A book meme
Rob, over at Consider Phlebas, presents this meme for our delight and delectation…
- Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
- Open the book to page 123.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the next three sentences.
- Tag five people.
Well, I have a bookshelf right next to my desk here, and there are plenty of books of more than 123 pages. So it’s a tad difficult to say which one is “nearest”. Therefore I’ve decided to grab three; a novel, a psychoanalytic text, and something from the bottom two shelves… the psychedelic section.
First up, the fiction…
He did not feel any temptation to tell lies to her. It was even a sort of love offering to start off by telling the worst.
“I hated the sight of you,” he said, “I wanted to rape you and then murder you afterwards.”
George Orwell | Nineteen Eighty-Four
Then the text-book…
One thing most contemporary critics and psychoanalysts would agree upon is that biological differentiations are inadequate, too many people seeming to cross over, at the psychical level, the “hard and fast” lines of biologically determined sexual difference. We thus begin with the hypothesis that there are males with feminine structure (defined in some way) and females with masculine structure (defined in some way).
What is of interest in Lacan’s way of defining masculine and feminine structure?
Bruce Fink | The Lacanian Structure: Between Language and Jouissance
And finally the more subversive text…
“Give us the child until he is five, and we will have him for life,” bragged some 18th Century Jesuit. The Jesuit order of that time, as Aldous Huxley later noted sardonically, educated Voltaire, Diderot, and the Marquis de Sade; obviously their techniques of brain-programming were not perfect. Nonetheless, most people in most societies do grow up as fairly accurate replicas of the previous generation.
Robert Anton Wilson | Prometheus Rising
I’ll not be tagging anyone with this. Run with it if you’re interested…