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Tuesday, August 5, 2025

Soria Olmedo

 I got two short books from Spain on Lorca's theater and poetry by Andrés Soria Olmedo. He is a top Lorca guy and I agree with what he says. Each chapter is short.  It is a very basic introduction on some level, fruitfully read by those new to Lorca, but also has ideas I hadn't thought of, but with which I agree. For example, he points out the "documentary" was an avant-garde form when Lorca used that word to describe La casa de BA. 

 I rarely disagree with Andrés, Christopher Maurer, Andrew Anderson, or Melissa Dinverno.  If I do, I probably would think I am wrong! (But I do disagree with Ian Gibson a lot of the time.)

When I say "Misunderstanding Lorca," then, I think I am in the mainstream, but that there are other tendencies that persist. 

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I had to look up the word "high-brown" and it told me it was from 1911. It gives the first known use of documentary in this sense as 1935! Soria Olmedo gives it as 1926 (I'm not sure in what language) and Bernarda Alba is 1936.  

I looked up some words from my birth year, doofus, golden oldies, cyborg, hair gel, keep-away, meet and greet, soul food, stink eye. 

Other words from '35: Phillips screwdriver, riff, roman fleuve. virology.  This just means that the word first appeared in print in a given year, as far as anyone's been able to discover. The word in most cases had to exist before it is found in print. I had no idea soul food was so recent. 

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