MG of DS* has called on me to serve Blogistan. The rules of the meme:
1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.
I keep a few books in one of the "decorative" shelfs on my junky Value City desk, and the closest to me was William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity. I fear this passage will set most of you to snoozing:
This, though historically important, seems poetically rather trivial, but the book which may be said to have been the origin of Elizabethan literature has a more complex and more certainly intended ambiguity. In the Shepheardes Calendar the same shepherds appear in precisely the three capacities that are treated of in Herbert's poem, as lovers, as courtiers, and as divines. And in the Faerie Queene, by the process I have just considered, this variety of meaning has been blurred into generalisation, and you can read all kinds of political and religious interpretations, indeed and interpretations that come naturally to you, into a story offered as interesting in itself, and as giving an abstracted vision of all the conflicts of humanity.
Speaking of ambiguity, rule #3 should be omitted and instead, #4 should say "post sentences 6-8."
I call on Remember the Midwest, Avant/Chicago, Gerry Fisher, Stephen Marc Beaudoin, and NPR's Margaret Kelley.
*my mind played a trick on me and wrongfully initialed Deceptively Simple as DC. Shoot, no OC reference this time.
