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Literature Splicing Contest | |||||||
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1. Find a piece of literature. 2. Select a point, then read it until you reach the first instance of the word was. 3. Copy and paste that piece of literature into this thread up until this was.
In one week I will reward the entry which I find the most interesting with a “reward of legitimate value.” The exact reward will be deliberated between myself and TUBSWEETIE until we determine something that seems suitably valuable to him. This deliberation will take place at the conclusion of this week. This is a no trolling contest.
I would prefer that non-entry posts are kept to a minimum, as it interrupts the pace of reading for myself and for any other readers. I would also ask that, though I request a point specifically, the participants endeavor to select a point conductive to an overall coherent reading. (Unless that contributes to the effect of your entry or the literature itself is incoherent, of course.)
Lastly, it should be noted that if the entry does not contain a use of “was” then it will not be considered eligible for the “reward of legitimate value.”
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Posted On: 12/06/2009 4:52AM | View Fie's Profile | # | ||||||
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Fie Posted:
toxx |
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Posted On: 12/06/2009 4:53AM | View Fie's Profile | # | ||||||
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From The Great Gatsby…
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was
——- Should the prize offered be determined to be BPs, I would like to withdraw my entry from consideration. *spanks!* Log in to see images! |
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Posted On: 12/06/2009 5:13AM | View scullyangel's Profile | # | ||||||
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Excerpt from “Our Mutual Friends” by Charles male reproductive organens:
“The Podsnaps lived in a shady angle adjoining Portman Square. They were a kind of people certain to dwell in the shade, wherever they dwelt. Miss Podsnap’s life had been, from her first appearance on this planet, altogether of a shady order; for, Mr Podsnap’s young person was…”
Mmm, that could be interpreted in a somewhat suggestive way… (;
This is why reading out of context is bad, haha. Or good, depending on how you interpret it. DiscothequeEnnui edited this message on 12/06/2009 5:57AM |
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Posted On: 12/06/2009 5:50AM | View DiscothequeEnnui...'s Profile | # | ||||||
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The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde ­ ­ THE PREFACE
The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glbum.
The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glbum. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless. ­ ­ CHAPTER 1
The studio was |
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Posted On: 12/06/2009 6:18AM | View Amasius's Profile | # | ||||||
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Closest book to me: Slaughterhouse Five
All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was |
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Posted On: 12/06/2009 6:19AM | View Johnny Mac's Profile | # | ||||||
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From Winter Dreams, also by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Something had been taken from him. In a sort of panic he pushed the palms of his hands into his eyes and tried to bring up a picture of the waters lapping on Sherry Island and the moonlit veranda, and gingham on the golf-links and the dry sun and the gold color of her neck’s soft down. And her mouth damp to his kisses and her eyes plaintive with melancholy and her freshness like new fine linen in the morning. Why, these things were no longer in the world! They had existed and they existed no longer.
For the first time in years the tears were streaming down his face. But they were for himself now. He did not care about mouth and eyes and moving hands. He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back any more. The gates were closed, the sun was —————————————————————————— Like scully, I withdraw this if the prize is bp. |
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Posted On: 12/06/2009 6:26AM | View Adapt's Profile | # | ||||||
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From The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, part way into Chapter 1 (“Why are people?”.)
Darwin made it possible for us to give a sensible answer to the curious child whose question heads this chapter. We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life.’ What are we for? What is man? After posing the last of these questions, the eminent zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: ‘The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely.’
Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun, but the full implications of Darwin’s revolution have yet to be widely realized. Zoology is still a minority subject in universities, and even those who choose to study it often make their decision without appreciating its profound philosophical significance. Philosophy and the subjects known as ‘humanities’ are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived. No doubt this will change in time. In any case, this book is not intended as a general advocacy of Darwinism. Instead, it will explore the consequences of the evolution theory for a particular issue. My purpose is to examine the biology of selfishness and altruism.
Apart from its academic interest, the human importance of this subject is obvious. It touches every aspect of our social lives, our loving and hating, fighting and cooperating, giving and stealing, our greed and our generosity. These are claims that could have been made for Lorenz’s On Aggression, Ardrey’s The Social Contract, and Eibl-Eihesfeldt’s Love and Hate. The trouble with these books is that their authors got it totally and utterly wrong. They got it wrong because they misunderstood how evolution works. They made the erroneous bumumption that the important thing in evolution is the good of the species (or the group) rather than the good of the individual (or the gene). It is ironic that Ashley Montagu should criticize Lorenz as a ‘direct descendant of the “nature red in tooth and claw” thinkers of the nineteenth century …’. As I understand Lorenz’s view of evolution, he would be very much at one with Montagu in rejecting the implications of Tennyson’s famous phrase. Unlike both of them, I think ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ sums up our modern understanding of natural selection admirably.
Before beginning on my argument itself, I want to explain briefly what sort of an argument it is, and what sort of an argument it is not. If we were told that a man had lived a long and prosperous life in the world of Chicago gangsters, we would be entitled to make some guesses as to the sort of man he was man-man edited this message on 12/06/2009 10:11AM |
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Posted On: 12/06/2009 10:07AM | View man-man's Profile | # | ||||||
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Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett Surprise surprise!
Chapter One People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around. Stories exist independently of their players. If you know that, the knowledge is power. Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped spacetime, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling . . . stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness. And their very existence overlays a faint but insistent pattern on the chaos that is history. Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story, the groove runs deeper. This is called the theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that have ever been. This is why history keeps on repeating all the time. So a thousand heroes have stolen fire from the gods. A thousand wolves have eaten grandmother, a thousand princesses have been kissed. A million unknowing actors have moved, unknowing, through the pathways of story. It is now impossible for the third and youngest son of any king, if he should embark on a quest which has so far claimed his older brothers, not to succeed. Stories don’t care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself. It takes a special kind of person to fight back, and become the bicarbonate of history. Once upon a time… Gray hands gripped the hammer and swung it, striking the post so hard that it sank a foot into the soft earth. Two more blows and it was |
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Posted On: 12/06/2009 1:13PM | View Afterthotz's Profile | # | ||||||
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Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone by JK Rowling. Chapter 2 Nearly ten years had pbumed since the Dursleys had woken up to find their nephew on the front step, but Privet Drive had hardly changed at all. The sun rose on the same tidy front gardens and lit up the brbum number four on the Dursley’s front door; it crept into their living room, which was |
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Posted On: 12/06/2009 1:26PM | View Skyman747's Profile | # | ||||||
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H.P. Lovecraft – The Picture in the House
Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.
Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from travelled ways, usually squatted upon some damp grbumy slope or leaning against some gigantic outcropping of rock. Two hundred years and more they have leaned or squatted there, while the vines have crawled and the trees have swelled and spread. They are almost hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and guardian shrouds of shadow; but the small-paned windows still stare shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which wards off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable things.
In such houses have dwelt generations of strange people, whose like the world has never seen. Seized with a gloomy and fanatical belief which exiled them from their kind, their ancestors sought the wilderness for freedom. There the scions of a conquering race indeed flourished free from the restrictions of their fellows, but cowered in an appalling slavery to the dismal phantasms of their own minds. Divorced from the enlightenment of civilization, the strength of these Puritans turned into singular channels; and in their isolation, morbid self-repression, and struggle for life with relentless Nature, there came to them dark furtive traits from the prehistoric depths of their cold Northern heritage. By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folks were not beautiful in their sins. Erring as all mortals must, they were forced by their rigid code to seek concealment above all else; so that they came to use less and less taste in what they concealed. Only the silent, sleepy, staring houses in the backwoods can tell all that has lain hidden since the early days, and they are not communicative, being loath to shake off the drowsiness which helps them forget. Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.
It was… |
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Posted On: 12/06/2009 1:47PM | View swine's Profile | # | ||||||
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Atlas Shrugged
She answered, not offensively, merely like a person who does not hear the question often:
“Dagny Taggart.”
“Well, I’ll be—” said the fireman, and then they all remained silent.
She went on, in the same tone of unstressed authority. “Proceed to the main track and hold the train for me at the first open office.”
“Yes, Miss Taggart.”
“You’ll have to make up time. You’ve got the rest of the night to do it. Get the Comet in on schedule.”
“Yes, Miss Taggart.”
She was |
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Posted On: 12/06/2009 1:57PM | View Inconnu's Profile | # | ||||||
Good Omens – Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
In the beginning
It was Sacra H edited this message on 12/06/2009 3:39PM |
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Posted On: 12/06/2009 1:58PM | View Sacra H's Profile | # | ||||||
ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND by Lewis Carroll
PART VIII—THE QUEEN’S CROQUET GROUND
A large rose-tree stood near the entrance of the garden; the roses growing on it were white, but there were three gardeners at it, busily painting them red. Suddenly their eyes chanced to fall upon Alice, as she stood watching them. “Would you tell me, please,” said Alice, a little timidly, “why you are painting those roses?”
Five and Seven said nothing, but looked at Two. Two began, in a low voice, “Why, the fact is, you see, Miss, this here ought to have been a red rose-tree, and we put a white one in by mistake; and, if the Queen was |
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Posted On: 12/06/2009 2:27PM | View valka's Profile | # | ||||||
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Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson
CHAPTER ONE
THE THINKER &
All that we are is the result of all that we have thought. It is — Buddha, The Dhammapada
William James, father of American psychology, tells of meeting an old lady who told him the Earth rested on the back of a huge ”But, my dear lady,” Professor James asked, as politely as possible, “what holds up the turtle?” ”Ah,” she said, “that’s easy. He is standing on the back of another turtle.” ”Oh, I see,” said Professor James, still being polite. “But would you be so good as to tell me what holds up the second turtle?” ”It’s no use, Professor,” said the old lady, realizing he was Aldo_Anything edited this message on 12/06/2009 2:54PM |
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Posted On: 12/06/2009 2:52PM | View Aldo_Anything's Profile | # | ||||||
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Tale of two cities:
It was |
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Posted On: 12/06/2009 9:30PM | View Adapt's Profile | # | ||||||
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I was gonna do a tale of two cities |
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Posted On: 12/06/2009 10:12PM | View Fortunato's Profile | # | ||||||
le BIBLE: And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was |
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Posted On: 12/06/2009 10:17PM | View iostiogic's Profile | # | ||||||
Tithonus Alfred, Lord Tennyson And tho’ they could not end me, left me maim’d To dwell in presence of immortal youth, Immortal age beside immortal youth, And all I was
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Posted On: 12/07/2009 1:42AM | View jimach's Profile | # | ||||||
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iostiogic Posted:
That isn’t the first verse in the Bible. If you’re going to do this contest at least do it right.
The beginning of Genesis actually starts like this:
1In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was |
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Posted On: 12/07/2009 2:46AM | View Shii's Profile | # | ||||||