Wednesday, September 03, 2025

Monday, September 01, 2025

Beers & Books (425) – Victor Català: Solitud

I consider myself lucky.
Victor Català's ‘Solitud’, published in German in 2007, 
has ‘found its way’ into my library –
antiquarian, at a good price and remarkably well preserved. 
What a book!!

Victor Català
(11 September 1869 – 27 January 1966)

Sunday, August 31, 2025

August ending

Great effort, even greater delight for the palate ...

Thursday, August 28, 2025

Summer stories by Carme: Cave paintings at El Cogul

I look at what I have drawn. I like it. 
One day people will say: contemporary painting.
But much rather would I paint eight or ten billion of us,
along with flying lightning bolts
that bring death to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands; possibly all of us.
Plus famines, rapes, misery and violence.
And there are many other things I would like to draw – 
as a warning to those who will live after me.
But how do you paint stupidity, envy, greed and similar abstract concepts?
Ah, my contemporaries wouldn't understand it anyway.
And so I prefer to indulge in the joys of love... 
well aware that it will end badly if we continue to reproduce so unrestrained.

Saturday, August 23, 2025

Beers & Books (423) – Mercè Rodoreda: Short stories

La meva Cristina i altres contes
*
My Christina & Other Stories 
 

Mercè Rodoreda (10 October 1908 – 13 April 1983)

Thursday, August 21, 2025

Laughing Lhursday*

Fortune favours fools,
or as a German saying goes,
"Die dümmsten Bauern
ernten die größten Kartoffeln."
/
"The dumbest farmers
harvest the biggest potatoes".

Once again I feel relieved. 

* [For first time visitors]: Typo in the title? Nah. It's just that
I would not let a tiny T spoil an avantgardistic alliteration.

 

Sunday, August 17, 2025

Coffee time with Pavlova & Mr B

Pawlowa
or how to smuggle a donkey halfway around the world
*
Certainly neither the original title (‘The White Umbrella’)
nor the writer (Brian Sewell) would have piqued my interest.
Being sometimes a donkey myself, though,
I could not resist the German title. ;-)
For an enjoyable read ...

Mr B, a fifty-year-old Briton, is travelling with a television crew in Peshawar, Pakistan, to make a film about the country's history. When he sees a heavily laden donkey foal covered in wounds by the side of the road during a car journey, he decides not to take the flight back to London scheduled for the following day. Instead, he wants to walk to London with the young donkey mare, whom he names after the Russian ballet dancer Pavlova because of her long legs. With only the bare essentials, including a white umbrella from the London umbrella shop James Smith & Sons, the two set off.
Translated from the German Wikipedia entry.

Saturday, August 16, 2025

He says it for me

Escric per viure.
O bé al revés, tal volta:
visc per escriure. 

 Miquel Martí i Pol

I write for living.
Or vice versa, this time:
I live for writing. 

Friday, August 15, 2025

Friday is Skyday

Tonight, 30 or 40 swallows were hunting for their dinner.
But no matter how hard I tried,
I could never get more than four in one photo.
They are so incredibly fast.

 

Thursday, August 14, 2025

Laughing Lhursday*

Living room idyll
designed by granddaughter

* [For first time visitors]:

Typo in the title?
Nah. It's just that I would not let a tiny T spoil an avantgardistic alliteration.