I've said it before: beware of unsourced 'quotations.' An über-conservative correspondent forwarded me the following:
"Negotiating with Obama is like playing chess with a pigeon." "The pigeon knocks over all the pieces, shits on the board and then struts around like it won the game." ~Vladimir Putin
Now Obama is indeed a feckless fool, and a disaster for the country and the world. It is a blot upon the American electorate that this mendacious incompetent was elected and then, horribile dictu, re-elected. I hope we can all agree on that. Mockery and derision are appropriate weapons to deploy against him and his supporters. But we who stand up for truth ought to be especially scrupulous about getting things right. So I ran the 'quotation' past Snopes.com whereat it is plausibly maintained that Putin said no such thing. There I snagged this nifty graphic:
Emmanuel Lasker, Die Philosophie des Unvollendbar, 1919, p. x:
Aber eine harte Kindheit macht einen starken Mann.
But a hard childhood makes a strong man.
In the '80s I read a chunk of Lasker's Philosophy of the Incompletable and concluded that the grandmaster of chess was not one of philosophy. But I didn't read much of it and it was a long time ago. Now available in a paperback reprint via Amazon.com. I am tempted to take another look.
Too many in philosophy and other fields confine themselves to the horizon of the contemporary. Explore, get lost, discover.
A marvellous sublunary trinity: chess, philosophy, and a cigar.
I am teaching chess to some women who have joined our club, "The Lost Knights of the Superstitions." Nice title, eh? At once both romantic and self-deprecatory with an allusion to the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine and Jacob Waltz, the 'Dutchman' himself who was not Dutch but Deutsch.
The following excerpt from an article by Lubomir Kavalek may help inspire the newly recruited distaff acolytes of the Royal Game.
Amazing Menchik
Vera Menchik (1906-1944) was the first women's world champion who could play successfully against the best male players. She almost stirred an international conflict. Three countries claimed her: she was born in Moscow, played chess mostly for Czechoslovakia, married an Englishman and died in London.
Menchik won the first official women's world championship in London in 1927 and defended the title six times in tournaments with an incredible overall score of 78 wins, four draws and one loss. She also defeated the German Sonja Graf in two world title matches in 1934 and 1937. Menchik played positionally most of the time, but she could deliver a nice tactical blow.
21.Rd7! (A beautiful decoy. The rook deflects the queen, allowing a spirited queen sacrifice: 21… Qxd7 22.Qxh5! gxh5 23.Bh7 mate. White would have a decisive advantage after: 21…Qxh2+ 22.Qxh2 Nxh2 23.Rxe7 Nxf1 24.Bxg6! e5 25.Nxf7 Kg7 26.Nxe5+ Kf6 27.Rxb7.) Graf resigned.
The Czechs honored Menchik with a postage stamp designed by Zdenek Netopil. He could not make up his mind, but eventually let her smile. It was issued February 14, 1996. Menchik held her world title for 17 years, the longest of any woman. Last year, she was inducted into the Chess World Hall of Fame – the first woman among chess giants.
During the 1929 Karlsbad tournament, the Austrian master Albert Becker founded the Vera Menchik Club. He suggested that anyone who loses to the lady should become a member. He was the first victim, but there were others. Among her most famous casualties were dr. Max Euwe and Sammy Reshevsky. Out of 437 tournament games against male opponents, she won 147.
She didn't fare well against the very top players. She was hammered by Jose Raul Capablanca (9-0), Alexander Alekhine (7-0), Mikhail Botvinnik (2-0), Paul Keres (2-0), Reuben Fine (2-0) and Emanuel Lasker (1-0).
In 1921 Menchik's family moved from Moscow to England. Vera was 15. When she saw bottles of milk left outside of English homes, Menchik said: "In Russia, they would immediately be stolen." The quote didn't make it to Elizaveta Bykova's biography of Menchik. Bykova had a different idea of what should be taken.
The fact that it is only a game does not imply that one should not take it seriously as a game and play hard and to win and by the rules. Anything less is 'unsporting.'
The ICC is the premier Internet venue for playing chess. I've been a member since 2002 at least. It's not cheap, but it is worth it. But while the site is fabulous, unfortunately some of the people who show up there leave a lot to be desired. Hence the acerbic tone of some of these notes.
1: In life there are no takebacks. "Chess is life." (R. Fischer) Ergo, etc.
2: You say your mouse slipped? That's no different than a Fingerfehler in OTB chess. And if a man cannot control his mousie, is he a man or a mouse?
3: In an unrated game, I may allow a takeback, but I will never ask for one, and you have no right to one.
4: Actions have consequences. Take responsibility for the former; learn from the latter.
5: Be kind to your opponent; you need him to have a game. Don't whine if you lose. If you are paired with me then you are a patzer and can expect to lose many a game.
6: Play hard, but with detachment from the outcome. Apply this principle to your life as a whole. Don't blame others for your stupidity. If you are a snivelling crybaby who can't stand to lose, find another pastime, or else play your computer at its lowest setting.
7: Thus spoke the Sage of the Superstitions.
8: Favorite command: set busy 2. Second favorite: +censor [name of offending party]
9: All churlish rascals will be forthwith zapped into the outer precincts of cyber-obscurity there to languish with rest of their scrofulous ilk for all eternity.
10: If you wish to be removed from my censor list, I charge a nominal fee of 100 USD. Take advantage of this offer now before prices go up.
I just now happened to click on one of Keith Burgess-Jackson's many Ten Years Ago in This Blog links, having no idea what was on the other end of it, when I pulled up the following:
Dear Keith,
In your post of 3/31/04 1:22:05 PM, you classify chess as an intellectual contest rather than as a sport, which is a physical contest. You seem to be saying that chess (and checkers) are intellectual contests with no physical, hence no sport, dimension. If this is what you are saying, then I disagree.
Tournament chess, which, like all serious chess, is played with clocks, is extremely demanding physically as well as mentally. Suppose the primary time control is 40 moves in 2 hours, the secondary control is 20 moves in 1 hour, and the tertiary control is 1 hour sudden death. Such a contest could last 8 hours with no adjournment! But even if a game lasts 3-4 hours, the physical demands become considerable. To play well, one must be physically fit and keep oneself supplied with nutrients during the game. Physical training is an essential part of the training regimen for the top players.
So I would say that chess counts as a sport. The Dutch employ the term, Denksport. Besides the sport aspect, it is easily arguable that chess has aspects of an art and a science.
There can be no doubt about it: Chess is the game of kings, and the king of games!
Bobby Fischer, supreme master of the 64 squares, died on this date in 2008, at age 64.
The day after he died I received this lovely note from my old friend Tom Coleman:This is a death in the family. I thought of you the moment I heard
the news this morning. Though not a talented player myself, at only
eight years old, six years younger than he, I marvelled at his
prowess as others did over Micky Mantle's. I never knew bitterness
toward my betters at either sports or chess. Many of us who were
neither as brilliant or disturbed as he still felt his agony, even
as a half-talented music student can feel Beethoven's agony even
after centuries. He had no heirs in the flesh; genius is no
evolutionary advantage. All brilliance points to transcendence and
whispers of immortality.
For Americans of a certain age and a certain bent, it is indeed as if a relative has died. Old Tom must have been consorting with Calliope when he penned his concluding line.
Ah, the (almost) inexhaustible riches of chess! A reader sends us to Volokh where we read:
An interesting thing happened yesterday in a game between my son and my father: a double check, in which the moved piece was not one of the checking pieces. (In a usual double check, a piece moves, placing the king in check but also discovering a check by another piece. To quote a formulation on the U.S. Chess Federation Site, “Double check is a more dangerous form of a discovered check where not only the hidden piece attacks the king, but also the piece that moves.”) How did this happen? Everyone was following the normal rules of chess.
A few miles from Buckingham Palace, Muslims in London’s East End are now sufficiently confident to go around warning local shopkeepers to cease selling alcohol. In theory, you might still enjoy the right to sell beer in Tower Hamlets or be a practicing Christian in Iraq, but in reality not so much. The asphyxiating embrace of ideological conformity was famously captured by Nikolai Krylenko, the People’s Commissar for Justice, in a speech to the Soviet Congress of Chess Players in 1932, at which he attacked the very concept of “the neutrality of chess.” It was necessary for chess to be Sovietized like everything else. “We must organize shock brigades of chess players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess,” he declared.
Six years later, the political winds having shifted, Krylenko was executed as an enemy of the people. But his spirit lives on among the Commissars of Gay Compliance at GLAAD. It is not enough to have gay marriage for gays. Everything must be gayed. There must be Five-Year Gay Plans for American bakeries, and the Christian church, and reality TV. There must be shock brigades of gay duck-hunters honking out the party line deep in the backwoods of the proletariat. Obamacare pajama models, if not yet mandatorily gay, can only be dressed in tartan onesies and accessorized with hot chocolate so as to communicate to the Republic’s maidenhood what a thankless endeavor heterosexuality is in contemporary America.
The gaying of America if you will. One good thing about leftists, though, is that they tend to turn on, and purge, their own ilk.
Krauthammer became hooked on the game when he was 20 — he is now 60 — and visited a friend in Cambridge, Mass. He found his friend’s roommate sitting with a chess set and an unfamiliar device.
“I said, ‘What is that?’ ” Krauthammer recalled, “And he said, ‘That is a chess clock.’ I had just come in from the plane. It was 10 o’clock at night, and I sat down to play and didn’t get up until 5 in the morning. I had found something that I loved, and I was in deep trouble.”
Krauthammer has chess boards in his office and a “chess room” at home. For a while, he held a small, informal chess club every Monday; members included the liberal scourges Charles Murray (co-author of “The Bell Curve”) and the writer Dinesh D’Souza. Krauthammer said they called it the Pariah Chess Club.
Wherein resides the dignity of the king? At every time in every possible game, the king is on the board. He cannot be captured: he never leaves the board while the game is on. He alone is 'necessary,' all other pieces are 'contingent.'
But at game's end, he too goes into the box with the lowliest of the pawns, as if to demonstrate that the high and mighty in life are equalized in death.
The Essays of Montaigne, vol. I, tr. Trechmann, Oxford UP, no date, ch. 50, p. 295:
Why shall I not judge Alexander at table, talking and drinking to excess, or when he is fingering the chess-men? What chord of his mind is not touched and kept employed by this silly and puerile game? I hate it and avoid it because it is not play enough, and because it is too serious as an amusement, being ashamed to give it the attention which would suffice for some good thing. He was never more busy in directing his glorious expedition to the Indies; nor is this other man in unravelling a passage on which depends the salvation of the human race. See how our mind swells and magnifies this ridiculous amusement; how it strains all its nerves over it! How fully does this game enable every one to know and form a right opinion of himself! In no other situation do I see and test myself more thoroughly than in this. What passion is not stirred up by this game: anger [the clock-banger!] spite [the spite check!], impatience [the hasty move!], and a vehement ambition to win in a thing in which an ambition to be beaten would be more excusable! For a rare pre-eminence, above the common, in a frivolous matter, is unbefitting a man of honour. What I say in this example may be said in all others. Every particle, every occupation of a man betrays him and shows him up as well as any other.
Applying what Montaigne himself says in his final sentence to his writing of this essay, we may hazard the guess that he was much enamoured of the royal game, but not very good at it, and so here takes his revenge upon it, its goddess Caissa, and her acolytes. You will notice how onesided his portrayal is. He displayed the same defect in his remarks on clothing. But he is a Frenchman and so more concerned with witty phrasings than with the sober truth. The essay is delightfully brilliant nonetheless.
One of Dylan's great 'finger-pointing' songs. Live version.
Today Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caught They lowered him down as a king But when the shadowy sun sets on the one that fired the gun He'll see by his grave on the stone that remains Carved next to his name his epitaph plain "Only a pawn in their game."
