From Miss Snark’s Blog (who got it from Tribe’s blog) , I steal the following exercise.
Here are your instructions:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.
The book I grabbed had only one sentence on Page 123, but it’s a deusy. (Note archaic but correct spelling of “deusy.”) Sentence follows:
Astride a crane, the brave squires are escorted off;
one takes pity on the pretty maiden in her mortal struggle;
penetrating the grove they go off with a friend,
passing through distant mountain passes,
they pay a call on a god of the Immortals.
Any guesses?
Feel free to post your discoveries here.
My fifth sentence on p. 123 of the book in nearest proximity is:
“Nancy.”
Love, F.
“Nancy. . . “
How evocative.
“Heather Duke underlined a lot of things in this copy of Moby Dick, but I believe the word ‘Nancy’ underlined all by itself, is the key to understanding Heather’s pain. On the surface, Heather Duke was the vivacious young lady we all knew her to be, but her soul yearned to inhabit another existence, to be another person altogether! Another personality, freezing of the knowledge of the way fellow teenagers can be cruel, the way that parents can be unresponsive.
“And as she writes so elequently in her suicide note, the way that life can suck! We’ll all miss our secret Nancy. Lets just hope that her secret identity is safe in the arms of Jesus!”
Mine is:
The example in the last section uses the “s-e” range form, a contiguous range of character values beginning with the min value and up to and incuding the max value.
Wouldn’t it be frabjus if my secret Nancy is Nancy Sinatra?
Love, F.
“Ses yeux brillent tandis que le cadran illumine d’en dessous son visage.”
—Plasma, Walter Jon Williams (J’ai Lu)
“In addition, the second-level notes are now numbered with Roman numerals.”
— The LaTeX Companion, 2nd ed.
Hee. I don’t even use LaTeX. It was
just the closest book.
Is WJW’s quote from “Outlaws of the Marsh”?
No, but that’s a good guess.
I don’t have a journal, so I’ll use yours!
“Several gyroscopes were tried about 1914-15, and in March 1916 one was ordered for the pre-dreadnought Ohio, to be fitted at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.”
The Reith lectures, broadcast annually, were founded in 1947 and named in his honour.
Now that this post is about to scroll off into the archives, I may as well reveal that the source of my quote was Blades from the Willows, a “wuxia xiaoshuo” (“novel of martial chivalry”) by “Huanzhulouzhu” (“The Master of the Pearl-Rimmed Tower”), whose actual name was Li Shanji.
It’s Chinese sword-and-sorcery, the sort where people fly and shoot “halcyon beams” at one another.
If you like a book in which lots of strange things happen on top of each other, and you don’t mind that there’s no plot to speak of, or characterization, or pacing, then this might be your meat.
“There are some people- religious people, God-fearing people- who believe this Message comes from beings in space, entities, hostile creatures, aliens who want to harm us, enemies of Man.”
Contact- Carl Sagan
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