Annals of Gaming, I

 Prodgies abound in games other than chess.  From today’s New York Times:

June 7, 2007

HE’S NINE YEARS OLD AND A VIDEO-GAME CIRCUIT STAR

By Bruce Lambert

HOLBROOK, N.Y., June 5 — Victor M. De Leon III has been playing video games on the professional circuit for five years now, racking up thousands of dollars in prizes and endorsements at tournaments around the country. He has a national corporate sponsor, a publicist and a Web site, with 531 photos chronicling his career. A documentary filmmaker has been following him for months.

Victor weighs 56 pounds and likes to watch SpongeBob SquarePants at his home here on Long Island. He celebrated his 9th birthday last month with a trip to a carnival and a vanilla cake. He gets above-average marks in the third grade, where he recently drew a dragon for art class.

The appropriately named Victor — better known to cyber rivals and fans as Lil’ Poison — is thought to be the world’s youngest professional gamer…

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Overheard on Lorimer St.

Time Out New York has an appealing cover story called “The Hipster Must Die!” 

 

As someone who spends time in Williamsburg—ground zero of cultural-zombie trendsetters—I found Time Out’s sentiment to be appealing.  Williamsburg has many things going for it, but a surfeit of vapid hipsters certrainly isn’t one of them. 

When I emerged from Gimme! the other day with my mid-morning cup of aromatic, full-bodied coffee, I was greeted by a wasted young woman and two strung-out, runny-nosed dudes.  The more vapid looking of the two was standing on a skateboard and wearing a faded Dunkin Donuts T-shirt from the days before the donut chain merged with Baskin-Robbins.  (Full confession: Ever since I saw the 1965 Oscar-nominated short “Skater Dater,” I’ve had fanstasies of being a champion skateboarder—and giving it all up for the right girl). 

The dude in front of Gimme! interrupted some minor trick he was doing on his skateboard, spun around, and bellowed in my direction: ”Fuck this place!  The coffee costs $1.30.” 

An outrageous price indeed for the very best coffee in the entire borough!  He stood there as if he expected me to hand him my coffee.  Instead I sent him and his two cronies down the street to an old world bakery known for its pastries—though most sell for more than $1.30—and a nondescript cup of coffee that costs 75 cents.

Kasparov in Zugzwang

Chess players are amused when the language of their game—checkmate, stalemate, pawn, gambit—shows up in nonchess contexts: “He’s just a pawn to be sacrificed.”  I particularly like the word zugzwang. 

Normally in chess it is a big advantage to be the player who is on move. But there are those rare chess positions in which whoever must move is at a huge disadvantage, because he has no choice but to give ground (In chess, you have to move a piece when it’s your turn; you can’t opt to stand still).   This kind of standoff has the beautiful guttural name zugzwang.  It is worth striving for such chess positions, even if you’re on the losing side and must give way, just so that you have a reason to utter the double-z word, which can’t even be spelled in Scrabble without resorting to a blank tile.

At BookExpo, the publishing gala in which 30,000 booksellers, editors, and authors crowded the Javits Center, I visited the booth of Bloomsbury, publisher of Garry Kasparov’s forthcoming semi-self-help book How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom.  There was a huge stack of his book, and next to it, an equally mammoth stack of Zugzwang,

 

Ronan Bennett’s murder-thriller set in St. Petersburg.  Now if only they had interlaced the stacks, so that the removal of any single book would cause the whole pile to collapse.  That would have been true zugzwang.

Sex for Dummies

 

I had my third date with Dr. Ruth Westheimer—at BookExpo America, the annual publishing bash at the Javits Center.  OK, “date” is a bit of bar-stool bravado; it was just the third time we met. 

The first time was when I had a day job, as the president/editor in chief of Discover magazine, and we found ourselves seated at the same table for lunch at some industry function.  When the waiter struggled to uncork a bottle of champagne, there was the predictable snickering around the table about how Dr. Ruth might have some advice for him.   

Our second meeting was in Central Park.  She was sitting by herself on a bench, and we had a brief chat.

A few years ago, I felt I really got to know her from her call-in radio show.  I don’t think I would have discovered the show had it not been for my self-imposed experiment in seeing whether I could play chess as an adult without spiraling into the kind of solipsistic obsession that had  haunted me as a child—the subject of my book King’s Gambit: A Father, a Son, and the World’s Most Dangerous Game.  On Wednesday evening I’d drive an hour and fifteen minutes from Woodstock to play in a tournament at the Middletown Chess Club.  On the drive home, I’d often unwind from the game by listening, at 11:30 P.M. or midnight, to Dr. Ruth’s show.   

But I remember only one question.  A young woman called in and asked Dr. Ruth whether it was too kinky to indulge her boyfriend’s fantasy of threading donuts—glazed not powdered—on his you know what.  The good doctor told her to go for it.

And, so at BookExpo, after roaming the convention floor for three hours, overwhelmed by the myriad of titles on display, I came across a mile-high stack of Sex for Dummies.  I was amused by this addition to the Dummies line. Incredibly, there are 1,300 different Dummies titles, which have sold more than 150 million copies; I was told that Dr. Ruth’s book, which is now in its third edition, is the most viewed title at dummies.com.  In Sex for Dummies, the speech bubble on the Dummies Man—the thoughtful-looking, triangular-faced dude who graces the cover of every book in the Dummies line—says “Try new sexual positions.”  And to think that the whole series began with DOS for Dummies.

 

I happened on the stack of Sex for Dummies half an hour before Dr. Ruth was scheduled to sign them.  But I was tired of walking around and, as someone who was freshly single after a decade of marriage (apparently I had failed to read Relationships for Dummies), I thought the book might even do me some good.  It was a bit embarrassing, though, to be waiting at the front of the signing line (which soon numbered hundreds of people) among a group of matronly Midwest librarians.  I passed the time perusing a copy of the book, and the unattractive person in line behind me kept apologizing for trying to read it over my shoulder.

When the diminutive sex expert finally arrived, one of the librarians said, admiringly, “Look at her!  She’s looks great.  She’s still alive and kicking.”

“I’m sure she’s doing a lot more than kicking,” a middle-aged man chimed in.

“Will there be demonstrations, Dr. Ruth?”  a woman cackled.  “We want demonstrations.” 

Dr. Ruth ignored her.  When she signed my book, I asked her what was new in this, the third edition.

“You’ll have to read it,” she teased, in her familiar energetic voice.

 

“But I don’t have the second edition.  I want to know what’s changed.” 

“Just read it!” she commanded. 

There must be new material, I thought, in chapter 15,  “Keeping up with Cybersex and Other Hot Stuff.”

Today America’s most beloved sex therapist and author turns 79.  Happy birthday, Dr. Ruth!

Memoirs of a Freelancer

A marriage annoucement in today’s New York Times caught my eye: between Kathleen Rubenstein, 22, and Hays Golden, 23, who met at the University of Colorado.  After trumpeting the impressive pedigree of the bride’s parents—the dad is the strategic-planner and fund-raiser for an autism society and the mother is the founder/CEO of her own management-consulting firm—the Times briskly identifies the bridegroom’s father, Arthur Golden, as “a freelance writer and the author of ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ (Knopf, 1997)” and then expends five-times as much ink on the credentials of a cousin of the bridegroom’s father, Times chairman and publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and the brother of the bridegroom, Michael Golden, Times vice honcho.

Now I’m not ragging on the paper for covering what is essentially a Times family affair, but for its description of the bridegroom’s dad as, first, “a freelance writer.”  Was that phrase necessary at all?  Wouldn’t it simply be sufficient—and far more informative—to identify Arthur Golden straight out as the author of Memoirs of a Geisha, a brilliant, bestselling first novel, for which Golden received oodles of well-deserved praise for beautifully and empathetically telling the story of a Kyoto geisha in the 1930s from the woman’s point of view.

Maybe someone at the Times felt it important to say “freelance writer” to forestall any impression—since the novel was published ten years ago—that Golden has been sitting around in a kimona fussing over tea ceremonies and sipping sake.

Writers like me bristle at the description “freelance” because it sounds like a synonym for “had a four-paragraph piece published in a minor airline magazine seven years ago.”  For that matter, if someone I just met in a coffee shop asked me what I did and I replied that I’m a writer, the next question would inevitably be, “Have you published anything?”  But to say off the bat, “I’m a published writer,” would sound too defensive or, alternatively, too snobby, as if I’m distinguishing myself from the other caffeneited scribblers around me who are struggling to get published. 

Such is the writer’s ambiguous lot.  If I said I was a doctor, my questioner might imagine that I owned a stethoscope and listened to congested people’s chests—she wouldn’t ask me if I had ever examined a patient.  If I said I was a gardener, she wouldn’t wonder if I had ever pruned a hedge. 

Publishing Confidential, Part I

Pasanella & Son Vintners in the South Street Seaport is a stylish, architecturally splendid wine shop where fish mongers once hocked cod.  A 1967 blue Ferrari, with its trunk open and filled with wine, is normally parked in the middle of the store, but was out on the town Friday night.   My publisher, Hyperion, needed all the space in the wine shop for a classy party in which its fall-list authors like me could schmooze booksellers who had descended on the city for the annual BookExpo America, at the Javits Center.  First, though, Hyperion brought all of us authors together for dinner—a gracious gesture given that writing is a solitary craft, and I at least don’t know that many other people who write books.

Now writers are like dogs—we’re all apparently one species but we come in shapes and sizes as diverse as dachshunds and great Danes.  So there I was, seated at dinner between fellow scribes Duane “Dog” Chapman (You Can Run but You Can’t Hide) and Kansas novelist Laura Moriarty (The Rest of Her Life)—with Hyperion author Caroline Kennedy (A Family Christmas) joining the party once the booksellers arrived.  The dinner gave me a rare chance, I thought, to discuss with these other wordsmiths the trade-offs involved in first-person versus third-person narration or even the outre second-person.

Laura Moriarty’s fiction addresses mother-daughter issues,

and my book, King’s Gambit, explores father-son dynamics, through the lens of chess, and so we realized that between the two of us we had the entire family unit covered.  Laura wanted to know what I blogged about.  “Not just chess,” I said, “but food, words, anything that I’m passionate about.”

“Words?” she said.

“Yeah, about phrases I hear, and their possible origins.”

She said that she had a very literal mind and could not help thinking, whenever she heard a colloquial expression, like the phrase “butt load,” of what the words themselves meant.  I told her she should be prepared to cringe when she read my blog entry on the tough-guy expression “Don’t blow smoke up my ass.”

Now I’m off to the Javits Center to be humbled by the tens of thousands of different books sold each year—and wonder how on earth mine will ever catch the eyes of prospective readers.

American Star Advances in World Chess Championship Qualifier

With a decisive 3.5 - .5 victory over his French adversary, Gata Kamsky of Brighton Beach now proceeds to the second and final round of the qualifying matches for September’s World Chess Championship in Mexico City.   The final round—a six-game match—will take place in Elista, Kalmykia, from June 6 to 14.  Kamsky’s success is impressive because, after a six-year absence from tournament chess, he has clawed his way back with a vengeance.

Kamsky, who defected from Siberia to the United States in 1989, is the second American to make a triumphant comeback after a long hiatus from tournament chess.  Former women’s world champion Susan Polgar took an eight-and-a-half-year break from international competition before leading the U.S. Women’s team to a silver medal in the 2004 Chess Olympiad in Calvia, Spain.

Both Kamsky and Polgar’s absences from chess were voluntary.  Not so for Alexander FyodorovichIlyin-Genevsky, a master whose story I tell in my book King’s Gambit: A Father, a Son, and the World’s Most Dangerous Game. 

Ilyin-Genevsky convinced Moscow to support the game and organized the first Soviet Championship in 1920.  As a player he was not among Russia’s very best (although he was skilled enough to be the three-time champion of Leningrad and to defeat Capablanca once in 1925), but he had the curious distinction of being the only known master who had to learn the game twice from scratch, because a brain injury in World War I erased his memory of how the pieces moved. 

During the Russian Revolution, when food shortages, power outages, and sub-zero temperatures brought Moscow to a standstill, Ilyin-Genevsky buried himself in chess.  Even after the central chess club—along with the city’s theaters, and other venues of entertainment—had been destroyed, he would hike through the frigid, blacked-out city to play against a dozen other chess addicts in a basement apartment illuminated by match light.