User:KForeman/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “the novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.”Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).

The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanis, we say: “Vaya usted a saber,” which is not far from“Go figure.”

===Works Cited===

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 Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “the novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.
+Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.”Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
+The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanis, we say: “Vaya usted a saber,” which is not far from“Go figure.”
 ===Works Cited===