Conversations With Strangers, Three

This morning on the 5 train to Grand Central, I was reading my current book, Henry James's The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw. A man (thirties? early forties? I'm not a terribly accurate judge of age) looked at the cover and smiled.

Man with a European accent: [indicates my book] I just read that. I liked the first one...You don't know if he's telling the truth or not - it's a classic case of the unreliable narrator.

You have to appreciate a fellow passenger who can discourse on unreliable narrators.

*

Speaking of literature and random conversational bits and pieces, let us turn to the fascination with life-size chess games. Here's Exhibit A, Through the Looking-Glass:


And of course, Exhibit B, from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (or, if you're British, The Philosopher's Stone, because they can manage that extra syllable across the pond):



Last night I happened to chance upon an overlarge chess set - not life-size, but significantly larger than your average coffee-table set. A group of us began to play (it was rather a collaborative effort), but a few pieces were missing. ("Who would steal a giant pawn?" I asked my roommate later. She gave me a Look as if to say, "Who wouldn't?" And I realized that, as usual, she was quite right.) In any case, a missing black pawn was represented by a can of peaches, two white pawns were represented by bricks, and a two-by-four stood in for a white knight. It was a most excellent game, and when else might you say or hear the sentence, "Brick beats peaches!"?

Perhaps in a very peculiar version of Rock-Paper-Scissors.