Thursday, January 04, 2007

Rabbits and Dens of Iniquity

Ms. Spots, although she did not wish to be medicated and allowed much of what I was syringing into her mouth to drip onto my father's bathrobe, promptly felt the benefit and soon ate some hay. This morning she devoured many greens and bounced about with considerable energy. We are much relieved.

Jesse prompts me to participate in a game where one must:

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.

Here goes:
The elaborate decoration and extensive equipment of these establishments explain the high prices levied on the clients. The interior decoration of the great fin-de-siecle tolerances was extravagant. Many keepers were determined to renovate their establishments on the occasion of the universal exhibitions of 1878, 1889, and above all 1900. Again, although picturesque description is not my purpose here, I shall quote from the accounts of some of these establishments to be found in the Meunier report:
"A Swiss rock, with a marvelous grotto and a rustic staircase, is one of the curiosities and one of the mysteries of the establishment [situated in the rue Chabanais]. [...]"

--Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850

Well... that was the book closest to the laptop and it did not serve too badly. I don't suppose that Textiles of the Arts & Crafts Movement would have been quite so intriguing. (It now dawns on me that I can't count and quoted five sentences, but the hell with it.)
I tag Kristen, P'tit-Loup, and Rabbit Girl.

5 Comments:

Blogger Julia said...

Glad you hit the 5th sentence or we would have missed the rock and grotto. Happy New Year!

January 04, 2007 10:33 PM  
Blogger Karla said...

Consider thyself also tagged to participate in this one!

And, as if the rock and grotto were not enough, another establishment had "a very rich Greek temple" and was an "electric fairyland." I'm not sure how to envision these combined... the Parthenon covered in Christmas lights?

January 05, 2007 7:00 AM  
Blogger P'tit-Loup said...

What a fun tag. I'll be glad to oblige!

January 07, 2007 12:13 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Funny, I read half of this post yesterday, got distracted and came back today as I was very intrigued by the game. I didn't realize until I finished reading today that I had been tagged. I'm happy to take part!

January 07, 2007 8:55 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The book nearest to hand happened to be the Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth and page 123 poses some problems for the sentence rule. It’s in the middle of a long poem called A Prolegomenon to a Theodicy. Of course it is unpunctuated, but I can kind of make out the shadowy images of sentences. Anyway here’s an excerpt starting at a section break in the middle of the page. Rexroth was fond of Andre Breton, and I suspect some of Breton’s list poems are lurking behind this one:

III
This is the winter of the hardest year
And did you dream
The white the large
The slow movement
The type of dream
The terror
The stumbled stone
The winter the snow that was there
The neck and the hand
The head
The snow that was in the air
The long sun
The exodus of thought
The enervated violin
The oiled temples
The sing song and the sung
The lengthy home
The trundling endless stairs
The young stone
Homing and the song
The air that was there
Flayed jaws piled on the steps
The twirling rain
And laying they repeat the horizon
Ineffably to know how it goes swollen and then unsowllen….

January 08, 2007 6:25 AM  

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