Find the palimpsest!
The object of this game isn't to find an actual palimpsest; rather, the point is to find the word "palimpsest"---in print. Hardcopy.
When you find such an occurrence, email it to palimpsest@slurm.com. We'll post it here, and you'll be famous! (If you want.)
For example, the word "palimpsest" occurs twice in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon; first on page 147:
There is a small chalkboard on the wall of Chattan's office. It is a palimpsest, not very well erased; the housekeeping detail here must have a standing order never to clean it, lest something important be lost.Then again, on page 240:
To Randy and the others, the business plan functions as Torah, master calender, motivational text, philosophical treatise. It is a dynamic, living document. Its spreadsheets, are palimpsests, linked to the company's bank accounts and financial records so that they automatically adjust whenever money flows in or out.
Get the idea? Keep those emails coming!
Thursday, September 12, 2002
Back in March, Corey twisted the Palimpsest Game by coming up with a palimpsest googlewhack: "scribbly palimpsest". More recently, while trying to remember Corey's whack, I devised a different one that leads to Kat Walsh's Mindspillage: "palimpsest momentousness". Palimpsest Googlewhacks will now receive honorable mention in the Game (which is, after all, all that any Game entry gets).
Wednesday, April 10, 2002
Lynn Huang has submitted this beautiful passage from Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson:Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.Thanks, Lynn!
Thursday, May 17, 2001
Ben Caines writes in to enter his own Ph.D. thesis, entitled Narrations of Palimpsest identity in Urban American Fiction, 1900-1930. Says Ben:When it's finished and published it's going to mention the word palimpsest about 200 hundred times.Thanks, Ben, we can't wait!
Wednesday, May 16, 2001
Meghan Reilly submits a truly superior entry from Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd (Penguin Classics 1985, p. 302, ch. 36):Such was the argument that Oak set outwardly before him. But man, even to himself, is a palimpsest, having an ostensible writing, and another beneath the lines. It is possible that there was this golden legend under the utilitarian one: 'I will help to my last effort the woman I have loved so dearly.'Thanks, Meghan!
Thursday, April 28, 2001
We have arrived! Though not exactly official Palimpsest Game submissions, Rosana and Jason both write to point out that palimpsest is the word of the day at Merriam-Webster Online. [Apparently palimpsest had been word of the day on dictionary.com more than a year earlier...]
Thursday, August 17, 2000
Justin Cass writes in with two entries: The Aztec Palimpsest: Mexico in the Modern Imagination, and Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities.Justin's prize is a link to his Futurama Daily Trivia site.
Okay, thanks again Justin, but it looks like we're going to have to tighten the rules a bit. Since anybody can go to amazon.com and search for "palimpsest" (and some people have), we will now have to require that future entries refer to the word "palimpsest" somewhere other than in the title of a work. Give us a page number! Give us a scan! Give us a completely unexpected palimpsest sighting!
Thursday, June 29, 2000
Jason Cook writes in to point out that Palimpsest is the title of a memoir by Gore Vidal.