wherein I justify this blog's name

Grabbed from Lady Crumpet

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.



The Woolf's visit was a great success.

Just my luck. I grab the third volume of The Letters of Virginia Woolf: 1923--1928, and manage to find the most mundane and boring sentence in it. Not any of her letters to Vita Sackville-West or any of the Bloomsbury folks. Just the editors filling in the background. And I even cheated. I'm in the library, so technically the closest book is the Cartoon History of Britain.

I've had T.S. Eliot in my head all day. Prufock, specifically. It's a bit odd.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

It keeps popping into my head, all out of order. Not the perkiest stuff to have on a constant loop.

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create

And I haven't read Eliot in forever, so I don't know why he's stalking me today. I suppose I'm in an alienated-gloomy-Modernist frame of mind. I'm trying to work on my philosophy paper, trying to find something to say about multiplicitous identities and culture and building coalitions and resistance and I'll be sitting there thinking--

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

So much for being productive. I'd much rather have Ogden Nash in my head, he's funny and it's too beautiful outside to have a depressed ex-pat poet blathering at you all day.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table

Gah. Go away you cranky pseudo-Brit! I'd rather hang out with Dorothy Parker.