At present, I am a vegetarian. I also admit to a certain pacifist streak. That said, I was not always that way (well, maybe not the pacifist part). When I nineteen years old, I went to Spain, deeply under the spell of Ernest Hemingway. The Sun Also Rises was my favorite book and had been for several years, during which I read it at least once a month. If you have ever read The Sun Also Rises, the climax is centered around the bullfights that are one of the highlights of the Feria of San Fermin in Pamplona.

So naturally, I attended more than half a dozen bullfights (corridas, to use the Spanish term, but I suspect that if I spent this entire blog calling them corridas, I would come across as even more pretentious than usual).

To aid my informal study of the topic, I picked up a copy Hemingway’s 1932 book, Death in the Afternoon. In addition to some stirring descriptions of particular bullfighters and bullfights, it also instructed the novice in elaborate rituals that surround the spectacle.

Well, that was a long time ago. Like I said, I’m vegetarian now. Besides which, I haven’t been back to Spain since I was 24 (I’m 36 now).

But, for some reason, I wanted to read about bullfighting. Specifically, I wanted to read Hemingway right about bullfighting.

So I picked up a late work by him called The Dangerous Summer about the summer bullfighting season of 1952. My good friend Ryan Leonard gave me a Barnes and Noble gift card as a get well present after my recent surgery. Most of it went to purchase Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money (a work I first read about in an essay by Fredric Jameson, collected in Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,  [which was a gift from my high school buddy, Matt MacKenzie] and have wanted to take a crack at it one of these days).  Let’s see how it looks to born again vegetarian.