Marie-Noëlle Drouet (1947- )

'Tous les enfants ont du génie sauf Minou Drouet', as Cocteau said. More information here.

Engelsina Sergeyevna Cheshkova (1928-2004)

The youthful face of the Buryat-Mongol ASSR. More information (in Russian) here.

Mamlakhat Akberdyevna Nakhangova (1924- )

Shock-worker of the Tajik cotton harvest. More information (in Russian) here.

Sean Bonney

He's coy about his age (early forties?). A wikipedia page is here. The reason I like him this morning, an interview, is here.

There are Men Outside my Window

My work accompanied by the surprisingly melancholic sound of spoken Romanian.

José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913)

More information here. A little belated, but, ¡Feliz Día de los Muertos!

Yeah, William Empson, I'm talking to you. Outside, now.

Transhumance

Jesús Garzón, an environmentalist, has spent a lot of effort reviving the old custom of transhumance (moving flocks from summer to winter pastures) in Spain. One of the traditional transhumance paths runs, funnily enough, through the centre of Madrid (when I say 'traditional', I mean, dating back to 1250 or so, when running sheep through the centre of Madrid wasn't as odd as all that). The shepherds pay 25 maravedíses (the word has three plural forms; I am using the one the RAE judges 'most vulgar'; the others are maravedís and maravedíes) for the privilege. More information here. The upshot of this is that the centre of Madrid was today filled with livestock. I was too lazy to follow the sheep droppings and horse dung all the way to the Plaza de Cibeles, so I set up shop outside the Plaza Mayor, and waited to see what came past. What came past was, mostly, sheep:








Here's a separate section on what we might call 'brand identity', if we were less funny than we in fact think we are:







And here are two photos of shepherds on horseback using mobile phones:


And finally, a horse:

All in all, a fun way to spend a morning.

Wombat News

Ridiculously cute baby wombat footage. Even as a baby, he's quite a chunker.

Poetry Reviewed

Oh look! I'm going to be famous and have groupies and live in a bathtub full of champagne!