Sherry Chandler

Oh now, this is magic

Oy! I’ve been meme-tapped by Mr. Lance Mannion and it turns out to be an offer I can’t refuse, because I don’t have to do anything original or clever or witty. All I have to do is look something up in a book.

I am so bad at memes.

Lance challenges me to the Meme of Page 123 and it goes thus:

• 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.

Here is why I was tapped for the meme:

because she is a poet and knows it and will therefore probably treat us to something lyrical, inspiring, and uplifting such as some verse by Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, Andrew Marvell

So, imagine my despair when I realized that, by the rules, I was going to have to use Charles O. Hartman’s Free Verse. An Essay on Prosody, the book I happened to have at that moment in my hand with my finger tucked into page 97 to hold my place, where the fifth sentence is

By this simple device Williams gives the poem a plot, projecting its rhythmic shape into narrative.

Now I’m not going to say that that sentence lacks lyricism but it is a little bit like being back in English 653. At least its a fairly simple sentence. Most in this book are compound and/or complex.

Some on Lance’s list were allowed to cheat, but not I.

So it was with some trepidation that I turned to page 123 and did the math.

Lo! look what I found. Not Dickinson, Wordsworth, or Marvel, it is true, but something just as sublime if maybe not quite so lyrical: the first seven lines of fit the fifth of T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton:”

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.

My lucky day!

This is my year to be T. S. Eliot, you know.

I will tap

Rebecca Clayton because she’s always reading some arcane and fascinating bit of West Viirginia history and so is likely to give us something from the Historical Sketches of Pocahontas County.

Harry Rutherford, who just read Housekeeping and might give us a bit of something like Shelley: The Pursuit.

Tommy, because he’s just getting his feet wet at this blogging thing, and he’s got a decent wit, if I do say so myself.

Rabbitswift, who stumped me with his very own book meme, though at least I got Jane Eyre and finally The Metamorphosis.

Diane Lockward of Blogalicious, whose latest collection of poetry What Feeds Us may run t0 123 pages and if not, she can cheat if she’ll share. Diane shares her recent reading list here, and I’m glad to say we concur on Cormac.

And Terry of I See Invisible People, because she’s my fellow woman-blogger-to-watch-in-2008, and she’s likely to give us something from The Tinroof Blowdown — or from one of her own novels.

___

Be sure to follow this meme back to Lance’s find from Rumpole Misbehaves.

The Countess, who was allowed to cheat but didn’t and so gives us Interstellar Travel and Multi-Generational Space Ships, but provides some bonus smut. Speaking of bonus smut, Coturnix gives us sex in the monkey house, while the Vagabond Scholar goes Zen. Steve Hart builds the first superhighway in his own book, The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of American’s First Superhighway.

Meme responses from Harry, Tommy, Rabbitswift, and Blogalicious.

…and more as they appear.

Possibly related posts:

The Magic of Bad Words, the Vitality of Poetry

Even Magic Has Limits

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