Saturday, March 1, 2008

Tag! I'm it!

TS, one of those magnificent bastards at Instaputz, has tagged me with a literary challenge. Here are the rules:
• look up page 123 in the nearest book
• look for the fifth sentence
• then post the three sentences that follow that fifth sentence on page 123.
I giggled with all the mirth I can muster at such an ungodly hour and grabbed Sam Myers The Blues is My Story by Sam Myers and Jeffrey Horton from the sidepocket of the lap desk, thinking "How fortuitous! I get to promote a friends book!" (Jeff is the father of Alex Horton, who writes the wonderful Army of Dude and is a frontpager at VetVoice, and still finds time to occasionally crosspost some of his stuff to Watching Those We Chose) and turned to page 123. My glee was quickly dashed. Page 123 is the end of a chapter, and has five lines plus one word. (Note that this did not prevent me from forging ahead with my whoring ways. I knew Sam Myers from my tenure at the Grand Emporium, and though he is gone now, his music lives on.)

Shameless promotion taken care of, I plucked Ye will say I am no Christian The Thomas Jefferson/John Adams Correspondence on Religion, Morals, and Values edited by Bruce Braden.

Denied again.

And down to two choices unless I made a trip to the bookshelf. If I go with Johnathan Alter's wonderful The Defining Moment FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope my reputation as a thinking lefty blogger is safe for another day. If I go with Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay, my cover is blown - y'all know what a sick freak I am at my very core.

'Twas quite a dilemma...I opened both books. Johnathan Alter won out because that page of Dexter was a conversation, and I didn't want to reproduce all the punctuation. Besides, that's a really good page of the Alter book.
He added that Hoover was a great humanitarian who became a sort of timid Boy Scout leader (could FDR have been thinking if Lippman defining him along the same lines?). Hoover had been a figure of great respect, but now, FDR told Tugwell, he was surrounding himself with guards to keep away the revolutionaries. There was nothing left inside the man but jelly.
Now - who to tag? This is the easy part - SkyGirl, you're it.

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