Brainwash

I. "She said, only half joking, that she washed her hair a dozen times in the course of reading it: overwhelmed again and again, that was the only way she could clear her head enough to allow her to return to Ishiguro’s world. The novel does have that sort of effect." —Levi Stahl on The Unconsoled (at The Quarterly Conversation)

II. Sarah Manguso's Bookforum syllabus: Writing about not writing.

III. Ed-clone, please go see Destroyer, Locsil, JACK Quartet at Miller Theater tonight come on it's in the friggin' neighborhood no I'm too busy I can't I can't do anything right now I'm burning the candle at both ends, I'm buying more candles, burning 'em, it's candles night and day here but wait Ed (is this Ed or Ed-clone I'm talking to?) you love Destroyer you're always QUOTING IT ON THIS BLOG—

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"):

The remains of the day

Oof! It's becoming the battle of the ex-interns, as Dizzyhead Gautam unleashes this stack of visual/daylight resonators!



But wait—the Thomas/Ed H. counterattack is more forceful than any of us could have guessed!

Fox news

The building housing Micawber Books in Princeton has been bought by the university, which "promised to bring in Labyrinth Books" (of NYC and New Haven fame). (I think I bought two books at Micawber, years ago—something by Ishiguro, probably An Artist of the Floating World, and a hardcover edition of Nabokov's Ada, before I realized hardcover Adas were everywhere.)

Interesting detail:

Mr. Fox began as a bookseller in the ’70s at the Strand Book Store in Manhattan, and moved to Princeton to open Micawber, then a store devoted entirely to secondhand books from his own personal library. His father, Joe Fox, was an editor at Random House, nurturing the careers of John Irving and Truman Capote.[...]

In her 1998 film, “You’ve Got Mail,” Nora Ephron used the name of his father, who, as it happens, was also a former boyfriend of hers. Joe Fox was the name she gave the character played by Tom Hanks, a chain bookstore owner who swiftly puts Meg Ryan and her tiny shop around the corner out of business.

Of course, in the Micawber story, Logan Fox is in the Meg Ryan role, the person who champions the mom-and-pop store and derides the corporate behemoth.