Addiction in "Love in the Time of Cholera"

OK, we were e-mailing about this (the fact that there are several references to chess and to Dr. Juvenal Urbino & Jeremiah de Saint-Amour suffering from an addiction to chess) during the day today, and I was reminded of a quotation... (It’s a long one, bear with me). As a ‘recovering chess addict’ (tournament-free since 9/2005!) I can confirm that chess addiction is no joke. :-)

“When one of us first plays chess, he is like a man who has already caught a dose of microbes of, say, Hong Kong Flu. Such a man walks along the street, and he does not yet know that he is ill. He is healthy, he feels fine, but the microbes are doing their work.
Something similar, though less harmful, occurs in chess. You have just been shown that the knight moves like the Russian letter “L” (actually the Russian letter is an upside down version of our L - but the knight move is the same - Jay), the bishop diagonally, the castle (rook) in a straight line, while the queen likes her own colour. You lose the first game. But at some time, if your father or elder brother or simply an old friend wants to be kind to you, then you win, and as a result feel very proud of yourself. A few days pass, and suddenly you involuntarily begin to sense that, without chess, there is something missing in your life. Then you may rejoice: you belong to that group of people without a natural immunity to the chess disaease…”

Mikhail Tal - “The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal” 1997

Note carefully the wording of the last sentence: one rejoices because he is without immunity…

Mikhail Tal was a famous Soviet Chess Grandmaster from Riga (Latvia) who was World Champion in 1960 & 1961. He was famous among chess professionals for being a bit of a 'party animal' - drinking, smoking, chasing women, i.e. all the good stuff - compared to his contemporaries. (I actually met him briefly in 1988 at the National Open tournament in Chicago, where one of my friends had the honor of playing against him in one of those 'simultaneous exhibitions' - where the master takes on many players at once to ‘even the odds’ - and actually managed to draw the game.)

Extracurricular Reading returns!

Hi All,

Just finished a good book today: Ken Jennings's (remember him from Jeopardy!) "Brainiac - Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs"

I actually bought this book for my dad for his 80th birthday last september (not with the intention of later borrowing it from him, I promise!) and he talked me into borrowing it recently. I breezed through it, since it's such a 'familiar' topic to me. Hearing him describe his Jeopardy! audition brought back memories of my own (it sounds like we even took the same 50-question test on day 2 of the tryouts) summer of 03(?) audition.

He also spends a lot of time in the book talking about other trivia 'enclaves' in the country, not the least of which was the phenomenon of 'pub trivia' and 'NTN' that most of the book club is familiar with from the infamous "BW3's Committee Meetings". All in all an entertaining book. Makes me want to head downtown to BW3s right now for a game...

P.S. I'm about halfway through "The Innocent Man"; quite a page turner. Much easier to get through than some of our other books. Hope everyone else is enjoying it.

-Jay

Call of the Wild

I'll follow suit, Sonja. Here's some stuff about "Call of the Wild", from Wikipedia:

The Call of the Wild is a novella by American writer Jack London. The plot concerns a domesticated dog whose primordial instincts return as he works as a sled dog in the trecherous, frigid Yukon in the search of a yellow metal.
Published in 1903, The Call of the Wild is London's most read book and considered one of his best. Because the protagonist is a dog, it is often thought to be particularly suitable for children, but it is dark in tone and contains numerous scenes of cruelty and violence.

Images of death, cruelty, and Darwinian struggle abound. Of the new world Buck enters, London writes "The salient thing of this other world seemed fear."

The University of Pennsylvania's Online Books Page [1] states that "Jack London's writing was censored in several European dictatorships in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1929, Italy banned all cheap editions of his Call of the Wild, and Yugoslavia banned all his works as being 'too radical.' Some of London's works were also burned by the Nazis." (These regimes may have been reacting to Jack London's reputation as an outspoken Socialist rather than to the content of the book, which, unlike some of his other novels, has no overt political message).
In 1960, critic Maxwell Geismar called The Call of the Wild "a beautiful prose poem." Editor Franklin Walker said that it "belongs on a shelf with Walden and Huckleberry Finn". E. L. Doctorow called it "a mordant parable... his masterpiece."