So, if I were to pose as a chess player, I’d have to also admit to being the worst chess player in human history. But this piece by John Holbo, arguing for the poetic beauty of Anderssen & Kiezeritzky’s Immortal Game, a poetic beauty that

cannot plausibly be explained with talk about “the complexity of language,” or “language-use,” or “language-games,” or “linguistic elements drawing attention to their own linguisticality,” or “free-play of signifiers”

does, I think, bear thinking about. Even if I can’t read the “poem” myself, and have to depend on Holbo’s exegesis of it.

* Also, the excerpts from Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defense were enough to get me to add it to my Amazon (.co.uk, since it’s out of print in the US) wishlist. Everybody says I should read Nabokov; well, maybe this will be the gateway drug. I find irresistible the temptation to steal, and make use of for SF, the techniques that Nabokov uses to make Luzhin’s chess-obsessed worldview accessible to those who are unable to sense, as Luzhin senses, the “exquisite, invisible chess forces . . . in their original purity.”