Despite my deep affection for the Surrealists, I had never before read the work of the New World’s greatest Surrealist – Aimé  Césaire.

For those who know nothing about him, this is the short version: He was born on the island of Martinique (then a French colony), studied and wrote in Paris in the 1930s (where he became close the Surrealist movement’s de facto leader, André Breton, who became a great advocate of Césaire’s writing), was a leader in the “Negritude” movement, and a prominent figure in Caribbean independence movements.

Notebook of a Return to the Native is a long poem about the isle of Martinique and the corrosive effects of French rule.

This was my first introduction to how the techniques of Surrealism could be applied to political aims. While many writers within the movement were involved in politics (Breton was active in left wing politics in the thirties and René Char was a soldier in the French Resistance in WWII), what I read was not explicitly political.

While Césaire will not replace Paul Eluard as my favorite poet of the movement, Notebook is unquestionably an inspiring read. It has the added bonus on containing a brief essay by Breton about his visit to Martinique and about Césaire.

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.