Word: bullfights
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...most spectacular features are the handsome, full-page color pictures, closely correlated with the maps. With a turn of the page, the reader gets a quick glimpse of what the mapped terrain really looks like. For Spain, for instance, instead of the customary travel-poster view of a bullfight, there is only one huge photo, spread across two pages-a memorable view of miles of rolling red earth planted with olive trees. Half a dozen postcard-size shots could have been crammed into the space, producing nothing more than a sheaf of postcards...
...observers it suggests a stadium, to others a brooding oyster or a flying saucer. "I can't decide whether it looks like it just got here or like it's just about to leave," muttered one viewer. Another critic grumbles that it is "too small for a bullfight, too large for a cockfight...
Just as the bullfight affords ordered release for the latent ferocity of Spain, bicycle racing brings Gallic veto worship to near ecstasy each spring and summer. It reaches its peak with the Tour de France...
...raise the Code Hero to something like tragic dignity, there had to be the risk of death. From Fossalta on, Hemingway had death as an obsession; the bullfight gave it to him esthetically, as a ritual, with order and discipline. In Death in the Afternoon, he states his tragic creed flatly: "There is no remedy for anything in life." His Winner Takes Nothing; his lovers lose all. His fictional stages are strewn with corpses. In To Have and Have Not, there are twelve, which compares favorably with the Elizabethans. Nemesis, in the Hemingway tragedy, is bad luck. "I was going...
...writer: "Someone said: 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know." Through his books, Hemingway is "that which we know" of World War I, the Lost Generation, the mystique of the bullfight, the Spanish Civil War. One can learn all of this without knowing Hemingway, but once having read him, one can never see these subjects again without some angle or tint of his vision. His best books exist at that rare level at which literature becomes experience...