Book Meme
I’ve been tagged! Nobody’s ever tagged me with a meme before. I’m giddy with excitement.
Thanks to BCB* Mandos, it is incumbent upon me to do the following:
Find the nearest book.
Turn to page 123.
Go to the fifth sentence on the page.
Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog.
Name the book and the author, and tag three more folks.
Upon first reading these instructions I was a tad flummoxed: my computer is in my study and I am surrounded with books. There’s an entire wall of books to my right, piles of current reading behind me, more piles of current reading on the stool, atlases at my feet — you get the picture. Was I going to have to pull out a fricking tape measure to determine which book was physically closest to some part of my body? Then I realized that the nearest book was barely three inches from my right hand: Balkan Ghosts, by Robert Kaplan. I’d forgotten it was even there since the poor thing was completely covered with about three years’ worth of birthday cards, deposit slips, free shipping offers from Bluestone Perennials that expired two years ago, and various other detritus, the whole edifice serving as a handy platform for my glasses.
Anyway, here’s the excerpt:
Petru Bejan was an editor of Timpul (The Times), a weekly newspaper born a few weeks after the December 1989 revolution and published by students at Jassy’s Cuza University. Timpul’s masthead bore the religious pronouncement Adeverat a inviat (”Truly He has risen”). The issue Bejan gave me to inspect contained several articles about the addition of Bessarabia to Romania in 1918 and about the “cultural genocide” perpetrated by the Russians in Bessarabia since World War II.
That’s from the chapter on Moldavia (the part inside Romania, not the independent Republic of Moldova).
I’m tagging three bloggers I don’t think have been memed yet: Richard, Victoria, and FlawedPlan. Feel the love.
*****
*Blog Cognitive Benchmark.
21 Responses to “Book Meme”
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simply wondered says:
hey there socksy
thanks for tagging me - i don’t wish to be smug (but that won’t stop me) but my god friend aradhana (the cute baby with the pen - god she writes well for a toddler) tagged me a little while ago; however i was so caught up in matters legal and business that i haven’t even been able to share a bottle of fonseca 63 with ehj2 (how busy is that!). so i will respond to both of you as soon as i can and perform this pointless and random task - you will understand that those are both positive terms in my book.
December 16th, 2006 at 5:33 am EST -
simply wondered says:
aradhana is of course my ‘good friend’ rather than a fellow cult member as my typo may have implied.
she may be a little woried about even the corrected term… -
ehj2 says:
Dear Violet,
Since I’ve already responded to the original meme/script, I get to proffer a better (in my mind) script — for extra credit.
The original meme would be improved by removing some its randomness. I’m more interested in knowing the most important books someone has read in the last few months. This would result in a list of books to consider for my own continued enlightenment.
The New American Militarism
How Americans Are Seduced By War
Andrew J. BacevichThe relationship of a population, its nation-state, and its military — is a narrative, a story, a script. Why America (a so-called peaceful and Christian and enlightened nation) invests so damned much in its military, why that military is so right-wing and fundy dominated, and why that military is so entwined with the free-market industrial “complex” — is a crucial story. Bacevich’s book is an excellent overview of some of the larger threads in that script and how they have evolved in the last decades.
The world is now on notice (and, as I’ve expressed here recently) … Democracies, with their tendency to build extremely efficient free-market economies, build really effective war machines, that they then turn over to “strong men” [why are they always idiots?] in times of crisis. The war of democratic Germany was not an accident, nor that of democratic Italy. The actions of democratic America in the past few years (the country in which — at least for a brief moment — resided the hopes of the world’s dreams) was not an accident.
Democracies (in their current institutional systems and justifying narratives) too easily succumb to mob unconsciousness — and all of that military power is just sitting there waiting to be used.
We desperately need to understand the current narrative and change it before it really gets us into trouble.
I would begin by aggressively supporting the notion of international law and the institutions of international diplomacy. Nation States (like America and Britain) are just too dangerous to be allowed to run around completely loose.
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ehj2 says:
And a second one:
Looking For Spinoza
Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain
Antonio DamasioThis book is just awesome. It links the most current understanding of the biological underpinnings of human thought to the ideas of a brilliant philosopher who, without laboratory or modern imaging technology, prefigured many of the ideas about consciousness now in play.
Antonio Damasio is the Van Allen Distinguished Professor and head of the department of neurology at the University of Iowa Medical Center and is an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California.
Spinoza, of course, is simply one of the greatest blinding lights of the last gazillion years. Just saying.
Please, if you have a chance, take a look at this text. It’s a beautiful (almost poetic) and accessible introduction to both neurobiology and a great ethical thinker, Spinoza.
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flawedplan says:
That was great, thank you! I confess to cheating a little on my page number but 123 didn’t have five paragraphs so I gave myself permission.
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Victoria says:
Awright already! I give in.
Thanks for helping to keep me somewhat ‘tethered’ to the world (as per our recent discussion).
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Mandos says:
Juju file, ignore the actual content:
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Burrow says:
All I can say is that I miss you. *sniff sniff* You never come play at my blog.
(I recently shared our credentials war with Laura from I’m not a feminist, but…we had good, much needed laughter.)
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Paul Tergeist says:
All I can say is that I miss you. sniff sniff You never come play at my blog.
-BurrowBecause you have hairy legs.
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Pastor Al E Pistle says:
More patriarchy.
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Burrow says:
Paul-you forgot prude.
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Pastor Al E Pistle says:
Paul-you forgot prude.
-BurrowI didn’t forget it, it simply never occurred to me. I doubt I have thought the word ‘prude’ ten times in my life and have never used it in conversation because the only image I get from it is a Del Monte prune.
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Samiam says:
This is pretty off-topic, but that homer Pistle seems intent on doing his best to derail the discussion anyway, and it’s the sort of thing I imagine you’d find interesting:
Q: What kind of a man refers to murder victims as “disgusting, drug-addled street whores”?
A: The kind of man who gets paid way more money than I’m ever likely to encounter in my lifetime to share his views with the nation in the pages of one of Britain’s best-loved daily newspapers. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pag.....hor_id=322 -
Samiam says:
Oops, for some reason that link breaks halfway through… If you copy and paste it into the address bar thing it should still work tho.
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Samiam says:
On second thought, Pastor Pistle is a wonderful old fellow…sort of the modern combination of Plato, Spinoza and Bush the Younger. I often look to him for advice.
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Paul Tergeist says:
I can’t post to the thread this came from….it’s closed. But I invite everyone to go back and read it again.
-T“Repeat after me: Iran is not a nuclear threat
Please read this post from Juan Cole: Iran Can Now Make Glowing Mickey Mouse Watches. Please memorize these points and share them with your friends — even print them up on T-shirts (the points, not your friends):
1. Iran is ten years away from being able to make a bomb.
2. Their nuclear program is a perfectly legal, civilian research effort to develop nuclear energy for power plants — not bombs.
3. The bragging from the hardliners in Iran is just to puff themselves up to other Iranians.
4. The “nuclear threat” talk from the Bush administration is more phony wag-the-dog war rhetoric — just like Iraq, but this time with even fewer weapons of mass destruction.Okay, that’s kind of a lot of words for a T-shirt, but I’ll work on it later.
Posted by Violet in Just Impeach the Stupid Freak, War.”
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Paul Tergeist says:
FLASH! Parthenogenesis makes males superfluous in lizards. What a revoltin’ development THIS is!
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Mandos says:
They probably always had the ability, at least Komodo dragons. Doubt this is some recent mutation. Other species have something similar to this too, IIRC.
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Violet says:
All I can say is that I miss you. sniff sniff You never come play at my blog.
Oh hey, don’t take it personally — I haven’t even been playing on my own blog. It’s been a rough month and some days all I can manage is just a quick check on the moderation queue to release people’s brilliant comments from purgatory.
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Paul Tergeist says:
They probably always had the ability, at least Komodo dragons. Doubt this is some recent mutation. Other species have something similar to this too, IIRC.
-MandosOf course they have. It just hasn’t been documented before because there was only supposed to be ONE immaculate conception. Turns out everyone can do it if there are no males about.
Shit! 50,000 years of patriarchy and it was all a joke on women! Hahahahahahaha.
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Burrow says:
I hope it gets better for you. Just wanted to let you know that I miss you dearly.
