3.31.2008

Fear of a Number

From Dan's Blog I bring meme:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people and post a comment here once you post it to your blog so I can come see!

From the always excellent FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS by Hunter S. Thompson, a surprisingly tame passage:

"Killed?" He almost whispered the word.
"In Vietnam!"

6 comments:

Dan L-K said...

That almost makes me want to see if you'd get a similarly innocuous result for Naked Lunch.

Anonymous said...

I have Naked Lunch (picked it up for about a dollar last month, haven't read), so here goes:

"You have, like Housman's barefoot shameless catamite The Congealed Shropshire Ingenue set your fleet foot on the silo of change. …But you can't kill those Shropshire Boys …been hanged so often he resist it like a gonococcus half castrate with penicillin rallies to a hideous strength and multiplies geometric…"

I have no idea what that was about, but I can't wait to find out.

Dan L-K said...

From my dozen-year-old recollection, I don't know you're going to get a whole lot more context than that; it isn't that the whole book is written that way, just that it's not exactly linear. Or, for that matter, plotted much at all. (I think at least some editions include the tag "an anti-novel." It means it.)

Unknown said...

oh! How did I not think of rooting through some Burroughs?! Now IM curious to try one of the more linear books like Western Lands or City of Red Night (V -- these are far more accesible reads. Naked Lunch is fun to flip through and read random bits. there really is no context -- its a cut-up)

queenmob said...

This is the only english book I could find in my shelf: Lovecrafts at the Mountains of Madness:

"They were, indeed, as lacking - in completeness as most of those we had unearthed - though it grew plain from the thick, dark green pool gathering around them that their incompleteness was of infinitely greater recency. There seemed to be only four of them, whereas Lake's bulletins would have suggested no less than eight as forming the group which had preceded us. To find them in this state was wholly unexpected, and we wondered what sort of monstrous struggle had occurred down here in the dark.

Penguins, attacked in a body, retaliate savagely with their beaks, and our ears now made certain the existence of a rookery far beyond. "

Unknown said...

Wow, thats wonderfully unsettling. Especially the bit about the killer penguins. Yay!