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 [...]

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 [...]

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

The Moors go ballistic

Cars and chariots of death.

In which I suggest that a Catalan folksong about a Hungarian princess also touches on the latter country’s foundation myth.

Curiously, Joan Amades noted that Catalan parents used to terrify their children out of going to lonely spots on windy days by telling them that the breeze carried in it a ferocious and sequestracious demon called Cul Pelat, Cul Pelé in French, for which the only reasonable English equivalent I can imagine is Shaven Arse. [...]

The Catalan Apache

“Shit, operating as the preeminent figure of self-alienation …, becomes a symbolic medium for questioning the place of the autonomous individual in new postcolonial societies.”

The sardana was encouraged by the Francoist state and suffered its greatest difficulties during the period of revolutionary anarcho-syndicalist and Stalinist control

Els de “no a l’esquerra” estan al carrer, doncs, li presento alguns (fragments de) crits del carrer del cançoner de Joan Amades (Barcelona, 1951) sobre la melodia d’un cànon anglès (MIDI) del segle disset:

La segona regla és del barretaire Joan Saluders de Barcelona (1918):
No et posis davant
de la ventisosa;
no et posis davant,
que et vindra un [...]