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Lady Steed has been complaining voraciously about the book she's now reading which is full of absurd and obnoxious metaphors and similies like the following:
- Each morning, including Sundays, the sun rose with a golf tee in its mouth.
- She rolled in like a peach basket that had swallowed a hoop snake.
- ...like a barnyard orchid, like a meat bubble, like a saline lollipop...
- ...that lay like a freshly ironed pillowcase atop the TV set.
And for good measure, this fun thing was said by one character:
- All the show here ever shows anymore are bear-poop-in-the-trail movies put out by the Mormon Church.
Yet she can't...stop...reading it.
Perhaps this is why:
- This sentence is made of lead (and a sentence of lead gives a reader an entirely different sensation from one made of magnesium). This sentence is made of yak wool. This sentence is made of sunlight and plums. This sentence is made of ice. This sentence is made from the blood of the poet. This sentence was made in Japan. This sentence glows in the dark. This sentence was born with a caul. This sentence has a crush on Norman Mailer. This sentence is a wino and doesn't care who knows it. Like many italic sentences, this one has Mafia connections. This sentence is a double Cancer with Pisces rising. This sentence lost it's mind searching for the perfect paragraph. This sentence refuses to be diagramed. This sentence ran off with an adverb clause. This sentence is 100 percent organic: it will not retain a facsimile of freshness like those sentences of Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe et al., which are loaded with preservatives. This sentence leaks. This sentence doesn't look Jewish . . . This sentence has accepted Jesus Christ as its personal savior. This sentence once spit in a book reviewer's eye. This sentence can do the funky chicken. This sentence has seen too much and forgotten too little. This sentence is called "Speedoo" but its real name is Mr. Earl. This sentence suffered a split infinitive — and survived. If this sentence had been a snake you'd have bitten it. This sentence went to jail withCliffordr Irving. This sentence went to Woodstock. And this little sentence went wee wee wee all the way home.
Whew! How can you turn down a book like that?
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That's beautiful. What is this book? I am filled with an unholy desire to read.
ReplyDeleteOh, you make me laugh so hard th.! You should post a warning: Do not read in computer labs, for this will cause humiliation when you laugh/snort/chortle outloud for the whole room to hear.
ReplyDelete.
ReplyDeleteSorry, Miss Hass. Just know I love you.*
But not as sorry as I am for Tolkien Boy....
(TB--figure it out. There's a way. Consider this a test of your internet savvy.)
*Clarification for wife: this love is purely platonic.
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ReplyDeleteHint: the last two sentences (cut) of the quoted paragraph include the title of the book.
This sounds like something Donald Barthelme would write. I'm looking into it as we speak.
ReplyDelete(shut up, I know you're not speaking.)
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ReplyDeleteHow do you know I'm not speaking?
(I'm going to test my theory real quick and make sure my finding-it method would work.)
xliqor
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ReplyDeleteHmm. My method and my backup method both did not work.
This may be an impossible task fit only for Herculibrarian.
Ten seconds. (As proof, the author's initials are TR.)
ReplyDeleteDoes that make me a Herculibrarian?
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ReplyDeleteWell done, Katya! How did you do it? (You didn't just read it last week, did you?)
And certainly, that is your title.
A Google quote search on "This sentence was made in Japan" returned about 60 hits, mostly from blogs quoting that same passage. I just clicked on one of them, got the title, and went to Amazon to find the author.
ReplyDeleteOut of curiosity, what methods did you try that failed?
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ReplyDeleteI thought that searching for the terms on Amazon would work since Search Inside is enabled for the book. No luck. Then I tried Google Book Search--I doubt the book is in the database, but it was worth a try.
I wonder how much luck your method would have with other sentences?
I tried about five other sentences and they all returned between 50 and 65 hits. What's saving me, of course, is that this a popular passage to quote. Take another passage, at random, and I doubt I'd have the luck.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. You're right, the Amazon "search inside" feature didn't do much, but a "book" search on A9 (which you have to figure does pretty much the same thing) gives good results for ' "yak wool" japan' (but not for 'yak wool japan').
ReplyDelete.
ReplyDeleteYak wool was my test sentence since it seemed the least likely to be common.