User:KForeman/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete corrida de toros.”They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges” (1). The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose.Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

===References===

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 The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete corrida de toros.”They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).
+Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges” (1). The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose.Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.
 ===References===