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Please go away: an open letter to Cormac McCarthy.

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[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Dear Cormac,

A couple of years ago the Texas Book Festival "Bookended" you. (They will Bookend anybody, so it's nothing to feel cocky about.) Since you famously do not appear in person to receive awards and over the years have kept yourself as invisible as some desert derelict living under a bridge near Lordsburg, New Mexico, I was asked to say a few words on your behalf. This required me to give up my regular Saturday morning muni golf match, but I reluctantly agreed. I did this out of the goodness of my heart, without expectation of any small thank you gift, such as a turquoise string tie, a Santa Fe Institute coffee mug, or a sleeve of Titleists. People who pray to Jesus don't expect trinkets either. I trust, by the way, that you eventually received the tokens of the festival's affection. You can't miss them--two huge lumps of limestone weighing a combined thirty pounds, each one engraved with an image of a cowboy hat with a book for its crown. Hard to imagine what it costs to ship those suckers or what somebody like you would do with them.

In my remarks to the swells at the book festival I depicted you and me as buddies who e-mailed each other all the time. Maybe they believed me. I said that you always began with "Hi Don" and tried to p ass yourself off as some macho dude just back from...

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