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He came across two burros squatting by the wall. They offered him coffee and tortilas and he took the tortillas and ate them. The tortillas were hard and acrid as if baked in the kiln of an apathetic deity who while having a dim recollection of having once had passion for the art of tortilla-making had acquiesced and given into entropy, allowing the quality of its tortillas to slacken and degrade just as said deity had allowed the world itself to wither and decay under the baleful tortilla-shaped eye of the cosmos.
He said Uno burrito grande por favor.
The burro spat and said No somos vendedores.
He spat and said Tengo hambre.
The burro spat on a tortilla and dunked the tortilla in coffee and squatted and spat and he squatted and spat on the burro spitting on the tortilla and said Have ye any more coffee and the burro spat.
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>>9178892
lol
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>His list of those whom he calls the "good writers" -- Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner -- precludes anyone who doesn't "deal with issues of life and death." Proust and Henry James don't make the cut. "I don't understand them," he says. "To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange."
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>>9178927
Proust BTFO
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>>9178927
>Faulkner
Who saw that one coming?
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>n McCarthy's sentence the unpunctuated flow of words bears no relation to the slow, methodical nature of what is being described. And why repeat tortilla? When Hemingway wrote "small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers" ("In Another Country," 1927), he was, as David Lodge points out in The Art of Fiction (1992), creating two sharp images in the simplest way he could. The repetition of wind, in subtly different senses, heightens the immediacy of the referent while echoing other reminders of Milan's windiness in the fall. McCarthy's second tortilla, in contrast, is there, like the syntax, to draw attention to the writer himself. For all the sentence tells us, it might as well be this: "He ate the last of the eggs. He wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate it. He drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth. He looked up and thanked her." Had McCarthy written that, the critics would have taken him to task for his "workmanlike" prose. But the first version is no more informative or pleasing to the ear than the second, which can at least be read aloud in a natural fashion. (McCarthy is famously averse to public readings.) All the original does is say, "I express myself differently from you, therefore I am a Writer."
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>>9178892
This is good writing tho
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>>9182005
Thanks for that excerpt. I hadn't read the article before.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-readers-manifesto/302270/
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>>9178892
I'm Chuck.
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