Posted
by Joel Mathis
December 23, 2006 at 8:54 a.m.
Tag, I'm It
[John B at Blog Meridian has tagged me with another book meme:][1]Find the nearest book. Name the title and author. Turn to p. 123. Post sentences 6-8. *Tag 3 more people.Here goes:My book is, no kidding, is ["Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy.][2] (John's blog is named after this book.) And I'm reading it on John's recommendation, after our exchange about McCarthy's "The Road" a month or two back.And here are sentences 6-8:_He does for I heard him do it. We cut a parcel of crazy pilgrims down off the Llano and the old man in the lead of them he spoke right up in dutch like we were all of us in dutchland and the judge give him right back. Glanton come near fallin off his horse._Which, if you lack context, must sound like complete gibberish.And now, three people:[Leslie][3] [Joe][4] [Emaw][5]Also, please consider yourself tagged and respond in the comments... [1]: http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2006/12/yet-another-book-meme.html [2]: http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-0679728759-0 [3]: http://www.lawrence.com/blogs/art/ [4]: http://kansascitysoil.blogspot.com/ [5]: http://3oclockam.blogspot.com/index.html
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bloozman (anonymous) says…
"Exploding" by Stan Cornym:
"Nowadays, such marketing play seems to have become unthinkable. When I meet those still working at a label like Warner Bros., their reacton is the same: a hug and a whispered, 'Stan, it's just not like it was. Now it's just about money and covering your ass.'"
Cronym, who spent 34 years with Warner Bros. Records since its inception in the late '50s, subtitled his book "The highs, hits, hype, heroes and hustlers of the Warmer Music Group."
leslie (Leslie vonHolten) says…
"Vintage Murakami," a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami. (My boss recommended and loaned the book to me--the benefits of working for a Japanese literature professor!)
Page 123 is a partial page (the end of a story), so I will post sentences 4-6:
"I went back to the low-pitched tent in the shelter of a dune, lay down beside Sargeant Hermano, and closed my eyes. This time sleep came to take me--a deep sleep that all but pulled me by the ankles to the bottom of the sea."
I've never done a meme, so do I tag 3 people here, or on my blog? Well, I'll do it here:
lazz
bwoodard
monkeywrench (Tim!)
monkeywrench (Tim vonHolten) says…
leslie, already breaking rules.
anyway, here goes.
"The Areas of My Expertise," by John Hodgman
John Hodgman is the "PC" guy on the "mac and pc" apple ads, and now a frequent contributor on "the daily show."
unfortunately, i too must break rules due to shortcomings by the author. page 123 is two sentences:
"This sign had never been seen before May 2, 1932, when it suddenly appeared on boxcars and on the doors of lint shops across the nation, and in stranger, bolder places as well: carved into mashed potatoes at roadside diners, chalked onto policement's backs, and, most famously, stamped into an Iowan cornfield on such an enormous scale that it was reputed to be seen by the president in his Super-Copter, seventy-five feet above the earth. Hoover was said to have been so unnerved by the sight that he dropped the giant turkey leg he was gnawing and in a thin voice exclaimed, 'So it has come: The wandering men will kill us all.' He began constructing his pneumatic militia the very next day."
monkeywrench (Tim vonHolten) says…
oops, i have to tag people? shit.
lori
scarymanilow
edie
monkeywrench (Tim vonHolten) says…
oh, and it was sentences 1-3, not 1-2, for those who would quibble. my apologies.
lori (anonymous) says…
Well, I'm almost embarrassed to post what I am reading right now, which is conveniently lying on the computer table next to me. Jai is into comics, so we've been trying to comb the library for stuff she might like. I think she's read all of Asterix and Obelix, the Far Side, and Get Fuzzy that the library offers. So now we are on to Bloom County. And I've been sucked into reading them, too.
Author: Berke Breathed
Title: "Bloom County Babylon: Five Years of Basic Naughtiness"
Page 123, Sentences 6-8, from Oliver Wendell Jones:
"100% original! A first! Truly unique!"
Tagging:
thetomdotdot
godjilla
mrs. cup o joel
thetomdotdot (anonymous) says…
"The Bearded Dragon Manual"
Phillipe de Vosji
New additions should be isolated for at least a few weeks and have fecals run on at least three samples over a period of weeks before being judged to be parasite-free.
A word of warning: Sulfa drugs should not be indiscriminately administered to every sick bearded dragon and should be used only if coccidia have been diagnosed.
Tagging:
Ladylaw
Mitzibel
Dazie
clayhill70 (anonymous) says…
Quest. The essence of humanity.
By Charles Pasternak
If bravery in humans is sometimes driven by spiritual aspirations,
the opposite, cowardice, at times underlies material pursuits: in
men who use others to do dangerous work for them in order to
gain riches. Acquisitiveness is surely a facet of quest, as the
word implies, and I return to the subject of wealth in Chapter 9.
ladylaw (Terry Bush) says…
The tom, I am going to get you b/c now I'll embarras myself:
Reading (again) "Medicinal Wild Plants of the Prairie" by Kelly Kindscher.
p 123 lines 6-8 say "The Blackfeet name for the alum root, Heiachera parvifolia Nutt. ex. Torr & Gray , is 'apos-ipoco' (tastes dry)(McClintock, 1923, p 320). The Chyenne name for the alum root, H. cylindrica var. ovalifolia (Nutt. ex Torr & Gray) Wheelock, is 'e hyo' isse' e yo' (Yellow medicine).
Honestly, it has more interesting parts........
mrs_cup_o_joel (anonymous) says…
"Degunking Your Mac" by Joli Ballew
p. 123, 6-8
"If other users access your Mac and have accounts, and if you want those users to be able to access the fonts you install, select For All Users Of This Computer instead. // It's important to delete fonts you don't need because having too many fonts not only slows down how fast your computer works, it slows down how fast you work. There's no reason to have multiple versions of the same font or fonts that are the same but have different names."
Yes, Joel's wife is a geek. :)
tag!
j_d
morgana
OtherJoel
edie_ (anonymous) says…
Me and the old man are on our way out to Texas for X-mess but here's my dish. Careful. It's *highly* cerebral.
Television Horror Movie Hosts
by Elena M. Watson
"Another week featured a talent show in which the Frankenstein monster did a Jolson impersonation and the Wolf Man sang 'Blue Moon.' But when they ran low on gags they could always resort to what Kerry Gammill calls having 'a monster walk spookily towards the camera.'
" 'Come to think of it,' Gammill says, 'we had an awful lot of monsters walking spookily toward the camera.' "
CafeSiren (anonymous) says…
The closest book was actually "Scrambled Eggs Super, " which has no page 123, so i'm going for Saramago's "All the Names," which I just bought, but have not read. These will, in fact, be my first three sentences of the book, so here goes:
...and, I guess not. Sentence #3 begins on line three of the page, and does not terminate anywhere on said page, so no sentences 6-8.
Darn it. Stymied at every turn.
Happy holidays!
Joel (Joel Mathis) says…
CafeSiren: Showoff.
Happy holidays!
bwoodard (Bill Woodard) says…
"Special Topics in Calamity Physics" by Marisha Pessl
*In this passage, our heroine, Blue van Meer, is describing a particularly harrowing bout of nausea...
"It was like black seawater overtaking a crimson Titanic stateroom, as recounted in one of Dad's favorite autobiographies of all time, the gripping eyewitness account 'Black in My Mind, Yellow in My Legs' (1943) by Herbert J.D. Lascowitz, who finally, in his ninety-seventh year, came clean about his Machiavellian behavior aboard the legendary ocean liner, admitting he strangled an unidentified woman, stripped her body, donned her clothes in order to pretend he was a woman with child, thereby securing a choice spot for himself on one of two remaining lifeboats. I tried to roll over and stand, but the carpet and the couch swerved upward and then, as shocking as lightning striking inches from my shoes, I was sick: cartoonishly sick all over the table and the carpet and the paisley couch by the fireplace and Jade's black leather Dior sandals, even on the coffee-table book, 'Thank God for the Telephoto Lens: Backyard Photos of the Stars' (Miller, 2002). There were also small but identifiable splatters on the cuffs of Nigel's pants."
Whew. I think that sentences 6 and 7 may be two of the longest in the whole book (which, by the way, is pretty damned good)!
OK. Nominations:
chris wristen (cwrist)
jill ensley (godjilla)
dave loewenstein (thirty-eight)
CafeSiren (anonymous) says…
Joel -- "Show-off"? It's not *my* fault that the man writes long, run-on sentences (I'm three chapters in now, btw, and it's shaping up to be a good book). Unless, of course, you were referring to the Seuss.
mitzibel (Misty Nuckolls) says…
I'm slogging and Wiki-ing (because classical history was thought an unnecessary subject by my rural school board) my way through "First Man in Rome", by Colleen McCullough:
"Yet Sulla had known three Gaviuses. Well, the Gavius who had drunk with his father and the Gavius who had given Sull no mean education aroused feelings in him he did not mind owning; but Stichus was very different. Had he suspected Clitumna was being honored by a visit from her awful nephew he wouldn't have come home, and he stood for a moment in the atrium debating what his next course of action should be--flight from the house, or flight to some part of it where Stichus did not stick his sticky beak."
lazz (anonymous) says…
Later that day I passed a little village -- don't remember the name. The town was only seven or eight houses wedged between the railroad tracks. The road that went through the center of town had only person to entertain, a weekend drifter with his thumb set on getting to the next town.
--sentences 6-8, p. 123, of "Hobo: A Young Man's Thoughts on Trains and Tramping in America," by Eddy Joe Cotton. (Better known as the frontman for the raucous revue The Yarddogs Road Show, one of the highlights of Waka 06.)
Out-of-it admission: what is "meme"?
monkeywrench (Tim vonHolten) says…
"Clitumna."
morganalefay (anonymous) says…
Wow. I was tagged! Cool. I'm geekier than you, mrs_cup_o_joel. Here's my book:
"The German Aesthetic Tradition" by Kai Hammermeister:
p. 123, sentences 6-8: "Since the sublime depends on the willful negation of the threatening aspects and, thus, willful overcoming of the will even before cognition can be achieved, beauty is conceived as cognition without struggle. Obviously, Schopenhauer's theory of beauty is also no less problematic."
Cheers!
I tag:
gccs14r
El_Borak
quinno
gccs14r (anonymous) says…
The closest book to hand is "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins.
p. 123, sentences 6-8: "He was drawing his opponents towards him so that his punch, when it came, struck the harder. The punch, of course, was Darwin's effortless explanation of exactly how the eye evolved by gradual degrees. Darwin may not have used the phrase 'irreducible complexity', or 'the smooth gradient up Mount Improbable', but he clearly understood the principle of both."
I tag:
OnShakedown
Shelby
bloozman
Joel, you've created a geometric progression here. If we persist, we'll run out of registered users. If it continues beyond that, we'll eventually run out of humans. Then who knows what kinds of posts we'll get.
j_d (Jason R. Dunavin) says…
The book is Sun Tzu's "Art of War" as translated by Lionel Giles (1910).
Sentences 6-8, p 123: "On the field of battle, the spoken word does not carry enough: hence the institution of gongs and drums. Nor can ordinary objects be seen clearly enough: hence the institution of banners and flags. Gongs and drums, banners and flags, are means by which the ears and eyes of the host may be focussed on one particular point."
No tags; everyone I know has already been tagged, and it's time to stop the runaway exponentiation
morganalefay (anonymous) says…
I just realized that I only posted sentences 6 and 7 from Hammermeister's book.
Here's sentence number 8:
"For him [Schopenhauer], beauty not only characterizes the successful work of art but also turns out to be an attribute of the ideas themselves that the genius contemplates in his ecstatic vision, as well as an attribute of every nonartistic object insofar as it can serve as an initiator of pure contemplation."
Wow. That was a long sentence.
Cheers again!
mitzibel (Misty Nuckolls) says…
Yeah, Tim, I snickered like a pubescent schoolboy too ;)
quinno (Patrick Quinn) says…
_Against The Day_, Thomas Pynchon:
"....You don't test when there's ships out, not even if it's one defenseless little cutter--"
"Defenseless! She was fully rigged up as an assault ship, sir!"
"--cruising along as innocent as any pleasure craft, till you assaulted _her_, with your infernal rays."
lazz (anonymous) says…
We need a lot more fiction that includes "till you assaulted her with your infernal rays."
Dazie (Aileen Dingus) says…
Aack- I just found out I've been tagged...
Closest book? I'm at work. Um... Corporate Express Office Products Sourcebook.
Page 123 (Calculators, desktop)
6-8
Display Angle Kick Stand Tilts Angled Tilts
Memory 4-key 4-key 4-key 3-key
Cost/Sell/Margin . . .
sorry. I have better books at home.
I tag Marcy and Xprt... Everybody else I know has been tagged.
OnShakedown (Chris Tackett) says…
book: Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie by Hunter S. Thompson
pg. 123: A letter to "Dollar Bill" Greider
lines 6, 7 and 8:
"He can't even talk. Did you see what those freaks wrote about the president? It's horrible."
Hmm, for HST that's not too entertaining. Especially because those lines come from what he'd imagine the Bush campaign staffers would say if Thompson did to Greider what he says he'll do in lines 1 and 2.
"You treacherous jabbering pimp! I have people in Washington who will jerk you up by the back of your pants and shoot you full of angel dust and slam you onto the Bush campaign bus with your nails painted pink and your mouth blazing fiery red lipstick and your fly open and the tips sliced off of your thumbs."
anyway, i'm with j_d that this will have to end soon, but i'll go ahead and
TAG!
editer (phil)
trainstop9
feeble
cfdxprt (anonymous) says…
Dazie,
You caught me at work, and since my "book" doesn't have concurrent page numbers, I'll use 1-23:
pro-STAR Commands Reference
For the first three models listed above, the user defines the reactants and products participating in a chemical reaction via commands in the local source set. Scalar variables representing the concentration of each constituent are specified by
commands in the scalar mapping set. Reactions that use the PPDF model are defined by separate commands grouped together in the PPDF set.
It gets really interesting in Chapter 2 where they dive into the syntax on how to implement that stuff...
beatle919 (Marcy McGuffie) says…
Kurt Vonnegut: "A Man Without a Country"
Crap: Page 123 has an illustration of an epitaph
"Life is no way to treat an animal."
beatle919 (Marcy McGuffie) says…
Kurt Vonnegut: "A Man Without a Country"
Crap: Page 123 has an illustration of an epitaph
"Life is no way to treat an animal."
scary_manilow (anonymous) says…
You asked for it:
Maneuvering in vessels camouflaged in naval-style "dazzle painting," whereby areas of the structure could actually disappear and reappear in clouds of chromatic twinkling, scientist-skyfarers industriously gathered their data, all of deepest interest to the enterprisers convened leagues below, at intelligenct centers on the surface such as the Inter-Group Laboratory for Opticomagnetic Observation (I.G.L.O.O.), a radiational clearing-house in Norhtern Alaska, which these days was looking more like some Lloyd's of the high spectrum, with everyone waiting anxiously for the next fateful Lutine announcement.
"Dangerous conditions lately."
Hell, some days you'd give the world for a nice easygoing Indian attack."
--Thomas Pynchon, "Against the Day"
I refuse to tag. Sorry.
editer (Phil Cauthon) says…
The book nearest me is also Hodgman's (see monkeywrench's post)
Lazz: "Meme, coined in 1976 by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, refers to a unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to another" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
Tag:
Hodgman's publicist
A friend of http://www.myspace.com/richarddawkins
murderama
thirtyeight (Dave Loewenstein) says…
Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild"
"But despite his aversion to money and conspicuous consumption, Chris's political leanings could not be described as liberal.
Indeed, he delighted in ridiculing the policies of the Democratic Party and was a vocal admirer of Ronald Regan. At Emory he went so far as to co-found a College Republican Club.
Tag:
Christo
D. Byrne
Elvira