The lovely and talented Kate Diamond tagged me on the “page 56″ meme a while ago, and I have slacked. Anyway:
Here are the rules: Grab the nearest book. Open the book to page 56. Find the fifth sentence. Post the text of the next two to five sentences in your journal/blog along with these instructions.
Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the closest. Tag five other people to do the same.
She walked down to the road that bordered the Tech Area, pulling the wagon behind her, leaving parallel trails in the dust. It was hot, and the wagon made walking a little awkward, but she was looking forward to seeing what might be in the dump. You never knew.
That’s from The Green Glass Sea, by Ellen Klages.
I’ll tag… Ruthling, Martini-Corona, Randy, ams16, and DiceyTillerman.
3 responses so far ↓
1 rebecca // Oct 20, 2008 at 4:02 pm
I’m trying to be non-memey over there, but I’ll happily do it here (and page 56 is footnotes, hee!):
“These anxieties about the body were complicated by medical theories on sex and gender. Women were considered to be generally more vulnerable to pollution than men were, because women’s bodies were assumed to be more open to the world than men’s and the boundaries of their bodies more readily transversible.” Bodies Out of Bounds, ed. Jana Evans Braziel & Kathleen LeBesco
2 Martini-Corona // Oct 20, 2008 at 4:05 pm
I did this a while ago when LJ user eeyorecol posted hers… but I posted it in her comments, as opposed to in my own post… anyway, here it is again.
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The closest reading material to me is many many back issues of The New England Journal of Medicine. The closest actual book is No End in Sight, which I grabbed off the book review “free copies” truck about a year ago but haven’t read yet. Page 56, sentence 5, is part of a transcript of an interview with journalist James Fallows:
“The November 2002 issue of my magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, carried an article by me that we actually rushed to get on our Web site in August, you know, three months early, because it was done then. And the title was “The Fifty-First State.” And the argument was, if we went into Iraq, then actually conquering it would be fairly easy, and the complications would happen after that, and we’d be in for ten years or more of real… a real handful there. And this was based on extensive interviews with a lot of people, who were veterans in past occupations, laying out a sort of day-by-day and week-by-week timetable of what you could expect: from the need to provide public order during the first couple of days after the invasion, to six months or so after that, having jobs re-created, reconstituting a security force, and so on.”
Ooof.
3 scott // Oct 20, 2008 at 6:22 pm
I know you didn’t tag me, but it sounded like a fun game; and an especially endearing/annoying one for me to play, little dissertation-writer I am. Little did I realize that the actual nearest book wasn’t the second-nearest one I in fact immediately reached for (Hans-Georg Gadamer’s /Philosophical Hermeneutics/, which would have been a particularly endearing/annoying choice). Rather, it was /The Gnostic Bible/.
On p. 56 we find ourselves in the Gospel of Thomas. And the fifth sentence is saying 48:
“Yeshua [Jesus] said,
“If two make peace with each other in one house,
“they will tell the mountain, ‘Move,’
“and the mountain will move.”
(Exegesis available upon request.)
(For the record, the Gadamer would have been, “Indeed, everything we learn takes place in language games. This is not to say that when we speak we are ‘only playing’ and do not mean it seriously. Rather, the words we find capture our intending, as it were, and dovetail into relations that point out beyond the momentariness of our act of intending.”)
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