bookmeme

[sabotabby]

* Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions if you want to.
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

(The closest book is cool and intellectual, though.)

Lacan's definition of love ("Love is giving something one doesn't have...") has to be supplemented with: "...to someone who doesn't want it."

Comments

[apperception.livejournal.com]

Haha. Cynical 20th century continental asshats.

I should post my definition of love. I wonder if I could make it fit into one sentence, like an aphorism.

[sabotabby]

That's the only way to do it. Otherwise, you run the risk of being unintentionally (as opposed to intentionally) cheesy.

[genesayssitdown.livejournal.com]

page 56 in the closest book to me is a blank page! i have to go for second closest.

[sabotabby]

You should just post that.






This meme intentionally left blank.

[genesayssitdown.livejournal.com]

oh but this was such an exciting meme

[genesayssitdown.livejournal.com]

Again she shuddered nervously, grimacing in awareness of saying something wrong.

[rohmie.livejournal.com]

"They set a domestic interest rate above that of the U.S. dollar and guranteed a fixed exchange rate between the Thai baht and the U.S. dollar."

- From David Korten's The Post-Corporate World, Life After Capitalism

I was using the book for the quote below, which I have shoe horned-in behind the second paragraph of Chapter 6, which now reads:

... Again, the Fourteenth Amendment was originally written to give blacks the same civil rights as whites. But instead it was fancifully interpreted to conflate corporations with living, breathing human beings. The irony is magnified when you remember that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments were passed together. As David Korten wrote in The Post-Corporate World, Life After Capitalism:

The doctrine of corporate personhood creates an interesting legal contradiction. The corporation is owned by its shareholders and is therefore their property. If it is also a legal person, then it is a person owned by others and thus exists in a condition of slavery – a status explicitly forbidden by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. So is a corporation a person illegally held in servitude by its shareholders? Or is it a person who enjoys the rights of personhood that take precedence over the presumed ownership rights of its shareholders? So far as I have been able to determine, this contradiction has not been directly addressed by the courts.

Now you have to re-read Chapter 6.

[sabotabby]

Well, you need to send it to me. And poo, I forgot to mail you back everything this weekend. I got sucked into an IKEA black hole.

[rohmie.livejournal.com]

Well, if you haven't sent the comics back, you should still have it. The chapter is otherwise unchanged.

Also, this gets added to Chapter 1, right after "Cheer the alma mater louder than the scholars and then question their school spirit or belonging." Since this will not see print before the election, I have written it accordingly:

Here is another classic example. In the last presidential election, country singer John Rich claimed that Johnny Cash would support John McCain if he were still alive (Johnny Cash, not John McCain). It turns out that Cash was actually a huge Democrat. This may seem like an understandable mistake, except that “The Man in Black” literally wore his politics on his sleeve:

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,
Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,
But is there because he’s a victim of the times.

Does this sound like someone who would oppose welfare or support stiff sentencing? In fact, the song even has a slam on the Vietnam War – “Each week we lose a hundred fine young men” – so I cannot imagine that Johnny Cash would support continuing the quagmire in Iraq.

But this is not some isolated example or just one man’s gaffe. It is part of a larger pattern. This is how conservatives think – or rather feel. Something is considered true simply because they want to believe it, not because it is backed up by any facts. Needless to say, this dramatically affects their notions of what people and things mean and stand for: Hence Ebenezer Scrooge-like Evangelicals who scorn the poor as lazy and “patriots” who call anti-war activists “traitors.” Of course, all human beings are capable of such dogmatic wishful thinking, regardless of their politics, and everyone is certainly entitled to their opinion. But American conservatives compose a special case because their ideology opposes everything America is supposed to stand for. And that is not just my opinion: It is a long-ignored, objective fact.

I think you can be forgiven for being sucked into IKEA. Although, I think I am done with them for a while. I've decided to pursue a different computer chair buying strategy. Instead of buying cheap chairs and paying enormous shipping, I've decided to buy an expensive chair and get free shipping. This is the chair I've bought and am waiting for delivery. Although right after placing the order, I had a chance to sit in one of these H.R. Geiger-like ant-legged chairs and they are really comfy. The system of joints automatically adjusts to accommodate whoever sits in it. Obviously, one of my criteria was that the seat has no mesh or fabric for the cats to sink their claws into.

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

Hard to see which is the closest, really, because the shelf is in front of me. I'll close my eyes and touch one.

Okay, here it is. Page 56 is in fact blank, since page 55 is a plate. Page 57 doesn't have five sentences on it. If we take pages 54 and 57 as one and count five sentences, the fifth is mostly in Latin and the fourth is a few yards long. This is unhelpful. Here are the fourth and fifth together.

We live indeed in a thieving, cheating, and plundering Age: Cozening is become a topping Trade, only we have got a genteeler way of ſtealing now, than only to take a man's Horſe from under him on the Highway, and a little looſe Money out of his Pocket; our Rapparees are Men of better Breeding and Faſhion, and ſcorn to play at ſuch ſmall Game, they ſweep away a noble Eſtate with one ſlight Bruſh, and bid both the Gallows and Horſe-Pond defiance; and the Mob is not always juſt in this Point, for one Pick-Pocket deſerves a Horſe-Pond as well as another, without any regard to Quality or fine Clothes. But Dat Veniam Corvis, vexat cenſura Columbas, ſay the Latins.

[torontoteacher.livejournal.com]

It is a sad commentary on my life that the four closest books to me have neither 56 pages nor 5 sentences on a page. I would have to walk across the room to get a book that didn't have board pages and colourful pictures.

[shelestel.livejournal.com]

The meme's just very textocentric.

[captainmushroom.livejournal.com]

I feel your pain.

[shoocu-shoocu.livejournal.com]

Two books are equally close:

"Remember that these plates are about 100km (60+ mi) thick and thousands of kilometers across." (This refers to tectonic plates.)
--From Natural Disasters (textbook), 6th edition, by Patrick Abbott

The other book has page 56 blank, so from page 55:
"Of course, this pestilence in uniform, whose systematic plunder had condemned the souks to ruin, did not obey the orders of al-Mustazhir."
--From The Crusades through Arab Eyes, by Amin Maalouf

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

*snerk*

[reverendgraham.livejournal.com]

you're getting the same answer i already wrote elsewhere:

"left inserts space that aligns the following text with the left margin directly below a left-aligned floating image."

[rohmie.livejournal.com]

Off topic, have you heard of Li'l Nyet?

[sabotabby]

OMG, no. That's adorable.

[queerasmoi.livejournal.com]

"What if the person you are talking with just lost a job?"

That's my nearest book.

[seanmonster.livejournal.com]

Hasn't anyone told you that threats lose their impact when so often repeated, without ever actually acting on one of them?

Bluebeard to Bigby Wolf, Fables Vol. 3.

[captainmushroom.livejournal.com]

"Henshaw, gentle in sleep."

[ltmurnau.livejournal.com]

"During their time together, as he sat in the rear seat of the white Pontiac, he was never to see Xero's face, but fragments of his amplified voice reverberated among the deserted stands of the stadium, echoing through the departure bays of the air terminal."

- J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

[arnavtul.livejournal.com]

I do not agree with all Lacan says, especially about issues of sex and gender, but he does have a lot to say that makes sense to me about love and how love never really does work. I have never heard the part about "to someone who does not want it", where is this from?