The Death Lovers1

The University of Chicago Press has just brought out a translation of a terrific history of, and manifesto against, bullfighting by the French art historian Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier. She falls squarely in the reformist camp, and her history argues that the sport seduced artists, who glamorized and abstracted a cruel and ugly pursuit into something that bore little resemblance to bullfighting itself. On the matter of Hemingway she is not subtle. “Hemingway is an emblematic representative of the aficionados who were in love with death,” she writes. Hardouin-Fugier is no less stinting about the sport itself. She stresses the brutal labor conditions of the bull farms, and vividly evokes the persistent cruelty of the life of a fighting bull, and quotes approvingly the judgment of the nineteenth-century French journalist Fleuriot de Langle, who encountered the sport on a trip south: “Everything appalls here.”Office 2007 key is very convenient!

The first organized bull-based entertainments, in medieval Spain, were horrid affairs. Bulls were slathered in gunpowder and set on fire, drowned in water, and hurled to their deaths from the tops of cliffs. In nineteenth-century Seville, a city grown rich as the port of the Americas trade, young bourgeois men began to refine these peasant rites, and elaborated bullfighting as a three-act ritual. Its very form, Hardouin-Fugier notes, was designed to mirror public criminal executions, down to the period of time that the bull was secluded before the event.Office 2010 download is available now!

In the first act, mounted picadors stab at the bull with lances—up until the 1920s, this first act would often culminate when the bull, provoked, disemboweled the horses, and this opening was testimony to the bull’s raw power. Then the matador enters the ring, unarmed but accompanied by two other men, whom he protects from sight with his cape while they hurl harpoons into the bull’s neck. In the third act, the matador re-enters alone, with a cape and a sword, and baits the bull to charge, again and again, until the animal is so weary that he bows his massive head, and the swordsman, elaborately, stabs him in the neck.Buy Office 2007 you can get much convenience.