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William Baude's avatar

Follow up post coming next week.

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David Foley's avatar

A smooth almost innocent follow-up to Bedrock Con Law 101 underscoring the more overtly subversive Richard Primus ... That was another great episode!

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Joseph Camden's avatar

But it looks like Ortega had been saying similar things for a while. Here's a quote from a 1959 NYT article: "Many aficionados, but no experts. When am in the ring, only two of us know what is happening: the bull and myself." Totally plausible he said something that could reasonably be translated into what Graves wrote?

https://www.nytimes.com/1959/09/13/archives/enter-the-leaden-age-of-bullfighting-the-leaden-age-of-bullfighting.html

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Joseph Camden's avatar

And I missed the byline - article by Robert Graves!

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William Baude's avatar

It's Graveses all the way down.

There's more interesting stuff about this episode. This may necessitate a follow-up post.

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Joseph Camden's avatar

I think you're right he would not have any qualms about taking liberties with the facts to make a point. Check that debate in I, Claudius between Asinius Pollio and Athenodorus.

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Anthony Sanders's avatar

I'm thinking of unsusbcribing to this newsletter because this post just sent me down a Robert Graves rabbit hole that was not on my Friday-catch-up-on-work agenda. This discovery is very impressive and it's also completely in keeping of what I know of Graves, who very much vies, and exceeds, follow Oxford scholars such as Tolkien and Lewis in eccentricity. What I was looking for is he had a wild theory that Jesus wasn't dead he just had gone through trauma and seemed dead for parts of three days in the same way that Graves himself went through trauma fighting in the First World War. It's kind of in his "semi-historical" novel King Jesus, but I think it might be in the White Goddess too. God knows if he actually believed it. There's a lot of wild stuff in the White Goddess. Can't find anything on point that ties this together though. But while we're talking about mid-20th century Oxfordians hiding stuff, ever hear the theory that CS Lewis's Narnia books are actually 7 commentaries on the 7 Medieval planets but Lewis literally never told anyone that that is what he was doing? https://www.amazon.com/Planet-Narnia-Seven-Heavens-Imagination/dp/019973870X

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Brian S Levy's avatar

This is so good. Not just the curiosity and research, but the substance and timely message of the poem, the bull metaphor (and perhaps double entendre) and the manner in which the story is told. A++

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