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Bon Dance

[ed.  It's Obon Festival season.  One of the best evenings of my life was spent at a Bon dance on the island of Lanai.

Bon Festival (Wikipedia)

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Invasive Species

by Rick Sinnott

On a country road through the rolling hills of western Kentucky, I pointed out a white-tailed deer to our two nieces and nephew in the back seat. The doe, unfazed by our moving vehicle, remained stock-still a few yards off the macadam.

As we zoomed past, 8-year-old Chirana mused, “It’s actually very natural … the countryside.”

Chirana was experiencing Kentucky from the opposite end of the spectrum from Alaska, where I call home. She lives in south Florida, arguably one of the least natural environments in the United States. In Florida, citrus groves, sugarcane fields and other agricultural monocultures increasingly dominate the interstices between sprawling urban areas. Its subtropical climate is burdened with the second highest conglomeration of invasive species of the 50 states, second only to Hawaii.

An invasive species is one that does not naturally occur in an area and whose release is likely to cause economic or environmental damage, including harm to human health. Exotic birds, mammals, reptiles, fish and plants have infested the unique North American panhandle like ticks on a farm dog. Over 515 exotic plants and 250 animals, mostly birds and reptiles, have been reported.

But I don’t want to talk about Florida.

My wife and I were visiting our families in three Midwest states. It’s rare for us to leave Alaska. The last time I visited America’s heartland was seven years ago. Each time I return to my boyhood haunts, the people are more or less the same, but the natural world has changed significantly.

On our previous visit, I saw stray cats and feral cats everywhere. Cats were not content just to patrol farms or rural homesteads, where a hard-working feline might find house mice or rats and benefit humankind by killing these age-old pests, among the first recorded invasive species. Instead the cats had elected to become an invasive species themselves. At night, their bright eyes winked and flashed from the shoulders of interstate highways far from the nearest house, and not a few were pummeled by passing vehicles and flattened on roads like the raccoons and opossums they were slowly replacing.

Cats are perhaps the least domesticated of domesticated animals, little changed from their common ancestor with African wildcats. Depending on how you feel about cats, it may or may not surprise you to know they are on the list of the 100 world’s worst invasive alien species. Experts estimate that there are more than 77 million pet cats and 60 to 100 million stray and feral cats in the United States. Cats in America kill hundreds of millions of wild birds and more than a billion small mammals every year. They may be the nation’s most abundant medium-sized predator. Unlike most wild predators, even well-fed cats kill.

But I don’t want to talk about cats, either.

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Prince

Irish Polar Bears

by Amina Khan

All polar bears alive today are descended from a female brown bear that most likely hailed not from Alaska, as widely presumed, but from Ireland, scientists said.

The discovery, reported online Thursday in the journal Current Biology, suggests that polar bears and various species of brown bears probably encountered each other many times over the last 100,000 years or so as climate change forced them into each other's territory. On some occasions, those meetings produced hybrid offspring whose genetic signature lives on in polar bears today.The findings were made by analyzing the mitochondrial DNA extracted from 242 bear lineages. Some of them were polar bears and some were brown bears. Some lived recently and others have been dead since the late Pleistocene, which ended nearly 12,000 years ago.

Polar bears and brown bears are uniquely suited to their habitats. Polar bears have white coats to help them blend in and sneak up on prey, a carnivore's fearsome set of teeth, and they are superb swimmers. The smaller brown bear, which includes grizzly and Kodiak bears, lives on land in warmer climes and eats plants and small animals.

Based on fossil evidence and genetic analysis, scientists had thought that polar bears' closest relatives were the brown bears living on islands off the coast of Alaska.

Although members of the two species can, and have, met and mated — as evidenced by the occasional "grolar bear" hybrid popping up in the Canadian Arctic — those couplings are extremely rare and thought to be brought on by global warming, as melting glaciers force polar bears into brown bears' habitat and brown bears encroach northward into polar bears' Arctic refuge.

So imagine study leader Ceiridwen Edwards' surprise when she analyzed mitochondrial DNA in the bones of extinct brown bears collected from Irish caves and discovered that it most closely resembled the DNA of modern polar bears.

Unlike nuclear DNA, mitochondrial DNA is passed down essentially unchanged from mother to child and provides a clear record of maternal lineage. Using mitochondrial DNA, scientists had already determined that all living polar bears could trace their roots to a single "Eve."

But to think that she was an Irish brown bear?

"I thought maybe I'd made a mistake," said Edwards, an archaeological geneticist at the University of Oxford.

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If You Knew Sushi

by Nick Tosches

In search of the ultimate sushi experience, the author plunges into the frenzy of the world's biggest seafood market—Tokyo's Tsukiji, where a bluefin tuna can fetch more than $170,000 at auction—and discovers the artistry between ocean and plate, as well as some fishy surprises.

It looks like a samurai sword, and it's almost as long as he is tall. His hands are on the hilt. He raises and steadies the blade.

Two apprentices help to guide it. Twelve years ago, when it was new, this knife was much longer, but the apprentices' daily hours of tending to it, of sharpening and polishing it, have reduced it greatly.

It was made by the house of Masahisa, sword-makers for centuries to the samurai of the Minamoto, the founders of the first shogunate. In the 1870s, when the power of the shoguns was broken and the swords of the samurai were outlawed, Masahisa began making these things, longer and more deadly than the samurai swords of old.

The little guy with the big knife is Tsunenori Iida. He speaks not as an individual but as an emanation, the present voice, of the generations whose blood flows in him and who held the long knife in lifetimes before him, just as he speaks of Masahisa as if he were the same Masahisa who wrought the first samurai sword, in the days of dark mist. Thus it is that he tells me he's been here since 1861, during the Tokugawa shogunate, when this city, Tokyo, was still called Edo.

Iida-san is the master of the house of Hicho, one of the oldest and most venerable of the nakaoroshi gyosha, intermediate wholesalers of tuna, or tuna middlemen, if you will.

The tuna that lies before Iida-san on its belly was swimming fast and heavy after mackerel a few days ago under cold North Atlantic waves. In an hour or so, its flesh will be dispatched in parcels to the various sushi chefs who have chosen to buy it. Iida-san is about to make the first of the expert cuts that will quarter the 300-pound tuna lengthwise.

His long knife, with the mark of the maker Masahisa engraved in the shank of the blade, connects not only the past to the present but also the deep blue sea to the sushi counter.

Everything around him seems to turn still for a breath as he draws the blade toward him and lays open the tuna with surgical precision. And everything around him is a lot, for we are in the frantic heart of a madness unto itself: the wild, engulfing, blood-drenched madness of Tsukiji.

Until the summer of 1972, bluefin tuna was basically worthless to American fishermen. Nobody ever ate it, and its sole commercial use was as an ingredient in canned cat food. The only tuna that people ate, the white stuff, also in cans, was processed from smaller, albacore tuna, and even that probably would not have gotten into the American diet if a California cannery hadn't run out of sardines and begun selling it in 1903.
Theodore C. Bestor is the author of Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World, the standard work on the subject. He, the chair of the Anthropology Department of Harvard, and I, the chair of nothing, spent some time together in Tokyo. It was Ted who taught me how to correctly pronounce the name of this place: "tskee-gee." (In her new book, The Sushi Economy, Sasha Issenberg says it's "pronounced roughly like 'squeegee,'" but it's not. Her book, however, is an engaging one.)

"I grew up in central Illinois," Ted told me, "and as a kid I don't remember ever eating fresh fish. I'm not sure I ever even saw one. As far as I knew, fish came frozen, already breaded and cut into oblongs for frying. And tuna, of course, was something that appeared only in cans like hockey pucks and ended up in sandwiches. I had absolutely no idea of what a tuna looked like, its size or anything else."

Tuna is the main event at Tsukiji, but everything from the sea—fresh fish, live fish, shrimp—is auctioned and sold here. At five in the morning, preceding the tuna auction, in another hall, there's the sea-urchin-roe auction. The most prized uni come from Hokkaido and its islands, and it's said that if you want to taste the best, freshest uni you must go there and eat it straight from the sea. But much of the uni laid out here in little boxes, often repackaged in Hokkaido, comes from California or Maine. Only in July, when sea urchins from the United States aren't available, are these boxes of uni not present. Color means more than size, and men roam the hall before the auction, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee from paper cups, searching for uni of the most vibrant orange-golden hues. The northern-Japanese uni can fetch about ¥7,000, or about $60, for a little, 100-gram box, while the Maine uni go for much less, from a low of about ¥800 to a high of about ¥1,500, or between $6 and $13. Being from Newark, I wonder if they ever douse these things with dye.

This place, the all of it—formally the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Central Wholesale Market, a name by which few know it—is, as Ted Bestor puts it, the "fishmonger for the seven seas." Its history reaches back 400 years, to the Nihonbashi fish market, which was located not far from the present site of Tsukiji, in the Chuo Ward. On September 1, 1923, Tokyo was devastated by the Great Kanto Earthquake, which killed more than 140,000 people. Nihonbashi was gone, and a new market came into being in the town of Tsukiji, within Tokyo. Tsunenori Iida, whose great-grandfather had a fish-selling stall at the old market, is one of only four men whose family businesses began at Nihonbashi and are still in operation at Tsukiji today.

It's hard to say how much of what is sold at Tsukiji is exported to high-class sushi chefs abroad.

"My guess, and it is a guess," says Ted Bestor, "would be that the total amounts are probably on the order of a thousand or two kilograms worldwide each day. This is minuscule by comparison with the roughly two million kilograms of seafood Tsukiji handles every day."

Two million kilos is about four and a half million pounds, more than 2,000 tons. The Fulton Fish Market, in New York City, the second-largest fish market in the world, moves only 115 tons a year, an average of less than half a ton each working day.

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Friday Book Club - This is Where I Leave You

I haven’t laughed out loud like this from a book in a long time – once even laughing until I was crying. Ordinarily this would be a good thing, except I read this on a packed plane from Tucson to Chicago a couple of weeks ago. My husband was in the middle seat, with nowhere to shrink from his embarrassment as I banged on the seat in paroxysms of hysteria, shoving the book at him and saying over and over, “Oh, read this page, just one more, you have to read this!”…

Here’s the bizarre thing about this book: it has a very similar plot to that of The Believers by Zoe Heller, which I absolutely hated. Tropper, unlike Heller, understands how to get you to love a very, very dysfunctional family.

This Is Where I Leave You begins with the death of the father, Mort Foxman, from metastatic stomach cancer. Their mother Hillary informs them that their atheist father’s last wish was that they “sit shiva” for him. This is a Jewish custom requiring that the family spend seven (“shiva”) days together in mourning before they get back to their regular lives. (The purpose is not only to honor the dead, but to cut off the mourning process, so that families do not spend too much time focusing on death instead of celebrating life.)

So the Foxman children, Judd (34) – the narrator, his older sister Wendy, older brother Paul, and younger brother Philip gather at their mom’s house for the shiva. Paul’s wife and Wendy’s husband and kids also come, along with Philip’s latest girlfriend. Judd’s wife, Jen, is not there because they have separated; he moved out of their house two months before after finding Jen in bed with his boss.

The book takes you through the seven day ritual. Over the seven days, the family, long scattered by school and marriage and jobs, gets to know each other all over again. While this may not seem like a setting for hilarity, it very often is.

There are so many funny things about this book, and so many comical passages that I ran out of stickies twice just marking the ones I wanted to quote. (So I guess I won’t be using all of the quotes!) But the problem is, if I conveyed all the funny bits to you, I would spoil it for you. I want to give you a flavor for the writing, however, so I’ll steer clear of the humor (not easy to do) and go for the bittersweet. In this passage, Judd is imagining having a conversation with his boss. He begins by talking about how he and Jen were wildly in love… at first. Then he continues:

I want to tell him how he and the love of his life will slowly fall into a routine, how the sex, while still perfectly fine, will become commonplace enough that it won’t be unheard of to postpone it in favor of a television show, or a late-night snack. … how he’ll feel himself growing self-conscious telling funny stories to their friends in front of her, because she’s heard all his funny stories before; how she won’t laugh at his jokes the way other people do; how she’ll start to spend more and more time on the phone with her girlfriends at night. How they will get into raging fights over the most trivial issues: the failure to replace a roll of toilet paper, a cereal bowl caked with oatmeal left to harden in the sink, proper management of the checkbook. How an unspoken point system will come into play, with each side keeping score according to their own complicated set of rules. I want to materialize before that smug little shit like the Ghost of Christmas Past and scare the matrimonial impulse right out of him.”

Evaluation: I enjoyed this book immensely. And while I laughed quite often, it is a book about leaving – whether through death or separation or leaving the past behind or even physically leaving – getting in the car and just driving. So it has some sad moments as well. But really, not too many; it’s more like a Seinfeld episode, in which pathos is just an excuse for another comedy routine. Highly recommended!

Note: The New York Times reports that Steven Spielberg is adapting a film version of this book.

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AntiGravity Yoga

by Ali Taylor Lange

The fitness world has seen plenty of crazes, but AntiGravity yoga is one of the oddest. Created in 2007 by world-class gymnast Christopher Harrison, the workout takes place a few feet above the ground inside a silk hammock. Sound a little too West Palm Beach and wheat grass for you? Harrison swears by the spine and hip stretching techniques, especially for runners and cyclists. Proponents claim that balancing on the swinging silk enhances abdominal workouts and encourages your body to stretch that extra inch. Still sound too gimmicky? We called Harrison for a little bit more background.

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by patrickjoust
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by David Hockney
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I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me On This

[ed.  The article in question is a riveting, intense and very personal account of one journalist's experience with PTSD.  Really intense.  But it was NOT a hit piece on Haiti, as the following open letter suggests.  Stress is where you find it. The original story link is here.]

GOOD magazine recently ran a piece written by Mother Jones reporter Mac McClelland in which she details her disturbing experience in Haiti, subsequent PTSD, and her healing process. The crux of her story — that engaging in violent sex helped aid her recovery — is deeply personal, complicated, and unsettling. But so is PTSD, and recovery is never simple.

For all of its raw honesty, however, there's a real issue with the article: a lack of context. In absence of any real details about McClelland herself, it is all too easy to conclude that it was Haiti itself that pushed her over the edge. The dark and violent imagery she uses only serves to further that conclusion.

To 36 women who would know, that's a problem. Herewith, their open letter to the editors of GOOD.

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The Modern Meaning of Flowers

Red roses: "I’ve been thinking about you, and what I think is I want to put my thing in your things and then I want to turn you around and put my thing in your other things. But I want you to be OK about this, OK?"

Carnations: "I knew I had to buy you flowers, but I didn’t think you were worth spending a lot of money on."

Daisies: "I think you’re innocent, like an eight-year-old girl, and that’s what I’m attracted to in a woman."

Orchid: "I want to intimidate you with my fabulous wealth, while discovering whether or not you can keep something alive on your own."

Stargazer Lilies: "I’m not saying your apartment smells like something died in it. I’m just saying you should mask the weird odor in your living room with the same fragrance that funeral homes use to cover up the stench of the dead."

Mums: "I saw these on sale outside KMart and remembered you were middle aged. Damn, you make elastic waistbands look good."

Peonies: "I am a man of breeding and therefore understand the importance of making every other woman in your office jealous of you."

Hydrangeas: "I’m gay."

Calla Lilies: "I saw these and thought of your vagina. Pretty, right?"

Gladiolas: "These will look really nice in your sitting room at the nursing home. Please die soon so I can inherit your 1996 Saturn."

Sunflowers: "I am enraptured by your sunny disposition and how as a hippie you never seem to wear a bra."

Tulips: "I have done something very wrong and I hope that you will never find out about it, because I want to keep putting my thing in your things."

Mixed bunch: "I want you to let me put my thing in your things, but I don’t have a steady job."

A Corsage: "I’m in high school, and I want to put my thing in someone’s things and I guess your things will do. Also, my mom bought this. Can I please put my sweaty hand on your things?"

Meghan O'Keefe is a comedian and writer living in New York City. She likes to get peach colored roses, because they're like less-aggressive red roses.

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Ryan Adams

In Defense of Prudes

by Maria Bustillos

There is little refuge from the explicit for today's prude. What with the ever-increasing gross-out quotient of TV and movies, and the unending barrage of sordid "news" about the private lives of public figures, nearly everywhere you look you're seeing something that makes you want to leap right out of your skin. It's asking for trouble even to admit to being a prude, of course, but if a prude is a person who is like to die of embarrassment about something or other almost all day long, then definitely I am one. And if I were to say further that modesty ought to be reconsidered as the virtue it is, I would be letting myself in for all kinds of grief. Still, though. Modesty ought to be reconsidered as the virtue it is.

If we really value all this open-mindedness and tolerance like we say we do, presumably people just get to be a total square, shy and reserved without fear of censure. They don't, of course. Maybe they don't want to see the Apatow movie, maybe the very idea of The Human Centipede sends them shrieking into the next room, maybe they don't like to go to the strip club. In practice, though, this kind of reluctance is liable to be treated as inferior, defective even, plus politically incorrect because if you say that you don't like to go to the strip club, this might easily be taken to mean that you're stuck up and narrow-minded and don't have respect for sex workers, plus probably you will be told that you're so inhibited personally that sleeping with you must really be some kind of ordeal. On balance it's often easier to just go along to the heinous performance art or endure all the farting and whatnot in the Apatow movie than it is to deal with the smackdown if you don't. Shyness is a personal thing, not a public one, involving just one person's prefs. for his own surroundings; lots of people just can't help getting the heebie-jeebies, the creeps and/or the willies from half what goes on.

So, I have come to take back the knife on behalf of us prudes, who quite often are only reserved, shy, terribly square people whose native restraint and weak knees are, in fact, generally accompanied by a deep love of personal freedom and diversity of opinion. Prudery comes in for a lot of flak because people imagine that the prudes want to impose limitations on the behavior of others, but they particularly, especially do not. The wimpy and yikes-prone, far from wishing to restrict or even to express an opinion regarding anyone else's private practices, are in reality possessed of a fervent, if doomed, desire to know as little about them as possible.

The Terrazzo Jungle

Fifty years ago, the mall was born.  America would never be the same.*

By Malcolm Gladwell

Victor Gruen was short, stout, and unstoppable, with a wild head of hair and eyebrows like unpruned hedgerows. According to a profile in Fortune (and people loved to profile Victor Gruen), he was a “torrential talker with eyes as bright as mica and a mind as fast as mercury.” In the office, he was famous for keeping two or three secretaries working full time, as he moved from one to the next, dictating non-stop in his thick Viennese accent. He grew up in the well-to-do world of prewar Jewish Vienna, studying architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts—the same school that, a few years previously, had turned down a fledgling artist named Adolf Hitler. At night, he performed satirical cabaret theatre in smoke-filled cafés. He emigrated in 1938, the same week as Freud, when one of his theatre friends dressed up as a Nazi Storm Trooper and drove him and his wife to the airport. They took the first plane they could catch to Zurich, made their way to England, and then boarded the S.S. Statendam for New York, landing, as Gruen later remembered, “with an architect’s degree, eight dollars, and no English.” On the voyage over, he was told by an American to set his sights high—“don’t try to wash dishes or be a waiter, we have millions of them”—but Gruen scarcely needed the advice. He got together with some other German émigrés and formed the Refugee Artists Group. George S. Kaufman’s wife was their biggest fan. Richard Rodgers and Al Jolson gave them money. Irving Berlin helped them with their music. Gruen got on the train to Princeton and came back with a letter of recommendation from Albert Einstein. By the summer of 1939, the group was on Broadway, playing eleven weeks at the Music Box. Then, as M. Jeffrey Hartwick recounts in “Mall Maker,” his new biography of Gruen, one day he went for a walk in midtown and ran into an old friend from Vienna, Ludwig Lederer, who wanted to open a leather-goods boutique on Fifth Avenue. Victor agreed to design it, and the result was a revolutionary storefront, with a kind of mini-arcade in the entranceway, roughly seventeen by fifteen feet: six exquisite glass cases, spotlights, and faux marble, with green corrugated glass on the ceiling. It was a “customer trap.” This was a brand-new idea in American retail design, particularly on Fifth Avenue, where all the carriage-trade storefronts were flush with the street. The critics raved. Gruen designed Ciro’s on Fifth Avenue, Steckler’s on Broadway, Paris Decorators on the Bronx Concourse, and eleven branches of the California clothing chain Grayson’s. In the early fifties, he designed an outdoor shopping center called Northland outside Detroit for J. L. Hudson’s. It covered a hundred and sixty-three acres and had nearly ten thousand parking spaces. This was little more than a decade and a half since he stepped off the boat, and when Gruen watched the bulldozers break ground he turned to his partner and said, “My God but we’ve got a lot of nerve.”

But Gruen’s most famous creation was his next project, in the town of Edina, just outside Minneapolis. He began work on it almost exactly fifty years ago. It was called Southdale. It cost twenty million dollars, and had seventy-two stores and two anchor department-store tenants, Donaldson’s and Dayton’s. Until then, most shopping centers had been what architects like to call “extroverted,” meaning that store windows and entrances faced both the parking area and the interior pedestrian walkways. Southdale was introverted: the exterior walls were blank, and all the activity was focussed on the inside. Suburban shopping centers had always been in the open, with stores connected by outdoor passageways. Gruen had the idea of putting the whole complex under one roof, with air-conditioning for the summer and heat for the winter. Almost every other major shopping center had been built on a single level, which made for punishingly long walks. Gruen put stores on two levels, connected by escalators and fed by two-tiered parking. In the middle he put a kind of town square, a “garden court” under a skylight, with a fishpond, enormous sculpted trees, a twenty-one-foot cage filled with bright-colored birds, balconies with hanging plants, and a café. The result, Hardwick writes, was a sensation:

Journalists from all of the country’s top magazines came for the Minneapolis shopping center’s opening. Life, Fortune, Time, Women’s Wear Daily, the New York Times, Business Week and Newsweek all covered the event. The national and local press wore out superlatives attempting to capture the feeling of Southdale. “The Splashiest Center in the U. S.,” Life sang. The glossy weekly praised the incongruous combination of a “goldfish pond, birds, art and 10 acres of stores all . . . under one Minnesota roof.” A “pleasure-dome-with-parking,” Time cheered. One journalist announced that overnight Southdale had become an integral “part of the American Way.”

Southdale Mall still exists. It is situated off I-494, south of downtown Minneapolis and west of the airport—a big concrete box in a sea of parking. The anchor tenants are now J. C. Penney and Marshall Field’s, and there is an Ann Taylor and a Sunglass Hut and a Foot Locker and just about every other chain store that you’ve ever seen in a mall. It does not seem like a historic building, which is precisely why it is one. Fifty years ago, Victor Gruen designed a fully enclosed, introverted, multitiered, double-anchor-tenant shopping complex with a garden court under a skylight—and today virtually every regional shopping center in America is a fully enclosed, introverted, multitiered, double-anchor-tenant complex with a garden court under a skylight. Victor Gruen didn’t design a building; he designed an archetype. For a decade, he gave speeches about it and wrote books and met with one developer after another and waved his hands in the air excitedly, and over the past half century that archetype has been reproduced so faithfully on so many thousands of occasions that today virtually every suburban American goes shopping or wanders around or hangs out in a Southdale facsimile at least once or twice a month. Victor Gruen may well have been the most influential architect of the twentieth century. He invented the mall.

One of Gruen’s contemporaries in the early days of the mall was a man named A. Alfred Taubman, who also started out as a store designer. In 1950, when Taubman was still in his twenties, he borrowed five thousand dollars, founded his own development firm, and, three years later, put up a twenty-six-store open-air shopping center in Flint, Michigan. A few years after that, inspired by Gruen, he matched Southdale with an enclosed mall of his own in Hayward, California, and over the next half century Taubman put together what is widely considered one of the finest collections of shopping malls in the world. The average American mall has annual sales of around three hundred and forty dollars per square foot. Taubman’s malls average sales close to five hundred dollars per square foot. If Victor Gruen invented the mall, Alfred Taubman perfected it. One day not long ago, I asked Taubman to take me to one of his shopping centers and explain whatever it was that first drew people like him and Victor Gruen to the enclosed mall fifty years ago.

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Hemingway's Bulls

by Steve King

On this day the running of the bulls begins in Pamplona, on the first morning of the nine-day Feast of San Fermin. Hemingway first went eighty-five years ago, as a twenty-three-year-old writer still a month away from his first, small book (Three Stories and Ten Poems), and so still filing stories for the Toronto Star: "Then they came in sight. Eight bulls galloping along, full tilt, heavy set, black, glistening, sinister, their horns bare, tossing their heads...." His first wife, Hadley was with him; they had semi-joked that the bullfights would be a "stalwart" influence on the baby she was carrying. He would be named "John Hadley Nicanor," the last coming from one of the bullfighters they were most impressed with on the trip, Nicanor Villalta.

On his second Pamplona trip, in July of '24, Hemingway jumped in the amateur bullring -- he never ran before the bulls-and did so again on his visit in '25. The people and events of this trip would become The Sun Also Rises, the first episodes of which he began to write by the end of that July. It was on this '25 trip that he saw the teenaged sensation Cayetano Ordonez, the novel's Pedro Romero:

Romero never made any contortions, always it was straight and pure and natural in line. The others twisted themselves like cork-screws, their elbows raised, and leaned against the flanks of the bull after his horns had passed, to give a fake look of danger. Afterward, all that was faked turned bad and gave an unpleasant feeling. Romero's bull-fighting gave real emotion, because he kept the absolute purity of line in his movements and always quietly and calmly let his horns pass him close each time. He did not have to emphasize their closeness.... Romero had the old thing, the holding of his purity of line through the maximum of exposure, while he dominated the bull by making him realize he was unattainable, while he prepared him for the killing.

And so the "grace under pressure" ideal was born, providing a measure for the mess which the other characters seemed unable to prevent in their lives, and for all that Hemingway would live, write, and perhaps die by.

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