Monday, October 19, 2009

Random Book, Random Passage #3

My random picks just took a turn for the totally random.  I seriously spun myself around and waved my arm with pointed finger at the bookcases with eyes closed and wound up picking Luke Rhinehart's The Dice Man.  Instead of flipping through the book, I'm going to get extra random and use a random number generator for page and line number.
'Obviously the old therapies couldn't solve this dilemma.  Whereas conventional psychoanalysis sees the desire for an Immaculate Anus as neurotic and counterproductive, we maintain that the desire, like all desires, is good, and causes trouble only when followed too consistently. The individual must come to embrace, in effect, both the Immaculate Anus and the excreted lumps of turd.'
He was standing in front of Dr. Cobblestone and leaned on the table in front of him with both immaculately tailored arms.  'We look not for moderation in the excretory functions, but a joyful variety:  a random alteration, as it were of constipation and diarrhea, with, I suppose, sporadic bursts of regularity.' 
Oh yeah. The Dice Man.  First, I'm not sure "alteration" is the mot juste in that last sentence?  Maybe if it went on to say "from constipation to diarrhea" instead of "of constipation and diarrhea"?  You can alternate between the state of being constipated and the state of having diarrhea -- things taking turns -- where alteration is the act of making something different. That aside, if you haven't read The Dice Man, I would suggest you get a die, roll it, and, if you roll a 1-5, then read it.  If you roll a 6, then wait a day or two and roll again.
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