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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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