I’d wanted to play since I ran into it at languagehat but attempting to study and going through books are mutually exclusive activities for me.

Anyway, here is the Exquisite Corpse of page 23.

The rules for 23/5 Exquisite Corpse are:
Take the nearest six to ten books from your shelf.
Open them to page 23, and find the fifth sentence.
Write down those sentences and arrange them to form a short story.
Post the text in your journal along with these instructions.

I cheated a bit, since I only have reference books here in the basement with the computer–I grabbed the books by the bed that had bookmarks, in the hopes that it was a random enough selection to qualify.

But what Gnostics celebrated as proof of spiritual maturity, the orthodox denounced as “deviation” from apostolic tradition. (1) It is usually the journalists and popular novelists who have picked up a few odds and ends of half-baked science from textbooks who go in for them. (2) In addition, modern science provides massive amounts of additional, no less genuine knowledge—that electrons are smaller than asteroids, that fish are not mammals, that the Moon is not made of green (or any other type of) cheese, and so on. (3) These should occur frequently at sites extending from Old Mexico to New York. (4)
‘Of course!’ said Bilbo, and sat down in a hurry. (5) I see people ignore them and even bully them. (6)

1. The Gnostic Gospels Elaine Pagels
2. Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis
3. The Matrix and Philosophy William Irwin
4. Making Book Teresa Nielsen Hayden
5. The Hobbit J.R.R. Tolkein
6. An Open Heart The Dalai Lama

Sentence six only works if you pretend it’s in quotes. Or if you imagine that I, with my infinitely wonderful typing skills, just forgot to add the quotes.

By the way, you can visit Andrei Codrescu’s Exquisite Corpse. I’m such an NPR geek that Andrei Codrescu is who I immediately thought of when I saw ‘exquisite corpse’.

And if you were curious, the books closest to my computer are: The Bible (New American Bible for Catholics), The Koran, Teach Yourself CSS, HTML4 for the World Wide Web, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, and The Chicago Manual of Style.
Pretty horrible short story material I think.

ADDENDUM the First:
By the way, fnord.