Borges Speaks

I've poked around the Internet for some time to find a good instance of Borges speaking, and I think I have a good one: here he speaks and recites a poem!

Cather Resources

I have found a few of Cather's short essays online, of which "The Novel Démeublé" and "Miss Jewett" are the most interesting for what they say about her artistic values.

I've had less luck in finding resources on the Fisher King myth, which you'll recall a friend of mine suggested that A Lost Lady parallels. There's an account of the king's relationship to the land at TVtropes; but otherwise, I've had to resort to Wikipedia for summaries of various takes on the legend of the old wounded (or impotent) lord whose decline parallels that of the realm, the innocent knight who is one of the few that can see the beauties of the Grail Castle, and the enticing seductress who is full of Life Force. But the glory of Wikipedia entries is that they have annotations and references at the bottom, which may lead a person to useful sources. So: here's the Wikipedia entries for various forms of the legend: Chrétien's Perceval and it sequels, Wolfram's Parzival, Wagner's Parsifal (perhaps the most elaborate), and, just a year before A Lost Lady, Eliot's "The Waste Land".

Wenzel von Tronka Is Living in Texas

Evidently the practice of abusing one's connections with the law to extort payment from travelers has not gone away: get a load of Tenaha, Texas, where officials routinely stopped nonwhite motorists and extorted large sums of money from them, generally by threatening them with imprisonment and more. The mayor defended the practice, saying that the highway through his town "is a thoroughfare that a lot of no-good people travel on" and that the confiscated money is being put to good use: “It’s always helpful to have any kind of income to expand your police force." Where's Martin Luther when you need him?