"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
2 comments:
Sexiest? Try creepiest! I get a serious shiver when he ramps up his seductive shtick with that famous come-on line, "Hey baby ... you might as well have sex with me because if you don't, you're gonna be getting busy with WORMS!" Still, yes, it's genius. I read that poems like Marvell's reflect what courtly discourse was really like: edgy, borderline insulting, as explicit as they could get away with while wrapping it all in a velvet ending. Brilliant and reckless. This is what vampires would really be saying, not that mooncalf dialogue in "Twilight."
"Explicit as they could get away with while wrapping it all in a velvet ending." And that's not sexy? Talk about la petite mort!
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