Literary Detective Agency
Comments: 2
Find missing words. Follow words around, see what they get up to. Park outside their sentences with cameras.
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Posted to Oh, the Humanity • 2003.06.19 (Thu) • 18:10
Comments
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens 2003.06.20, 13:13
Been reading the Eyre Affair again? Maybe the bookworms are loose.
Posted by Derek Mackrell 2003.06.24, 12:38
This reminds me of the following quote from Foucault's Pendulum, which for some reason is one of my favourite passages from the book.
I decided to invent a job for myself. I knew a lot of things, unconnected things, but I wanted to be able to connect them after a few hours at a library… . A sudden illumination: I had a trade after all. I would set up a cultural investigation agency, be a kind of private eye of learning. Instead of sticking my nose into all-night dives and cathouses, I would skulk around bookshops, libraries, corridors of university departments. Then I'd sit in my office, my feet propped on the desk, drinking, from a Dixie cup, the whiskey I'd brought up from the corner store in a paper bag. The phone rings and a man says: "Listen, I'm translating this book and came across something or someone called Motakallimun. What the hell is it?" Give me two days, I tell him. Then I go to the library, flip through some card catalogs, give the man in the reference office a cigarette, and pick up a clue. That evening I invite an instructor in Islamic studies out for a drink. I buy him a couple of beers and he drops his guard, gives me the lowdown for nothing. I call the client back. "All right, the Motakallimun were radical Moslem theologians at the time of Avicenna. They said the world was a sort of dust cloud of accidents that formed particular shapes only by an instantaneous and temporary act of the divine will. If God was distracted for even a moment, the universe would fall to pieces, into a meaningless anarchy of atoms. That enough for you? The job took me three days. Pay what you think is fair."
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