What Are You Reading? (The Page 123, Line 5 Meme)

After an intense week on site with a client, my brain feels like flan. Cce offered this irresistible meme, a way to rally the brain cells back to the process of writing.

The meme is this: grab the book nearest to your left elbow, open to page 123, and then copy the sixth, seventh, and eighth sentences. As it turns out, this seemingly innocuous meme makes me look hopelessly nerdy. I would have so preferred to look hip to the jive.

First, this from Richard Bookstaber's A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation, a book I found myself drawn into on the flight out and back last week.

The most recently issued bond, termed the on-the-run bond, becomes the standard for trading. When traders enter orders to buy or sell the 30-year, the on-the-run bond is the bond they mean. This trading demand means the on-the-run bond enjoys a liquidity premium - that is, it trades at a slightly higher price than its less interesting older brothers which, though once on-the-run bonds themselves, are now beyond their six months of fame.

As I write this, two things become clear to me. One, why it is that when I first began this book months ago, I put it down. (And yet this week, his story about how our financial markets have become so volatile snapped through the definitional necessities to engage me.) Two, why I developed a sense of humor. Any young man who finds such ideas fascinating is sure to become a social pariah if he can't also tell a joke. I learned early in life that most people did not share my interest in the arcane world of underlying social constructs that give us the visible but that most everyone finds ill-timed bodily functions like farts or erections a great source of humor.

In an attempt to prove that I also read less dense fare, I tried the meme on another book, the second book taken on my recent trip. The Best American Nonrequired Reading, edited by Dave Eggers, is full of whimsy. It includes the story that Hemingway wrote when challenged to write a complete story in six words: "For sale: baby shoes, never used." And yet, the meme brings me directly to yet another fascinating to me, yet almost intentionally dense, bit of prose - this one from futurist Ray Kurzweil, writing about longevity.

If we factor in the exponential advances in computation and communication (price-performance multiplying by a factor of a billion in twenty-five years, while at the same time shrinking in size by a factor of thousands), these scenarios are highly realistic.
The apparent dangers are not real, but unapparent dangers are real. The apparent dangers are that a dramatic reduction in the death rate will create overpopulation and thereby strain energy and other resources and exacerbate environmental degradation.

Now feeling self conscious about the kind of stuff I read, I turned to the next book piled on my left and find a dry excerpt from one of George Washington's speeches, elaborated upon by Gore Vidal in his book Inventing a Nation. One more time I try the meme, drawing from Marty Lefkoe's Re-create Your Life.

Now Frank described a pattern that bothered him: "I use sarcastic, flippant, glib humor to mask my insecurity. I use it to take the offensive. I use it to negate compliments. If I get loving, supportive comments, I do this to deal with the fear that it will be taken away."

Or perhaps Frank is just dealing with the fact that his interests are oddly esoteric and his acceptance into any group hangs by the thin thread of humor.

Life Hiker, Thomas, HRH, Dave, and jen, if you would like, try your hand at the meme. I'm curious about what you're reading.