I'm afraid it's goodbye.
But thanks for the memories...and thanks for reading!
After 14 years here and 832 posts, and my intro to online posting, it's all over because I've found someone new to share my life with! Well, you know what I mean...
Please join me now over on my new Substack page: https://bretthetherington.substack.com/
All my old blogposts are there so for nostalgia's sake we are not really parting are we?
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| Photo: https://www.corneliakraft.com/ |
When Nadia was running downstairs
from the 6th floor, doing up her dressing gown,
cursing the wind and her mistake
she came across the boy from door 4, floor 4
the one who never says good morning
She put the brakes on her crazy run
having seen the second floor was wet,
she was about to fall near the front door:
her slippers were loose
and she hadn’t found the money nor time
to go to the shoe-repairer
…her precious headcovering flew
and landed at Magda’s feet
the new postwoman, who took it and put it
with sound judgement on a parked motorbike.
Then Fatima, from the halal supermarket, fell
in love with its bright colours,
and although she didn’t wear it,
against her mother’s advice,
she took it thinking to give it
to her close friend Raissa,
who would never dare to go outside
without a hijab covering her hair.
And from the doorway, when Nadia sees
Fatima taking the headscarf off the motorbike,
and the great joy she had on her face
she gave up her claim on the very thing
that Karim, her husband,
didn’t know
was a gift from a clandestine love
with whom, years before,
in Morocco, Nadia had dreamt of a future.
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Tot just noranta segons
Mentre la Nàdia baixava l’escala corrents
des d’un sisè pis, cordant-se la bata,
maleint la ventada i el seu error;
es creuava amb el noi del quart quarta,
aquell que sempre li nega el bon dia;
la cursa boja frenava uns instants
veient el terra mullat de la planta segona;
ensopegava a prop de la porta d’entrada:
les sabatilles li anaven balderes
i no havia trobat el moment ni els diners
per dur al sabater...
...el seu objecte preuat voleiava
fins aterrar just als peus de la Magda,
la nova cartera, que amb molt bon criteri
el deixava damunt d’una moto aparcada.
Al moment la Fàtima, del súper halal
s’enamorava de la peça de roba
de colors tan llampants,
i malgrat que, desoint els consells de sa mare,
ella no en duia, la prenia pensant
regalar-la a la Raissa, l’íntima amiga
que mai no gosaria anar pel carrer
sense hijab cobrint-li els cabells.
I quan la Nàdia veu, des del portal,
la Fàtima amb el vel a les mans,
i amb quanta il·lusió aquesta se’l mira,
renuncia a reclamar el mocador
que el seu home, en Karim,
no sap que va ser el regal
d’un amor clandestí
amb qui, uns quants anys enrere,
al Marroc, la Nàdia somiava un futur.
2022
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| https://open.spotify.com/episode/01ogjKyUpngHPNpQMcuneG |
They wanted to stop the depopulation of the municipality... and they did it!
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| [Edited photo by Francisco Lomero] |
"In mid-June, an all-female independent group, Women for the Municipality of Angüés (AMPMA), [began] its second term leading the small Aragonese town of Angüés, Spain, after winning, for the second time, an absolute majority in the municipal elections of May 28, 2023. Their term of office is today's most unique political phenomenon in Spain's democracy...
The first thing they did when they assumed the legislature in 2019 was to eliminate the mayor's salary and remove the cell phones, Christmas bonuses, and Christmas dinners of councilors paid by the City Council: Now, the positions are completely voluntary, and this saved the locality about 12 000 euros per year. In addition, they reduced energy costs by installing solar panels in the Town Hall and changing the street lighting."
Read more from source at Global Voices here.
Japanese pictorial map of Europe from the year 1932.
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| [Illustration: Leonardo Berbesi] |
"The history of the dish begins with the persecution of the Jews in the Iberian Peninsula, during the 16th century.
Many of them ended up in England, taking the fried fish with them. It was a Sephardic dish that they used to eat on Fridays.
The secret was the use of oil, which sealed the flavours, made the flour crispy and the fish very tasty.
To those islanders accustomed to lard, frying in oil seemed revolutionary…’ Later we read: ‘…A Jewish fishmonger who emigrated from Eastern Europe, named Joseph Malin, was the first to come up with the idea, in 1860, of putting fried fish and potatoes together in his store in [London's] East End…"
Found at BoT but original source is here.
"I found Brett's very personal account of his travels through Spain a moving and very rewarding read.
His affection for the country and its peoples shines through and his encounters with the people he meets on his travels avoid caricature and shallow conclusions.
He is clearly still discovering aspects of the country he loves and enjoying the opportunity to complete the picture."
[Read the full Amazon reader review here.]
"For more than half a century, this unusual yet organic cross-pollination of genius remained an almost mythic artifact, reserved for collectors and scholars...
Random House commissioned surrealist kingpin Salvador Dalí (May 11, 1904–January 23, 1989) to illustrate the Carroll classic for a small, exclusive edition of their book-of-the-month series. Dalí created twelve heliogravures — a frontispiece, which he signed in every copy from the edition, and one illustration for each chapter of the book."
Read more and see more of the wonderful illustrations at source here.
https://www.nowness.com/series/constructed-views/stone-cut-la-sagrada-familia
I'm happy to say I'll be launching my non-fiction book,
"Slow Travels in Unsung Spain" at this unique independent bookshop:
Fahrenheit 451
(C/- de la Ribera, 8, [El Born] BARCELONA
[Metro: Barceloneta]
Friday, 3Oth June, 7.00-8.00PM.
We'd love to see you there!
(Look inside the book here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NJG91W7/ )
On the same day that the neighbouring region's new ultra right culture Minister is installed,...at a cafe in a coastal town in Catalonia a Black man is refused service by a waiter who racially insults him.
"In Barcelona I didn't have the impression that the absence of my father was definitive. I thought it could come at any moment. We saw his family, his parents, his grandmother...It was his homeland...".
A blog (in Catalan) on the childhood of the great writer in Barcelona.
"The festivity of the Maya comes from pagan rites and dates from the medieval age, appearing in ancient documents. It takes place every year in the beginning of May and celebrates the beginning of the spring.
Girls between 7 and 11 years old are chosen as “Maya” and should sit still, serious and quiet for a couple of hours in altars on the street decorated with flowers and plants and afterwards they walk to the church with their family where they attend a ceremony.
(All photos by Daniel Ochoa de Olza/AP Photo)" Source here.
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In the early 1900s, in Europe, the era of colonial expansion was in full swing and tribal art still interested only avant-gardists such as Henri Matisse or André Derain, founders of Fauvism. Before being caught up in African know-how, Picasso first set out to discover Catalan primitive art.
He made "a journey to the depths of Catalonia, where he discovered a medieval Iberian creation that strongly affected his technique," says Juliette Pozzo, in charge of Pablo Picasso's personal collection at the Musée national Picasso-Paris...
Negro art? Don't know! ", quipped Pablo Picasso to an art critic in 1920, in his own tone without laughter. The Iberian artist, born in 1881 in Malaga, Spain, nevertheless collected African, Oceanic, Hispanic and more broadly, extra-Western art objects. This is in any case what testifies the finds in his private collection and the images of his workshops, full of statuettes, tools, ornaments, masks, totems ...
Picasso was an experimental painter, both one of the most acclaimed and the most criticized of modern art, "for his ultra misogynistic side and very violent towards women," says Olivia Marsaud, head of visual arts at the French Institute of Senegal.
A little prodigy of drawing from the age of 14 who "could have been one of the greatest classical artists of the twentieth century," says Gilles Plazy, one of his biographers."
Read more from source here.
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That poverty [of choice] forever impoverished our culture and therefore our understanding of reality.
In our ignorant adolescence the budding literates had infected us from indifference to the scientific sages practiced by the vast majority of the highlights of humankind.
In the letters was fantasy, imagination, sensitivity, the spirit of rebellion; in the sciences, the methodical, the rigid, the roman, the proseic of a reality that any slightly sensitive person would find less interesting than the elevated world of arts, books and the music.
Just as I miss the music education I did not have, I also regret that the low quality of scientific education I received and then the sharp and absurd separation between sciences and letters do not allow me now to understand more deeply a culture without which it is not possible to understand the reality of things nor adopt an attitude of rationality in life.
Separated from each other, the two cultures of C. P. Snow are lost to eachother in their own dead end alleys."
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| [Raquel Acosta is one of Spain's most high-profile carvers (Credit: Josu Acosta)] |
