Last week I scooted through Curtis Sittenfeld’s new collection of short stories, Show Don’t Tell, and although not a complete waste of time, it came close. Sittenfeld’s prose is punctilious, not overburdened by clichés and occasionally there’s a half-chuckle, but the writing is sterile and never messy. It’s Iowa Writers’ Workshop mid-level fiction, with all that implies. New York Times reviewer Jen Doll, in a rave, writes: “In this way, reading ‘Show Don’t Tell’ is a bit like sitting down with a good friend who’s about to dish on some major-life business.”
Few are immune from scintillating or salacious “dish,” including me, but Sittenfeld’s stories, about middle-age (with flashbacks) are dull. Take “The Richest Babysitter in the World,” in which narrator Kit thinks back to her time minding the daughter of what Doll, and other reviewers, call a “Jeff Bezos-like” character. It is Bezos, who starts off with a happy marriage, becomes the commerce titan of today, leaves his wife (who, after a $40 billion divorce, settlement donates enthusiastically to “philanthropic” concerns), exploits workers and causes mom & pop stores to shutter. Pardon me while I take a snooze.
My sour mood heightened last Friday morning upon reading a story in the Times, “Mexico City Bans Traditional Bullfights for Violence-Free Option,” a blow for a centuries-old tradition in the huge and unwieldy city. Now, “rules [will determine] how long a bull can be in the ring and limit bullfighters to using only capes,” wrote James Wagner, in a surprisingly non-judgmental (for the Times) story.
Is the bull now an endangered species?
I’ve enjoyed bullfights, baseball games (still thriving), horse and dog races, boxing matches and casinos. A disappointment in several trips to Bangkok is that I never could find the right guy who’d give me the password to attend an illegal cockfight. (In 1987, in battle-torn Manila, I also had no luck on that front.) That’s a minority view, at least in the United States, but it’s part of a now-forbidden culture and raised my curiosity.
I don’t feel bad for the bull who’s inevitably gored, and anyone who eats a ham or roast beef sandwich—or relishes a veal cutlet—yet screams “animal rights” when it comes to bulls is reading from an upside-down rulebook. I’ve been to about a dozen bullfights, and aside from one long afternoon/early evening at Madrid’s world-renowned Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas, when sitting in the third row and seeing the bloody ear of a bull presented to a Spanish royal was admittedly gruesome, it’s a bracing way to soak up the pageantry that surrounds the events. My first bullfight, in Mexico City, was the most memorable. Two friends and I, in the cheap seats, drank beer and roared with the crowd, even though we couldn’t precisely make out what was happening in the ring. We left in a euphoric state, caused a little mischief on the way back to our $2/night hotel, and bought some street food.
Years ago, while vacationing in Puerto Vallarta, I took my then pre-teen sons to a bullfight in a picturesque, if small, ring on the outskirts of town. My wife was a good sport and though she passed on the outing and was apprehensive about the potential for “night frights” haunting the boys, she didn’t raise a rumpus, and when we returned, all three of us a bit sunburned, she said to me, “Good, I’m glad that’s out of your system for this year.”
I made sure we had nosebleed seats, so it didn’t get too gory for the kids, but they were fascinated not only by the four matches and bursts of color that were like silent fireworks, but also the vendors hawking posters depicting that day’s star matador and the bottles of Coke that must’ve been recycled from 1959. At least that’s what I imagined: I’d told them about the standard Coca-Cola of my youth, those 6.5 ounces of soda in the thick green glass bottles, and their eyes widened upon seeing the real thing. In fairness, I don’t think either Nicky or Booker today would return to a bullfight.
Do you know who the world’s heavyweight boxing champ is today? I don’t. This sport has been in the crosshairs of busybodies for decades, and while I acknowledge the serious injuries these athletes can suffer, when their brains are scrambled after too many blows to the head, no one forced them to pursue that work. My first brush with the crusade against prize fighting was in the early-1960s when Davey Moore was killed in the ring at Dodger Stadium, giving Bob Dylan prime current material to write about, and stirringly, in his “Who Killed Davey Moore.”
I’ve no idea whether this is true, but 100 smackers says that Dylan (who later lionized boxer Hurricane Carter) like millions in the United States, stopped time to watch any Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali championship fight. When Ali was in the ring—before he was suspended for refusing Vietnam conscription—it was an event as highly anticipated as the Super Bowl. I’d often watch Ali dispatch the likes of Floyd Patterson, Ernie Terrell, Henry Carter and George Chuvalo at the home of my Italian friends Frankie and Tony, whose father was a wealthy developer, on their big (for the time) RCA color tv. In the mid-1960s, no one in the sports world compared with Ali, a modern Babe Ruth—although perhaps Joe Namath was a contender.
Bullfighting and boxing will go poof, as fans die off and aren’t replaced by kids who’ve never heard of Sonny Liston, let alone Joe Louis and Jack Dempsey. In fact, a lifelong pal of mine, who has as much in common with animal activists as he does with Tim Walz, has jumped the fence on this question. He emailed: “As a kid of 16 at a bullfight in Mexico City the apparent risk for the matador and pageantry of the show was thrilling. What I don’t like today, many decades later, is the slaying of the bull in front of a raucous crowd, slaking their thirst for death. I feel the same way about the hunting for all types of wildlife. It reminds me that we live in a dangerous, unkind world, and I have no desire to be around it when it’s happening. How about Capture the Flag or Dodgeball as demonstration sports for the next Olympics?”
He made some valid points, but I’m not sold, even though it’s inevitable bullfights for me are the shards of memory.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023