I started a project last semester titled "Inspiration in Literature" where I would read a novel or a collection of poetry by one author and then see how much writing I could produce inspired by that author's work. The following is a piece from that project inspired from Cormic McCarthy's All The Pretty Horses:
My friend Johnny had the newspaper print somethin' 'bout him being dead. He said it was to get rid of his ex-girlfriend. She she'd be sad, he said, but she couldn't bother him 'bout havin' another girl anymore. My friend Johnny has no concept of love or compassion. Not that I've seen anyway. He forgets. He has no memory to keep him holdin' on to anything. Sometimes he'll read an old newspaper and laugh 'bout how poetic people get. No one cares, he'll tell me, just get out the dry and dirty facts. Just tell it how it is. There doesn't need to be no poetics involved. There is no poetry in life, not real life, it is just a fantasy you people live in. You people, meanin' me. I work for the newspaper. But I don't know nothing 'bout no poetics, I just type everthin' up, looking for the sloppy mistakes the real writers make. Johnny is always pushin' me to dull it down. He doesn't want to read no grotesque details about surgery, he'll tell me. Things get cut up and sewn back up all the time, there doesn't need to be no detail about how much blood was lost, what's lost is lost, he'll say. It doesn't matter, does it? Sure people panic, people feel a strange scramblin' sensation when they think somethin' has vanished, but once the initial shock settles in the rest is memory. If you can't remember what it was you've lost, what's the point in thinkin' of it, of tryin' to recreate it. Johnny shouldn't have faked his death, it is gonna be a real trouble when someone recognizes him, or he has to give his name to someone who saw that he died--but I understand it--I wouldn't care much for obsessive women either if I didn't know who they were.
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