User:KForeman/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican toreros are highly inventive with the cape and with the muleta (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came to Spain in the 1960s, and his impossible pass with the muleta was intricate and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a gallicina and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican toreo does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the muleta as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amusing the specialist.

===Works Cited===

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 Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican toreros are highly inventive with the cape and with the muleta (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came to Spain in the 1960s, and his impossible pass with the muleta was intricate and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a gallicina and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican toreo does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.
+On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the muleta as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.
+For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amusing the specialist.
 ===Works Cited===