User:KForeman/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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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.

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Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.”Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. The record of a war is not just El Loco’s crazy season, the record of a war is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t Amado—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

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 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.
+{{pg| 288 • T H E  M A I L E R  R E V I E W|a l l e n  j o s e p h s • 289}}
 Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.”Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. The record of a war is not just El Loco’s crazy season, the record of a war is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t Amado—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?