Category Archives: Spanish

Animals in Chicago

November 6, 2013 It seems right that the theme this year for the Chicago Humanities Festival should be “Animals: What Makes us Human.”   This city, after all, used to be called (and maybe is still called) hog butcher for … Continue reading

Posted in Americas, Animals, Atlantic, Diaspora, Environmentalism, Ethnicity, indigenous communities, Race, Spanish, World history | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

On Philip Levine’s “Salami”

“Stomach,” the seat of our most basic, precognitive desires (hunger) and responses (the “gut reaction”), aptly opens a stanza rife with the smells and flavors of Spanish cuisine. But if the stomach is the logical destination of the food being … Continue reading

Posted in contemporary poetry, Food in literature, Global South, Mediterranean, Spanish | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Ntozake Shange, Alice B. Toklas: What Cooks Know

January 23, 2013 “The first effable gazpacho was served to us in Malaga,”  Alice notes.   She and Gertrude Stein would also find “entirely different but equally exquisite” versions of the that soup in Seville and Cordoba, cities once under Islamic … Continue reading

Posted in African-American literature, Cities, Contemporary novel, Diaspora, Ethnicity, Food in literature, Global South, Greek, Islam, Mediterranean, Middle East, Polish, Spanish | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Jack Kerouac: Mexico City Blues

October 3, 2012 “The immense triangular arc from New York to Mexico City to San Francisco”: Jack Kerouac writes in The Dharma Bums. After two publishers turned down On the Road in quick succession, Kerouac went to Mexico in a … Continue reading

Posted in African-American music, Americas, Arts communities, Cities, Experimental poetry, Genre, Global South, jazz, Latin America, lyric, Media, mexico, Modernist poetry, Music, peripheral networks, Publishers, Spanish, Twentieth century literature, YouTube videos | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Spanish Civil War: Hughes and Hemingway

July 4, 2012 The Beinecke Library doesn’t have a great Hemingway Collection (most of his material is at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston), but I did find a rare photo, taken in Madrid in 1937, Hemingway with Langston Hughes, … Continue reading

Posted in Africa, African-American literature, Arabic, Caribbean literature, collaboration, Cuba, Cuban poetry, Ethnicity, Global South, Islam, Latin America, Letters, Libraries, Modernist poetry, Newspapers, peripheral networks, Spanish, Translation, Twentieth century literature, world literature | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Hemingway’s Four Wives

June 27, 2012 Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Matha Gellhorn, Mary Welsh — I sometimes think of them as punctuation marks to the writing.  And yet a good chunk of world history seems written into these marriages. Hadley was in Paris … Continue reading

Posted in Americas, Caribbean literature, Cities, Cuba, Global South, Latin America, museums, Nobel Prize, Spanish, Twentieth century literature, world literature | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

Oceanic Archives, Hong Kong University 2012

June 5, 2012 At least I’ve heard Elizabeth DeLoughrey before.   She’s been working on this stuff for years, it’s always a pleaure to get a new installment — in this case, the ocean in danger of being reterritorialized by “seasteading” and … Continue reading

Posted in Americas, Arabic, Chinese art, Christianity, Cities, collaboration, Creole, Diaspora, Ethnicity, Islam, mexico, Nineteenth-century literature, oceans, peripheral networks, print medium, Spanish, World religions | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Two Toledos

April 25, 2012 I’m on my way to Toledo, I told people.  Ohio, not Spain, I added.  Then I found out that the two are in fact sister cities. The association began in the 1920s when University of Toledo President, … Continue reading

Posted in Arabic, architecture, Classics, Educational institutions, epic, Islam, Midwest, mixed races, Spanish, Translation, Universities, world literature, World religions | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 20 Comments

Wallace Stevens, amigo of Cuban writers

April 18, 2012 Wallace Stevens and Cristina García?   Not the most obvious pairing.  Yet it is Stevens’s poems that remained on García’s desk throughout the writing of Dreaming in Cuban, giving the novel its epigraph. And for Stevens, Havana is … Continue reading

Posted in Caribbean literature, Comparative literature, Cuba, Global South, Latin America, Letters, Modernist poetry, peripheral networks, Spanish, Translation, Twentieth century literature, Universities, world literature | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments