wolves in the mirror

[freckles_and_doubt]

I wasn't going to post today, because really, five days in a row suggests unruly degrees of displacement, or angst, or narcissism, or something. But scroob tagged me with an interesting book meme, and who am I to resist?

"So here's how it is: you grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 123, go down five sentences, type out the next three for our reading pleasure... Then you tag three people."

OK. I'm in my office on campus, so possible books are the ones I'm teaching. In a pile next to my computer are, from the top down, Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, Storming the Reality Studio: A casebook of cyberpunk and postmodern fiction, and a photocopy of Charles Stross's "Lobsters", which doesn't have a Page 125 so is not much use to man or crustacean.

Page 123 of The Bloody Chamber puts us in the middle of "Wolf-Alice", just before the perfect embodiment of the Lacanian moment.

She rubbed her head against her reflected face, to show that she felt friendly towards it, and felt a cool, solid, immovable surface between herself and she - some kind, possibly of invisible cage? In spite of this barrier, she was lonely enough to ask this creature to try to play with her, baring her teeth and grinning; at once she received a reciprocal invitation. She rejoiced; she began to whirl round on herself, yapping exultantly, but, when she retreated from the mirror, she halted in the midst of her ecstacy, puzzled, to see how her new friend grew less in size.

Just for comparison: page 123 of Reality Studio is a cityscape etching by John Bergin. Page 124 doesn't have five sentences. I shall emulate the exteemed Scroob and go for page 125, which is the start of an extract from Rudy Rucker's Software, and has really short sentences so you get extra.

The digits on his watch winked at him, meaningless little sticks. He had to keep moving or he'd fall through the crust. On his left the traffic flickered past, on his right the ocean was calling through the cracks between buildings. He couldn't face going to his room. Yesterday he'd torn up the mattress.

Hmmm. Surreal. OK, I tag wytchfynder, and wolverine_nun, and tsukikoneko. Just because I can.

Comments

[ex-wytchfyn.livejournal.com]

The nearest book - Mikhail Bakunin's God and the State - doesn't have 123 pages, so I fell back on the next closest, David Cordingly's Under a Black Flag.

Mower was a Boston man, thirty years of age, "of short stature, thin favoured, and dark complexion," and he had good reason to be worried. No sooner had the pirates taken the ship than they decided to force Mower to join them. The methods which they used left him with little choice: "One of the pirates struck Mower many blows on the head with the helve of an axe, whereby his head was much bruised and bloodied, after which the same pirate forced him said Mower to lay his head down on the coamings of the hatch, and lifting the axe over his head swore if he did not sign their Articles immediately, he would chop his head off, the said Mower begging hard for his life."

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Good lord. Just in time to be not quite in time for Talk Like A Pirate Day. Stirring stuff.

[ex-wytchfyn.livejournal.com]

Yup, it's official. Accurately 'talking like a pirate' involves letting loose an unintelligible howl delivered in a blast of rum-soaked scurvy breath while you run a Frenchman through the neck. Now that is a glottal stop.