Everybody’s doing it (and I’m pretty sure I’ve done it before). This time I’m crediting Terrance.
1. Find the nearest book.
2. Turn to page 123.
3. Go to the fifth sentence on the page.
4. Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog.
5. Name the book and the author, and tag three more folks.
Lived experience, in other words, serves as fodder for the continuation of another’s epistemology, even when it is recorded in a “contestatory” position to its relation to realism and the overarching structure of the profession. While cultural criticism can pretend that the profession does not exist, its various voices must surely question any conflation of the professional model with one universal and world historical. The relation between local and given knowledge is obviously too problematic to allow for such an easy slippage, which is furthermore the ground on which the postcolonial can be abused to become an allegory for any one of the pigeonholes constructed for multiculturalism.
From Women, Autobiography, and Theory: A Reader, edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. From the essay “Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition” by Sara Suleri.
I used this book for a class on American autobiographies, specifically for an essay on the use of first person plural in Native American women’s autobiography. The essay I used discusses the relationship the “I” and “we” selves and it’s formation of representative subjective communities in autobiographical works. Academic speak, wow. It’s been awhile.
What’s funny is that the closet book to me was the Yellow Pages phone book, and page 123 is a list of churches.
Your turn, navel-gazers.
“Ford is extremely critical of the accomodations and living conditions with which he and the other warrant officers were provided. While this may appear petty, given the circumstances, it is enlightening (although not entirely surprising) to learn that such tensions arose between the two ships’ companies.
Ford’s journal probably reveals much more about the journalist than do any of the contemporary officers’ journals from the Franklin search.”
William Barr, “A Warrant Officer in the Arctic: The Journal of George Ford, 1850-1854″, in Alan Frost and Jane Simpson, eds., Pacific Empires: Essays in Honor of Glyndwr Williams (Vancouver: UBC Press), 1999.
“The coral atolls in Mangareva lagoon had no good raw stone at all, and even the volcanic islands offered only relatively coarse-grained basalt. That was adequate for building houses and garden walls, using as oven stones and fashioning into canoe anchors and food pounders and other crude tools, but coarse-grained basalt yielded only inferior adzes.
Fortunately, that deficiency was spectacularly remedied on Pitcairn, the much smaller (2-1/2 square miles) and steeper extinct volcanic island lying 300 miles southeast of Mangareva.”
Jared Diamond, Collapse.
Say what you want about Diamond’s theories, but he sure can keep a reader’s attention.
Also, in my view, he gets points for beginning Collapse with Shelly’s Ozymandias:
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stampt on these lifeless things,
The hand that mockt them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that collosal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
A remark suddenly struck me with such force that I was surprised to hear myself utter it” “Why a generation in Walden Two must mean about twenty years!”"Instead of the usual thirty” said Frazier, laughing at my astonishment. “We get no end of amusement out of that, at the expense of the “big litter” people. We don’t sacrifice our women to a policy of maximal childbearing, but we equal or exceed their rate of propogation, and with healthy children too, by the simple expedient of getting three generations for two.”
Walden Two, by BF Skinner
Closest:
“During the middle of the twelfth century it must have been rapid. In 1163 Pope Alexander III held a council at Tours and at King Louis VII’s request issued an anathema against all who sheltered or had an dealings with the heretics of the Toulousain and Gascony. In 1165 the bishops of the south of France held a council at Lombez, where the heretic doctrines, the rejection of the Sacrements and of the Old Testament were once more condemned.”
Steven Runciman, “The Medieval Manichee: A Study of the Christian Dualist Heresy”, Cambridge University Press, Reprinted in 1999 (originally published 1947).
Slightly less close:
“Fourtunately– or even providentially– Jerome was quite simply the greatest scholar of his time in the West. Almost uniquely among his contemporaries and sucessors, he was a ‘three-language man,’ as Augustine once called him with unmistakable envy for his command of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Augustine himself– of whom it has been said that ‘whether Augustine be the greatest Latin writer or not, he is the greatest man who ever wrote in Latin’ — had only fragmentary knowledge of Greek and a second-hand aquaintence with Hebrew (plus just a smattering of some North African ‘Punic’ dialects).”
Jaroslav Pelikan, “Whose Bible Is It?: A Shot History Of The Scriptures”, Penguin Books, 2006.