Whether you are seriously hooked on chess or casually intrigued by it, you probably think of the tables in Cambridge’s Holyoke Center as the Boston area’s one big outdoor chess venue. That’s, after all, where the Chess Master sets out his board a few tables down from his counterpart, the redoubtable Chess Mister. That’s where you can play both regular chess and blitz, the high-speed version, most any day, for $2.00 a pop, against skilled competition. (If you win — it does occasionally happen — you get your $2.00 back.) And that’s where, if you’re learning, you can find a teacher.

Who knew? Chinatown Park on the southern tip of the Greenway rivals Harvard Square as a home for outdoor chess

Of course, if you’d been bitten by the chess bug, you didn’t need me to tell you about the scene at Holyoke Center. You knew.

But if you knew, you probably thought that’s all there is to outdoor chess in Boston. If so, you were mistaken. There is another venue where the game is played with at least as much passion and relish — the game, that is,if you’re capable of wrapping your mind around the fact that chess speaks more than one language. (more…)

Though it does not originate in the Kuiper Belt, the Beijing summer Olympics (8/8/08-8/24/08) is bearing down upon us like an outsized asteroid, bringing China out of feudal/communist distance into full twenty-first century relief. Sports, at this point, remain secondary:before we get to ping-pong, swimming, the shot-put and gymnastics, Americans have unprecedented amounts of trend-setting Chinese art and culture to ponder.

Time to take out your Xiangqui board! (more…)

Marcel Duchamp famously tweaked art for being inferior to chess, saying: “From my close contact with artists and chess players I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.” Duchamp backed this opinion up by abandoning art for years to pursue what he believed to be the greater intellectual and aesthetic rewards of chess.

Duchamp playing chess sometime during the 1930s

In fact, the argument can be made that Duchamp resigned himself to becoming a legend of the art world only because he didn’t quite have the talent to become a legend of chess world. It is tempting, then, to wonder what Duchamp might have made of Diana Thater’s installation, “Here is a text about the world,” in which a chess fetish meets Chelsea art world convention. (David Zwirner Gallery, 525 West 19th Street, Manhattan, January 10 - February 9).

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Zugzwang,by Ronan Bennett
(Bloomsbury USA, 288 pages)

It’s an understatement to say chess has been good for literature; the game has even inspired people not known for the written word to produce memorable prose. Consider the following, for example, by composer Sergey Prokofiev apropos a game he witnessed in pre-World War I Russia: “I watched the . . . board descending into a state of incomprehensible complexity, with virtually every piece exposed to attack; this sent me into a state of pure ecstasy.”

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If you want to get a glimpse of a Joseph Stalin you likely had never conceived of before, just turn to the mug shot taken of him by Tsarist police in 1912 or some of the other photos in Sebag Montefiore fascinating, radically revisionist new biography Young Stalin. (more…)

Ex-Catholic nun Karen Armstrong has, in her long, productive second career as scholar, written 21 books, including A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and engaging, balanced biographies of Buddha and Muhammed. I interviewed her about the Buddha biography when it came out in 2001 and enjoyed talking to her, but what she’s saying now vis a vis her new book, The Bible: A Biography just isn’t so. (more…)

That Doris Lessing, at the age of 88, has at last won the Nobel Prize for literature is a cause for celebration, and for allowing that some things, at least, however unexpectedly, can finally go right in this world. Why it took the Nobel Committee so long to come to a correct conclusion about her achievement is the remaining mystery. It has, to her many readers, been an open secret for decades she is simply one of the world’s most commanding writers, with a range of theme, material, style and genre no other writer in English can match. (more…)