"Morante, born José Antonio Morante Camacho, is widely regarded as the leading 'torero de arte' of his generation, and deemed by some to be the greatest ever."

"Famed for his mastery of the cape and a style that blends risk, improvisation and aesthetic refinement, critics regularly attribute 'mysticism' to his best performances.... A recent El País commentary called one of his performances a 'virtuosic, stirring, surprising, baroque work — an act of improvisation by an artist who is not of this world, capable of hypnotising, with a supernatural ability entirely alien to modern bullfighting.' Another suggested it would not be surprising 'if a religion were founded in his honour.'..."

That's from The London Times., where it looks like this:

"Morante is a genius, a being born to make beauty dream; a revolutionary, a complete artist, pure feeling, brave, master of a prodigious technique and a dazzling capacity for inspiration."

Wrote Antonio Lorca, a bullfighting critic, quoted in a London Times article about Morante's sudden retirement, "Spain’s top matador bids farewell — with a snip of his scissors/After a dramatic final fight, the torero retires as bullfighting faces growing scrutiny and declining support among younger Spaniards."

Spain’s leading matador has stunned the bullfighting world by staging an unexpected farewell, symbolically cutting off his ponytail in the ring after a “historic” performance.... His departure marks the end of a unique career whose “classicism” and “mysticism” often exhausted critics’ superlatives....

Is it surprising that there is still bullfighting in Spain?

"One afternoon in August 1937, Ernest Hemingway strode into the New York office of a Scribner’s editor and slapped a book across Max Eastman’s face."

"He then 'bared his chest to Mr. Eastman and asked him to look at the hair and say whether it was false'... Next, he 'persuaded Mr. Eastman to bare his chest and commented on its comparatively hairless condition.'... Hemingway was simply very pissed off about a manhood-challenging review that Eastman had written for The New Republic four years earlier. Writing about Death in the Afternoon — a nonfiction account of the bullfighting traditions of Spain — Eastman repeatedly jabs at Hemingway, saying 'the only simple thing' about the book is Hemingway himself, and alleging that his literary style is the equivalent 'of wearing false hair on the chest.'"

From "The Review That Caused Hemingway To Slap the Critic in the Face with a Book."

Nice picture at the link of Hemingway sucking in his gut and looking in the mirror at his bare torso... bear torso.

No one speaks of hairy chests as the mark of manhood anymore. I watch baseball games and mute that commercial for a nose-hair trimmer that the male model uses not only in his nose and on his ears and at his nape but also on his chest. A dinky battery-powered hair trimmer on his chest.

And of course, no one admires masculinistic writers who stride into the offices of publishers and slap critics in the face with books. I doubt if it was ever admirably manly to behave like that. The verb "slap" gives it away. Well, at least he strode. He didn't slink or sidle, which is, perhaps, how today's male author would approach a publisher.

By the way... who was Max Eastman? He turns up in what might be one of your favorite books, F.A. Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom":

It is pathetic, yet at the same time encouraging, to find as prominent an old communist as Max Eastman rediscovering this truth:

“It seems obvious to me now — though I have been slow, I must say, in coming to the conclusion — that the institution of private property is one of the main things that have given man that limited amount of free-and-equalness that Marx hoped to render infinite by abolishing this institution. Strangely enough Marx was the first to see this. He is the one who informed us, looking backwards, that the evolution of private capitalism with its free market had been a precondition for the evolution of all our democratic freedoms. It never occurred to him, looking forward, that if this was so, these other freedoms might disappear with the abolition of the free market.” [Max Eastman, “Socialism Doesn’t Jibe with Human Nature,” Reader’s Digest, July, 1941, p. 39.]

Slow. Maybe he needed a good slap in the head with a book. Please, no violence. Slap somebody in the head with a book today only metaphorically. And — late clue to Hemingway —  "wearing false hair on the chest" was a metaphor. I hear the ghost of Hemingway — metaphorical ghost — saying "Fuck metaphor!" — "fuck" being, of course, another metaphor. Man and metaphor. It's a tricky business.

ADDED: That reference to Reader's Digest (where Eastman published his "Doesn't Jibe" piece) in the context of hitting somebody with a book got me thinking about Bob Dylan's "Motorpsycho Nightmare":

Well, he threw a Reader’s Digest
At my head and I did run
I did a somersault
As I seen him get his gun...

It's the old farmer who tries to hit Bob with the Reader's Digest and who (like the King of America) threatens him with a gun, and — resonantly enough — what enrages the old farmer is Bob's statement "I like Fidel Castro and his beard." Now, that doesn't mean Bob Dylan is a communist. Bob just needed to come up with something to say that would strike the farmer as "very weird" because he wanted to get thrown out. We all know Bob Dylan is right wing.

"The bull’s horn pierced the fighter’s lower jaw and came out through his left eye socket."

But 5 months later, Juan José Padilla is back in the ring.

Padilla says "I’m here to promote bullfighting and not to get involved in politics," but it's a big political fight in Spain:

Since 2007 and the start of the financial crisis, bullfighting has come under pressure in Spain because of public subsidy cuts, slashing the number of fights by more than a third. Catalonia stopped bullfighting in September, after its regional Parliament voted to ban it.

But in November, the conservative Popular Party, led by Mariano Rajoy, returned to power after almost eight years of Socialist government. Mr. Rajoy is himself an aficionado of the sport and his party has long spearheaded efforts to enshrine bullfighting in the national cultural patrimony.

How do you feel about bullfighting in Spain?
	It's barbaric and should be banned.
	People can disagree, but at least don't subsidize it, especially during a financial crisis.
	It's fine: part of the culture, it irks Socialists, and the bull has a fighting chance.
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