One thing about rereading books, you sometimes wonder whether you were sentient on previous perusals. Today, in Huck Finn, I came to the following description of a one-horse Arkansas town on the Mississippi River not long before the Civil War; somehow, it had never before penetrated the defenses I evidently raise while "reading":
All the stores was along one street. They had white-domestic awnings in front, and the country people hitched their horses to the awning-posts. There was empty dry-goods boxes under the awnings, and loafers roosting on them all day long, whittling them with their Barlow knives; and chawing tobacco, and gaping and yawning and stretching—a mighty ornery lot. They generly had on yellow straw hats most as wide as an umbrella, but didn't wear no coats or waistcoats; they called one another Bill, and Buck, and Hank, and Joe, and Andy, and talked lazy and drawly, and used considerable many cuss-words. There was as many as one loafer leaning up against every awning-post, and he most always had his hands in his britches pockets, except when he fetched them out to lend a chaw of tobacco or scratch. What a body was hearing amongst them, all the time was—
"Gimme a chaw 'v tobacker, Hank."
"Cain't—I hain't got but one chaw left. Ask Bill."
Pretty sure I'll be dead before ChatGPT can equal that. While I was typing it in, the word processing tool used by this blogging platform inserted considerable many underlinings to indicate the phrases and constructions needing the attention of an editor.
Spoiler alert: in the immediately following pages, the residents of this town and the surrounding rural areas are cast in an unfavorable light, especially if compared to the narrator and his friend, Miss Watson's runaway slave Jim.
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