propagatin’
from memepool:
1. Grab the nearest book. 2. Open the book to page 23. 3. Find the fifth sentence. 4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
Holy crap. The book nearest to me right now is Heart of Darkness. There’s probably an outrageously offensive fifth sentence just waiting for me on page 23. Let’s see…
One…two..three…four…five. Shit. I knew it. I’m really tempted to just put the thing down and grab another book. Or just forget this exercise entirely. But here goes anyway:
“Well if a lot of mysterious niggers armed with all kinds of fearful weapons suddenly took to travelling on the road between Deal and Gravesend catching the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for them, I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts would get empty very soon.”
It’s interesting, though…having finally gotten around to reading the story (and I’m not quite done yet; it’s thick as syrup, slow reading), it’s easy to see how it’s managed to piss people off. But my edition has a lot of footnotes, and the historical background in the appendices takes up more space than the actual story…and so, looking at the footnotes, I learned that Deal and Gravesend are towns in England…so what sounded like dumb, outwardly-projected hatred suddenly twists around and turns into self-criticism (Marching around with fearsome weapons and enslaving villagers is exactly what the narrator’s outfit is there to do.) And there’s an early passage where he imagines an ancient Roman’s thoughts on the savage Angle tribes in England…it sounds like an obvious point to make now, I guess, but it struck me as a pretty interesting attitude for 1899.
Oh, and a quick google check confirms that other people have thought what I’ve been thinking–there’s a big ol’ homoerotic, sadomasochistic vibe running through this thing too…all that talk about bodies–men’s bodies; the female characters aren’t really described too clearly at all–and torture. Self-hatred on a whole lot of levels…
‘Course, however you come at it, in 19th-century terms, the narrator’s a heroic explorer; in modern terms, he’s a war criminal with a conscience….
“Popol est tout le temps en colère.”, which means “Popol is always angry.” The book is Au-delà des peupliers, a novel that one of my relatives wrote about growing up in the “Venise Verte” (“Green Venice”) part of France.
amble v. stroll, promenade, saunter, dawdle, meander, walk, ramble, drift, wander, gad.
Yeah, the nearest book was a thesaurus.