I can't ever really play these. There are no books here in the office except a shelf-full of dictionaries of various sorts. And a couple almanacs.

::::sulk/sigh:::::::::

Yay, but the nearest book beyond that one is still some freakin' tech manual. AARRRGHHH....

Will school ever end?? I can't even find any of my good books. The ones with plots and characters and NO test at the end.

LOL....oh, well, ok, if you don't mean the literal NEAREST book.

"Yet, while such attempts give insight into altered consciousnes in Western naive subjects, they do not indicate what a "shaman" may do with experiences so derived or how she or he interacts with spirits."

There, that from the one I left lying on the table.

Ooops, sorry. It is from "Nine Worlds of Seid-Magic: Ecstasy & Neo-Shamanism in North Europeon Paganism" by ethnographer Jenny Blain.

My latest study project, trying to find my way in the dark. Many of the techniques she writes of mirror some of my own experience in part. That particular quote happens to be from the section about practicianers who use mind-altering substances.

I never do this meme, because right now, the book closest to me is Peter Sotos' Tick, and no one really wants to read page 56. Or any other page, probably. It's even more offensive than his usual banter.

Sweetie, I do read Sotos for pleasure. There are very few authors whose books I consistently pre-order, especially in limited edition. And especially for the prices the books command (the most expensive to date, Selfish, Little: The Annotated Lesley Anne Downey, ran me $70-- but given what some of his books go for on ebay these days, that's a bargain).

Since this one only asks for one sentence (I usually see it asking for the next seven), and since this one also makes a great six-word story:

"The father handed her the condom."

Wherever your mind takes you, the actual next six sentences are probably far worse.

Yeah. "The" takes away necessary context (which is a hallmark of Sotos' writing-- he's very detached about just about everything he writes), leaving it ambiguous as to whether it's "father" in a religious sense, "her" father, someone else's father, etc. (Though Sotos didn't really get into the "someone else's father" examination until much more recently-- there's quite a bit about it in Lordotics, the book that came out last month.)

For the record, though, it's "her". And if you went where I think you went, you were off track, but not by much. It's not incest-- her father is her pimp.

(Have I mentioned that despite publishers and critics consistently referring to Sotos' work as novels, it's all nonfiction? At least "nonfiction" in the sense of, say, Bukowski, rather than, say, Elie Wiesel or James Frey or the Running with Scissors guy or anyone else whose "memoirs" were made up...)

Bukowski wrote autobiographical novels that he never claimed were anything but fiction-- though, in fact, they weren't. All the others wrote semi-autobiographical novels they claimed were true, and were later discovered not to be.