Bullfight posters are not hard to come by in Spain. Indeed, in any place in the country with touristic pretensions you can probably find a shop where they’ll inkjet your name on to some simulacrum of a traditional bullfight poster such that to the untrained eye it will look as though you yourself, alongside some José Tomás and Such-and-Such de la Frontera, were one of the three brave matadors who stared death in the eyes in Plaza de Toros de Madrid back in some timeless past and lived into the Disneyfied present to tell of it (what these posters in fact announce, of course, is that you or someone who cared enough about you to buy you a gift visited Spain). With its flick-of-the-wrist abstractions, and the bull about to enter the ring as though at the edge of some kind of black hole – with the blood-red text streaked, near the bottom, as though with blood – the image above, created by contemporary Majorcan artist Miquel Barceló, hardly resembles the iconic bullfight posters from which the aforementioned souvenirs take their folkloric cues. All the same, it is the most beautiful bullfighting poster I have ever seen, because the bullfight it was created to promote – on the 25th of September at the Plaza de Toros Monumental in Barcelona – was the last bullfight ever held in Catalonia. * I am no bullfighting expert. But having spent probably a quarter of my adult life in Spain, and a fair percentage of that time heading up groups of American high school students who naturally can’t go back home without having seen a Spanish bullfight, I’ve been to enough to know the basic script. Each bullfight features three matadors and six bulls, each of which gets...

Thanks to the high school students with whom I’ve shared the past six weeks as instructor of creative writing and residential adviser at a pre-college summer enrichment camp on the campus of Amherst College, and thanks more importantly to my willingness to let those students plug their iPods into the auxiliary socket and turn the volume to “max” when they are riding with me in one of the fleet of mini-vans we keep on hand for class activities, evening excursions, and other sundry errands, I have of late found myself taken by the effortlessly relentless flow of a young MC from Pittsburgh by the name of Mac Miller. Just nineteen years old, Mr. Miller has not yet been signed to a major label, nor has he released a full-length album. By and large, he has made his name by way of what are called “mixtapes,” short compilations advertised by word of mouth and given away at concerts and online for promotional purposes, in the hope of eventually securing that coveted major label deal. For now, the majority of Miller’s fans are even younger than he is. But if you do not fit into that category there’s at least half a chance that you’ve heard a few bars of his “Donald Trump.” The hit song’s lyrics, coasting atop a catchy Saturday Morning Cartoons meets Sunday morning church chorus beat, include “I just wanna ride, ride through the city in a Cutlass/Find a big butt bitch, somewhere get my nuts kissed,” “I ain’t picky but these girls be acting tricky/When the situation’s sticky and the liquor got them silly,” as well as Miller’s rather inscrutable pledge, and apparent origin of the song’s title, to “take over the world when I’m on my Donald Trump shit.” I...