Bibliomancy Meme

Eszter at Crooked Timber posted an interesting exercise. The task: Grab the nearest book that is at least 123 pages long, open the book to page 123, find the 5th sentence on the page, type the following three sentences, then tag five people. I'm not going to tag anyone, but welcome the three of you who read this blog on occasion to do the same exercise.

I looked above my monitors and the first book on my shelf is, Erving Goffman's Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. Page 123 takes me to the essay, "Alienation From Interaction."

What the individual takes to be immodesty in others may present itself in many forms: immodest individuals may seem to praise themselves verbally; they may talk about themselves and their activity in a way that assumes greater interest in and familiarity with their personal life than the individual actually possesses; they may speak more frequently and at greater length than the individual feels is fitting; they may take a more prominent "ecological" position than he thinks they warrant, etc.

One interesting source of other-consciousness is to be found in the phenomenon of "over-involvement." During any conversation, standards are established as to how much the individual is to allow himself to be carried away by the talk, how thoroughly he is to permit himself from becoming so swollen with feelings and a readiness to act that he threatens the bounds regarding affect that have been established for him in the interaction.