and Georges Bizet, who dabbled in local colour several decades […]

Orhan Pamuk: Yes, until I was 30 I didn’t earn a single kopek, and I lived at my divorced mother’s house. I lived the strange life of a crazy boy who might one day become a writer. My friends had real jobs. I just wrote, and I could never get published. I was so ashamed, […]

An amply dimensioned gypsy lady is vending six small cacti in pots and two bunches of cut chrysanths outside the municipal market building. An impeccably dressed faux-blonde pija approaches.
–Three cactus for five euros! lovely flowers! three lovely cactus for five euros! lovely…
–I want three cacti, that one, that one and that one.
–That’ll be ten euros, […]

This old bar in Badalona appears to be named after someone who doesn’t have a second surname or a business partner (there’s no room for a second word, so it can’t have been painted out) but who uses the conjunction anyway. I don’t see what’s wrong with being a brazen lover of conjunctions. They are […]

Apparently if you go to the Barcelona real estate trade fair and say you want to buy a parking space, they’ll throw in a free flat. If you can get a mortgage. (Of course, the sector is not in collapse. That only happens in other countries.)

“Much has been said on the subject but it is still a little known fact outside of Barcelona that it’s music scene is seriously ill. Years of neglect, conservatism and lack of investment has left this supposedly cultured modern city with a big hole where it’s grass roots live music scene should be. You’d expect, […]

“Special offer: leg of jamón serrano and mountain bike, 130€” For 135€ they could have included a rucksack so you could cycle away with the ham on your back.

Barcelona’s biggest flea market is relatively well policed, so most bikes and other stolen goods end up in unofficial markets on street corners across town. This rare bird, a lady’s Juncker originally purchased from Engelenwyck in Maastricht, was being sold this morning at the Encantes:

You can tell it’s stolen because while the the bike and […]

Ian Llorens–who is only slightly mad, and there’s nothing wrong with that–is back. Here to celebrate is a photo of the front of the excellent Picó Lloréns family coffee and sticky things chain store in Albacete:

Hoards of Catalan and Valencian merchants are to be found throughout provincial Spain, helping provide a more sensible explanation for […]

Sin mirarlo de cerca compro un candado de combinación @ 9,65€ en Ferretería Pablos (dueño Domingo Pablos), Provença 504, 08025 Barcelona, NIF 07734406N. Al salir de la tienda veo que el paquete está cerrado con celo, y al sacar el candado descubro que ya ha sido utilizado sin notar la nueva combinación. Vuelvo inmediatamente a […]

‘It is said that on inaugurating the great ENSIDESA steel concern, Franco exclaimed, “And to think that this cost nothing more than two kilos of paper…”‘ (Manuel Ortínez, Una vida entre burgesos. Memòries (1993)) How can people still get so worked up about a vulgar thief?

– I haven’t brought the component I need. I’ll come back tomorrow, but I’ll bill you now for today.
– But you haven’t done anything.
– Sorry, company policy.
– OK, give me the bad news.
– Right, that’s 20€ travel and one hour’s labour @ 35€, 55€ plus VAT.
– But you’ve only been here five minutes.
– Sorry, company […]

Just out of interest, I emailed an advertiser on Loquo.com similar to this one. He has replied:
Thanks for your email and it is my gladness to hearing from you.I am Gandy […],the owner of the house you are making enquiry of.Actually I resided in the house with my family,such as my wife and my only […]

One of the things that shocked me about the primitive exchange I came across in Binéfar four years ago was that, 300 years after the Japanese started using forward contracts for rice and 150 years after the spread of rail communications through the American West laid the basis for futures trading on the Chicago exchange, […]

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 […]

Charles Butler is doing some really interesting work down in Jaén. Check out the interview he did with an enterprising manufacturer called José Vico in Orcera. Orcera is a macho, conservative town that I once found to be distinctly scary, but Mr Vico is marketing a range of personal care products including a “lip balm, […]

A rebujito is a dry sherry (manzanilla, fino) or occasionally a white wine to which fizz (lemonades, …) has been added, typically in a ratio of 1:2, in order to give you a head-start on the alcohol. This is the lite version of whichever British drink it is that has you knock back a third […]