Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for April 21, 2008

I.
The best Shadowplay yet? From "Things I Read Off the Screen in 'They Drive By Night'":

Many are the ads for Player’s Cigarettes in this film! I won’t reproduce them all or you will be hypnotised into craving the Smooth Smoke Doctors Recommend, and I don’t want that on my conscience. The items offered by CHARLIE’S include TEAS, you will note. For a hard-boiled crime drama, this film shows quite a lot of tea being drunk. It’s an odd effect.

II.
This bit in the TLS review on Lee Siegel novel Love in a Dead Language

which is about the death of a Sanskrity scholar, Leopold Roth, who specialized in studying sentences made up of identically ordered letters, which differ only in terms of the number of spaces between those letters. Roth's dissertation is titled Oflyrricheros, which, depending on the spacing, reveals either the disappearance of love (O Fly Rich Eros), or a paean to poets (Of Lyric Heros), and he encourages readers to puzzle over the relationship between the identically lettered question "Am I able to get her?" and the fantasy "Amiable together."

reminds me of—you knew it was coming!—Keeler's The Marceau Case:

The Marceau books hinge—or do they?—upon a single line of a manuscript, which reads: “ ‘Blimey, ‘Erb! Little?’ Lu Caslow’s dreary eyes”. Is the culprit Meyer B. Li? Or a midget funambulist named Little Lucas?

III.
Selfdivider on early Ishiguro.

IV. Via Very Short List, "Charlie Rose by Samuel Beckett" (aka "Waiting for GoDot.com"):