spain – Page 82 – don't confuse the narrator

tall tales

Esperanza Aguirre, the presidenta of the comunidad de Madrid who described herself as “el verso suelto dentro del poema” has come up with another quotable phrase: “Yo no hablo cuando llevo zapatos planos.” – “I won’t make a statement when I’m wearing flat shoes.”

Most women are familiar with the concept of getting dressed and putting our make-up on before making an important phone call, and I guess this is much the same thing. The problem is the psychological reasoning behind it.
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prevention is better than cure?

This caught my eye en route to the village this morning:

Sociedad de Prevención de Fraternidad — What about igualdad & libertad?

It was on the side of a lorry parked down by the river. Muprespa are some kind of mutua de accidentes, but I don’t think the slogan reads quite the way they want it to.

don’t confuse the slaughtered pig

list of search phrases — blog standard searches

WordPress – which is where this blog is hosted – provide statistics so bloggers can see how many readers they have and what brings them to the site.

I’m intrigued by the readers who arrive from search engines looking for specific things.

Or, more accurately, I’m intrigued by the things they are looking for. The image on the left shows the most popular search strings from a couple of days ago.

The variety of ways that people think of for searching for the same basic idea fascinates me. But, after all, if there’s more than one way to kill a cat, there’s probably more than one way to slaughter a pig.
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house of cards

The second image that I wanted to talk about from my conversation with the poet Joan Margarit dealt with the writing process. (See yesterday’s post for the first.)

Joan described how the poet often writes early drafts of a poem to include more than is needed. We cram stuff in just to see if it fits. Subsequent drafts entail removing bits carefully, like pulling out cards one by one from a card house.

When the structure comes tumbling down, you know you’ve found the point at which you should have stopped.
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last year’s cat

I said the next post would be more about poetry, but if it is, this page is going to begin to be very boringly text-heavy. So here’s a quick seasonal picture to brighten it up:

The photo was taken last year and this cat is no longer with us. The rest of the semi-feral family are doing exactly the same with this year’s leaves, though.