board77

Do Unitarians practise any form of confession along the lines of the Roman Catholic confession which I'm more familiar with?

New question in my second post.

-Pips-

Depends if waterboarding is involved.

Oh no, that's Baptists.

Better than being Jewish though.

Hey!

Not a jest about the political views of Baptists, just one on their penchant for dunking.

Okay, I managed to skirt the issue. But I was wondering if any helpful Pratchett-lovers might have a copy of The Last Continent to hand? I wanted to use his description of aboriginal dot-painting to back up a point I was making about poetry which sketches the subject from all perspectives, but never exactly gives a clear image of the thing itself.

I think it may be on page sixty, and it begins with "It looked as though the artist hadn’t just wanted to draw a kangaroo from the outside but had wanted to show the inside as well." I'm sure there was something about what it had looked like last Tuesday, and what it had had for lunch, but the only time I can find it quoted on the whole of the internets, it's this short version.

Please help! I'm not fulfilling my quota of using Pratchett in 50% of all unconnected essays properly this semester!

-Pips-

It's not on page 60 of my edition. Do you remember who else is in that scene?

Aha! Found it on page 110!

Quote:

In the cave the water in the pool rippled under the starlight, the expanding circles lapping against the sand.

On the wall was an ancient drawing of a kangaroo, in white and red and yellow. The artist had tried to achieve on stone what might better have been attempted with eight dimensions and a large particle accelerator; he'd tried to include not just the kangaroo now but also the kangaroo in the past, and the kangaroo in the future and, in short, not what the kangaroo looked like but what the kangaroo was.

Among other things, as it faded, it was grinning.

Jude! You're a star! First the war on the bots and now this.

Oddly enough (I wrote to the L-Space Librarians before I thought of asking here) I had a reply this morning giving a very similar quote which actually was on page sixty of a certain edition - but which is markedly different! Pratchett obviously likes his dot-paintings.

He stopped, water dripping off him, in front of one. Someone had probably
wanted to draw a kangaroo. There were the ears and the tail and the clown
feet. But they looked alien, and there were so many lines and
cross-hatchings that the figure seemed... odd. It looked as though the
artist hadn't just wanted to draw a kangaroo from the outside but had
wanted to show the inside as well, and then wanted to show the kangaroo
last year and today and next week and also what it was thinking all at the
same time, and had set out to do the whole thing with some ochre and a
stick of charcoal.

Thank you so much for your help!

-Pips-

Oh, that's interesting - I wonder if it was changed for the different editions? The two quotes are so similar, I can't imagine they'd both be in the same book.

Now I feel like re-reading the whole book to see

I think they're different... he does it just occasionally. More often it's from one book to another, especially with the non-Discworld books. He has a very particular turn of phrase, and often there are almost identical moments in different contexts.

I mean, I'm absolutely certain that somewhere he says something about what the kangaroo had eaten for dinner. Probably about 3/4 of the way through, when Ridcully and the rest of the faculty start stomping around and trying to find out about the Wet. That'd make three seperate but very similar analyses of the same painting in the same book. No argument, he's a great writer, but sometimes I'm surprised his editors don't seem to point it out to him.

-Pips-