Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for January 26, 2009

I. "I think that the whole world of Kafka is to be found in a far more complex way in the stories of Henry James." —Borges interview, The Paris Review
(Via.)

II. L.G. Thos. sends this "keen observation by John Banville": "Who but Nabokov would invent a villain with an x in each of his names?"

Dzyd trivia: Name that villain!

III. Supplementary VN trivia from me: What VN book, turned into a film with Anna Karina, interestingly features a character named Dorianna Karenina?

IV. Most of the stories in Stephen King's Night Shift were originally published in Cavalier (?). Two (including "Children of the Corn") were published in Penthouse. One story appeared in Cosmopolitan, another in Maine (?), and another in Gallery (?).

Oh Henry!

I enjoyed Benjamin Markovits's TLS review of the first two volumes of Henry James's letters, though these two sentences confused me—

One sign of a great letter-writer may be that the chief interest of the letters does not lie in the way they expose their author. On these terms, the young James was far from a great correspondent.

(I must have read this five times...!)

Here's a terrific passage from one of the letters:

Wherever we go we carry with us this heavy burden of our personal consciousness + wherever we stop we open it out over our heads like a great baleful cotton ombrella, to obstruct the prospect + obscure the light.

I love how "baleful" leads to "cotton" (as in a bale of cotton)—and that old spelling of "umbrella"; I guess it must come from "shadow," which I'd never quite thought about...

* * *

Remember the Seinfeld where Elaine's braless friend is the heir to the Oh Henry! candybar fortune? They must have chose that brand deliberately, eh? (I mean—given the O. Henry–like twists that often occur on Seinfeld.)