#soviet era chess set

[royalchessmall12]

Royal Chess Mall: 5 Qualities of Soviet-Inspired Brass Metal Luxury Chess Pieces & Board Set 

Chess is a timeless game of strategy, intelligence, and grandeur. It's a pastime that transcends borders and cultures, bringing people together through its intricate maneuvers and compelling challenges. When you play chess, it's not just about the moves on the board; it's also about the aesthetics and craftsmanship that come with the chess set you choose. The Soviet-inspired Brass Metal Luxury Chess Pieces and Board Set by Royal Chess Mall is a perfect example of combining the beauty of art with the intellectual rigor of chess. We make high-quality chess sets from exotic woods and fine metals, carefully sculpted down to the smallest detail, turning them into true pieces of art.

(1)  Exquisite Craftsmanship

The Soviet-inspired Brass Metal Luxury Chess Pieces and Board Set by Royal Chess Mall is a testament to the art of craftsmanship. Each chess piece is intricately designed and meticulously crafted with the utmost attention to detail. Made from high-quality brass, these pieces exude an air of elegance and sophistication. The chessboard itself is a work of art, featuring a beautiful inlaid wooden board with a stunning border design. This set is a visual masterpiece that elevates the game of chess to a whole new level.

(2) Timeless Design

The design of this chess set pays homage to the grandeur and opulence of the Soviet era. The chess pieces are inspired by the classical Staunton pattern but are adorned with unique Soviet-inspired motifs. The kings and queens, for example, are embellished with ornate crowns, and the knights take on the shape of noble steeds. This design not only reflects the historical significance of the Soviet Union but also adds a touch of regal splendor to your chess matches.

(3) Premium Materials

Quality is of the utmost importance when it comes to chess sets, and the Soviet-inspired Brass Metal Luxury Chess Pieces & Board Set by Royal Chess Mall does not disappoint. The use of premium brass for the chess pieces ensures durability and longevity. The wooden chessboard is made from high-quality materials, providing a smooth playing surface while adding a touch of natural warmth to the set. When you invest in this chess set, you're investing in a piece of art that will last for generations.

(4) Impeccable Balance

Balance is a crucial aspect of any chess set, and the Soviet-inspired Brass Metal Luxury Chess Pieces & Board Set offers impeccable equilibrium. The weight of each piece is carefully calibrated to ensure stability during play, preventing accidental knocks and disturbances. This balance allows for smooth and unhindered gameplay, so you can focus on your strategy and enjoy the game without any distractions.

(5)  A Gift of Distinction

Whether you're an avid chess player or a collector of fine chess sets, the Soviet-inspired Brass Metal Luxury Chess Pieces & Board Set is a gift of distinction. It's a luxurious and thoughtful present for chess enthusiasts, history buffs, or anyone with a penchant for the finer things in life. The set comes in elegant packaging, making it a gift that will be cherished and admired for years to come.

All the chessmen have hand-carved work done by top craftsmen of the trade. To add to it unique carving work of Asian elephants has been done on the chessboard itself. The retail package includes a beautiful red case to store your luxury chess set.

Conclusion

Chess is not just a game; it's an art form that combines strategy, intellect, and aesthetics. The Soviet-inspired Brass Metal Luxury Chess Pieces & Board Set by Royal Chess Mall embody the essence of this art. When you own this set, you're not just playing a game; you're engaging in an experience that reflects the grandeur of the Soviet era and the beauty of chess.

With all the love from our patrons across the globe, Royal Chess Mall, has grown to become one of the most loved chess stores with distribution centers in the USA, UK, Germany & India to cater to its clientele in North America, Europe & other countries worldwide. If you want to buy chess boards, metal chess sets, and general chess sets, you can surely visit our website Royal Chess Mall. Wishing you a great journey with chess!

[vinaysohan]

Carrom Gam

Certainly Board games are tabletop games that involve players moving pieces or markers on a pre-marked surface or "board" according to certain rules. These games can vary widely in terms of complexity, strategy, theme, and mechanics. Here are descriptions of a few popular board games.

Chess: Chess is a two-player strategy game that involves moving different types of pieces across a checkered board with the goal of checkmating the opponent's king. Each type of piece moves in a unique way, and the objective is to put the opponent's king in a position where it cannot escape capture.

Monopoly: Monopoly is a classic economic strategy game where players roll dice to move around a board, buying and trading properties, and aiming to bankrupt their opponents. The game involves resource management, negotiation, and a fair amount of luck.

Settlers of Catan: Settlers of Catan is a modern board game that involves resource management and trading. Players build settlements and roads on a fictional island by collecting and trading resources like wood, brick, wheat, ore, and sheep. The game's popularity has led to numerous expansions and variations.

Risk: Risk is a game of global domination and strategic warfare. Players deploy armies, attack opponents, and conquer territories on a map of the world. The game involves both strategic planning and tactical decisions.

Ticket to Ride: In Ticket to Ride, players collect train cards to claim railway routes between cities on a map. The objective is to complete destination tickets and build the longest continuous routes. The game balances strategy with a touch of luck.

Pandemic: Pandemic is a cooperative game where players work together as members of a disease-fighting team to treat infections and find cures before the world is overwhelmed. The game emphasizes teamwork and strategy against the challenges presented by spreading diseases.

Carcassonne: Carcassonne is a tile-placement game where players build a medieval landscape by placing tiles with cities, roads, fields, and more. Players also deploy their followers as "meeples" to claim features and earn points.

7 Wonders: 7 Wonders is a card drafting game where players build civilizations over three ages by selecting cards that represent buildings, technologies, and wonders. The game involves choosing cards strategically and adapting to changing circumstances.

Codenames: Codenames is a word-based party game that requires players to give one-word clues to their teammates to help them guess the correct words on a grid. The game challenges creativity, word association, and deduction skills.

Twilight Struggle: Twilight Struggle is a two-player game that simulates the Cold War era. Players take on the roles of either the United States or the Soviet Union, competing for influence in various countries through political, military, and cultural means.

These are just a few examples, and the world of board games is vast and diverse, catering to a wide range of interests and preferences. Whether you enjoy strategy, cooperation, negotiation, or storytelling, there's likely a board game that suits your tas Of course, I'd be happy to continue describing more board games:

Dominion: Dominion is a deck-building game where players start with a small deck of basic cards and gradually acquire more powerful cards to improve their deck. The goal is to earn victory points by constructing the most efficient deck.

Agricola: Agricola is a worker-placement game where players are farmers striving to expand their farms, grow crops, raise animals, and improve their homesteads. Players must manage resources and plan carefully to meet the demands of each harvest.

Splendor: Splendor is a game of gem trading and development. Players collect gems to purchase development cards, which provide permanent gem bonuses and victory points. The game emphasizes resource management and strategy.

Lords of Waterdeep: Lords of Waterdeep is a worker-placement game set in the Dungeons & Dragons universe. Players act as secret rulers of the city, assigning agents to quests and buildings to gain resources and complete objectives.

Dead of Winter: Dead of Winter is a cooperative and semi-cooperative game set in a zombie apocalypse. Players work together to survive, complete objectives, and manage limited resources while dealing with potential traitors in their midst.

Betrayal at House on the Hill: This game starts as a cooperative exploration of a haunted mansion, but as the story unfolds, one player may become a traitor with a secret objective. The rest of the players then try to overcome the traitor's plans.

Terraforming Mars: In Terraforming Mars, players take on the role of corporations working to terraform and colonize the planet Mars. They acquire resources, improve the environment, and compete to achieve various goals.

Catan: Catan, also known as The Settlers of Catan, is a game about resource gathering and trading. Players collect resources to build settlements and roads, while trading with each other to expand and develop their territories.

Forbidden Island/Forbidden Desert: These are cooperative games where players work together to solve puzzles and complete tasks. In Forbidden Island, players retrieve valuable treasures from a sinking island, while in Forbidden Desert, they search for parts to repair an airship in a desert.

Clue (Cluedo): Clue is a deduction game where players attempt to solve a murder mystery by gathering clues and making educated guesses about the suspect, location, and weapon. Players move around the game board to gather information.

These are just a few more examples from the diverse world of board games. Board games continue to evolve with new themes, mechanics, and styles, catering to both casual players and dedicated enthusiasts. Whether you're seeking strategic challenges, social interaction, or immersive storytelling, there's likely a board game that suits your interests.

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[nismorack]

I really liked Queen's Gambit and like everyone who watched I suddenly wanted a chess set. Now, I have a chess set. But what I really wanted was the set they played in the finale.

Some digging later suggested that was what was known as Grossmeister Supreme set. Made only for high level Soviet tournaments. Which will cost around 300+ euros. Even replicas made entirely of wood are expensive.

However, I also found out that the general Grossmeister set was used in all normal tournaments. Up to the 60s they we all wood. From the 60s onwards the knights and decorations were made of plastic.

For a far more reasonable price (but still not super cheap), I managed to find a set from the 80s. It had only one minor flaw. The soles of the pieces had deformed preventing some pieces from standing straight.

Luckily I still had some black tolex leftover from an old amp project. This stuff matched the style of the original soles and is also designed to take a beating. Some cutting and glueing later all pieces have shiny new soles and can stand up straight once more.

Now to locate a nice wooden board to go with it.

[swan-of-sunrise]

The Winter Soldier (Chapter Four)

Summary: (Y/N) and Sam worry about their new super-soldier friend after it’s revealed that he’s on the run and wanted by S.H.I.E.L.D., the very agency he’d dedicated himself to.

Pairing: Steve Rogers X Reader

Word Count: 1.3k

Warnings/Disclaimers: None

A/N: Hope you all enjoy!

Chapter Four (Previous Chapter)

“It’s such bullshit! Captain America’s a criminal now?!”

“I know, Greg.”

“They haven’t even said what he’s done!”

“Yep, it’s ridiculous…”

“How can they organize a manhunt for him but not say what he’s supposedly done?!”

(Y/N) pinched the bridge of her nose and let out a frustrated groan. “Greg, you’re my friend and I love you but I can’t keep having this conversation with you.”

The line was silent for a moment. “What do you mean?”

“We’ve been having the exact same conversation for almost a half an hour! You can’t believe that Cap’s a criminal, I agree, you complain that they haven’t said what he’s wanted for, I agree, then you start going all ‘Law and Order’ on me!” She exclaimed, immediately regretting her outburst; with a sigh, she sat down in her desk chair and rubbed her forehead. “I’m sorry, Greg, that was rude. I don’t like what’s going on either; Captain America stands for freedom and honor, he always has, and it just seems…wrong that he’s the subject of a manhunt. I seriously doubt that Captain America of all people did anything to break the law.”

“Wow, when did you become such a big Cap fan?”

“I went to his exhibit when I was at the Air and Space Museum yesterday, and I guess it got me interested.” (Y/N) half-lied, fidgeting with the sleeve of her sweater as she pressed her phone closer to her ear. “Anyway, the reason I called was to tell you that it might take me a little longer to get the draft of my book to you; I still need to look over the last couple of chapters and with everything happening…it might be hard to focus on writing today.”

“Don’t worry about it, Mike’s busy reading through a nine-hundred-page thriller that was sent in this morning so that’ll give you some time. Sorry to cut this short but I’ve gotta go, I have to check on mine and Mara’s dinner reservation for tonight, so I’ll talk to you later, (Y/N)!”

“Talk to you later, Greg!” (Y/N) hung up and set her cell phone down on the desk with a sigh. Ever since she and Sam turned on the television at breakfast and saw the breaking news, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was horribly wrong; Steve Rogers wouldn’t be on the run from S.H.I.E.L.D. unless he had a damn good reason to be. I’m sure he’s fine, he’s probably been through much tougher scrapes than this, she thought to herself with forced optimism as she turned on her laptop and began typing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Humming along to Billy Joel’s ‘Movin’ Out’, (Y/N)’s fingers flew across her keyboard as she typed and she smiled, proud of the fact that her writer’s block from the week before was now officially over and that she was so close to completing her very first novel. Not bad, not bad at all, she thought, hitting the ‘save’ button and stretching her arms over her head to relieve the build-up tension in her shoulders.

“Now this is good music, Booksmart!”

She spun her desk chair around to see Sam standing in the doorway of her bedroom and raised her eyebrow as she turned down her music. “Oh, so Billy Joel’s okay but everything else I listen to is garbage?”

Sam gave her a teasing eye-roll. “I never said that your music was garbage, I just said it was weird. How’s the writing going today?”

“I edited twelve pages and just spent an hour trying to describe a Soviet Cold War-era missile, so it’s been okay. How was work?”

“It was good, I didn’t have any meetings scheduled so I spent most of the day playing chess with the old timers. I swear, I think Gary cheats but I can’t figure out how he does it…”

(Y/N) shrugged. “Or maybe you should just accept the fact that you’re terrible at chess and the old timers take great pleasure in seeing you lose.”

“Ha, ha, very funny. You still cool with driving me to the shop to pick up my car?”

(Y/N) got up, turning off her computer and unplugging her MP3 player from her speaker with a grin. “Of course! Driver picks the music, though!” She laughed and practically skipped out of the room as Sam let out a groan of defeat and followed her. “Oh, don’t be so dramatic, Birdbrain, it’s not like I’m making you listen to a CD of ambient throat singing!”

“Wouldn’t be surprised if you had some of that…”

Five minutes later, they were on the road and the two of them were singing along to her one of Panic! At The Disco’s newest singles at the top of their lungs; out of the corner of her eye she could see other drivers shooting them odd looks but she couldn’t care less, she was enjoying herself far too much.

Sam chuckled as the song came to a finish. “Damn, their new album is good. You know, I didn’t start listening to alt-rock until I met you.”

“Then you should be thanking me for bringing such good music into your life!” Giggling, (Y/N) turned down the volume and glanced over at the cheerful man sitting beside her, her smile faltering as she asked, “Do you think he’s okay, Sam?”

Her roommate’s expression grew serious and he shook his head. “I really don’t know. I saw on CNN earlier that inside sources claim he’s wanted by S.H.I.E.L.D. in connection to the assassination of their director, but I don’t buy it. The guy we’ve met, who’s so dedicated to his job that he hasn’t bothered getting a life outside of it, wouldn’t be a part of something like that. I think something else’s up and I’ll bet anything he’s out there trying to figure it out.”

(Y/N) bit her bottom lip, nodding after a moment. “Yeah, me too.”

“Just you wait, this whole mess with S.H.I.E.L.D.’ll be cleared up in no time. I’m calling it right now, Steve’s gonna ride up to the VA on his motorcycle and dramatically whisk you off your feet, and the two of you are gonna ride off into the sunset together while one of those sappy love songs you pretend not to like plays in the background.” Sam's teasing smirk widened when her cheeks flushed. “C’mon, Booksmart, you both were mooning over each other like teenagers after the meeting yesterday; I felt like I was in the live studio audience of a soap opera taping.”

“You know, I could always kick you out of the car and make you walk all the way to the shop, if you'd prefer.”

“And I'd still get there before you ‘cause you drive like a grandma...”

Soon after, she pulled into the auto repair shop’s lot, parking under the shade of a tree before turning to Sam with a smile. “Did you want me to stay just in case your car isn’t ready yet?”

“That would be great, actually, thanks!” Sam gave her a grin before getting out of the car and heading into the shop.

(Y/N) rolled down the windows and sighed when she felt the soft spring breeze against her skin. Taking advantage of the peaceful moment, she let her imagination wander and began brainstorming different stories and characters in her head. You should probably finish the book you’re writing before you start on another one, she thought with a playful eye-roll. Her childhood dream of becoming a published author was in the middle of coming true, and she couldn’t be any happier about it.

Just then, her eyes drifted to a silver truck that was driving past the parking lot. It was going fast so she couldn’t get a very good look at the driver, but for a split second she could have sworn that the man driving the truck had the same blonde hair and chiseled jaw as Steve Rogers. Chalking it up to worry for the runaway super-soldier, she closed her eyes and murmured, “Whatever he’s up to, I hope that he’s staying safe.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

A/N: Thank you so much for reading! I’ve created a Spotify playlist inspired by this series, and I’ll be updating it every time I upload a new chapter. Enjoy!

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4BenknAqQQnOWY8NmSa23V

Tagging: @mrs-obrien​ @lahoete​ @awkward117​ @cminr​ @momc95​ @awkwardnesshabitat​ @marinettepotterandplagg​ @khuang3​ @supersouthy​ @benakenalove​ @brooke0297​ @hufflepeople​ @becausewelie​​ @outoftheregular @supreme-tantrum​

Chapter Five

“The Winter Soldier” Masterlist

[hafwen]

Netflix’s ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ said the first female grandmaster ‘never faced men.’ Now she’s suing.

By

Julian Mark

Today at 7:52 a.m. EDT

In 1968, Nona Gaprindashvili was the only female chess player to enter the International Tournament in Gothenburg, Sweden. Throughout the tournament, she sat across from nine men and topped seven of them, placing third overall.

Recapping Gaprindashvili’s success, the New York Times noted the chess player’s “never-say-die spirit.”

As it happens, 1968 is the same year that Beth Harmon, the fictional heroine of the blockbuster Netflix series “The Queen’s Gambit,” was the only female competitor at a respected chess tournament set in Moscow. But during one scene at the tournament, a commentator remarked on how unusual it was that Harmon, a woman, was competing. Then he said: “There’s Nona Gaprindashvili, but she’s the female world champion and has never faced men.”

The camera then turned to a character resembling Gaprindashvili sitting in the audience.

That moment, shown in the final episode of the series, is now the subject of a defamation lawsuit that Gaprindashvili filed against Netflix on Thursday.

“The allegation that Gaprindashvili ‘has never faced men’ is manifestly false, as well as being grossly sexist and belittling,” the lawsuit states. Alleging false light and defamation, the suit demands at least $5 million in damages.

“Netflix brazenly and deliberately lied about Gaprindashvili’s achievements for the cheap and cynical purpose of ‘heightening the drama’ by making it appear that its fictional hero had managed to do what no other woman, including Gaprindashvili, had done,” the lawsuit adds.

Recounting the numerous times Gaprindashvili faced men — including the 1977 tournament that led to the Georgian becoming the first woman to achieve the title of grandmaster — the lawsuit compares the trajectories of the real-life Gaprindashvili and the fictional Harmon. The lawsuit also points out an irony: In attempting to create an inspiring story about a woman excelling in a male-dominated sport, Netflix “humiliated” Gaprindashvili, a trailblazer for women in chess whom some called the “real life Beth Harmon” after the show’s release.

Netflix did not respond to a request for comment late Thursday. The company told the New York Times that it believed Gaprindashvili’s lawsuit had no merit. “Netflix has only the utmost respect for Ms. Gaprindashvili and her illustrious career, but we believe this claim has no merit and will vigorously defend the case,” the company said.

Following its October 2020 debut on the streaming platform, “The Queen’s Gambit” was a resounding success. At the time, it broke the record for the most-viewed scripted limited series, with 62 million households watching the series in the first 28 days. The series inspired a record surge in users on Chess.com, a popular online game platform, and it reopened a debate about the sexism that continues to pervade the sport.

But before “The Queen’s Gambit” — and even the eponymous 1983 novel by Walter Tevis — there was Nona Gaprindashvili. Born in Georgia in 1941, Gaprindashvili began playing professional chess when she was 13. At 20, she became the women’s world champion, a title she successfully defended for the better part of two decades. Georgian female chess players continue to follow in her footsteps.

Georgian women ruled chess in the Soviet era. A new generation chases the same ‘Queen’s Gambit’ glory.

But Gaprindashvili did not only play against women. During the 1964-65 Hastings International Chess Congress in England, she notched victories against four male players. In 1965, Gaprindashvili played 28 men simultaneously in Dorset, England.

In 1977, Gaprindashvili was the only woman invited to the Lone Pine International Tournament in California. She faced nine men and ended up tying for first place. Following that win, Gaprindashvili became the first woman to earn the title of international grandmaster.

During her career, she has faced off against numerous male grandmasters, including Boris Spassky, Mikhail Tal and Viswanathan Anand — all winners of the World Chess Championship. Although she never beat those three, she drew a game against Anand, a five-time world champion, in 1988.

Gaprindashvili’s lawsuit argues that Netflix knew — or should have known — her history and should not have included a line saying she never faced men, as the show had notable chess experts on hand with whom to consult. And, after the series aired, Gaprindashvili confronted Netflix about the error, demanding a public statement about the false line, an apology and a retraction, the lawsuit states.

But Netflix, the lawsuit alleges, dismissed the argument that the statement was defamatory, calling it, rather, “innocuous.”

Rising to prominence as a woman in chess was not easy, Gaprindashvili’s lawsuit notes. Early on, men played especially viciously against her, always taking games until the bitter end and never agreeing to draws. She also wrote about discrimination in a 1976 book, according to the lawsuit. In the book, she proclaimed: “The term ‘Women’s Chess’ has expired.”

“I am proud that I have my share in promoting the creative emancipation of women in chess,” she wrote, according to the lawsuit. “I had my share in helping women to overcome psychological barriers separating them from ‘man’s chess.’

[reidio-silence]

This “triangular diplomacy” was a paradoxical thing, a product of that complex transit between the raging, mercurial Nixon and the coolly rational Nixon, the riverboat gambler and the chess player, Nixons old and new. He was getting out of Vietnam in the most unhinged possible way: dribbling out American troops while stepping up the bombing for fear of showing America “a pitiful, helpless giant” (according to one estimate, 350,000 civilians died in Laos from the bombing for Operation Dewey Canyon II and 600,000 in Cambodia for Operation Menu). But his backstage maneuvering was based in a pragmatic understanding few others were wise enough to reach: that America was no longer the world’s eight-hundred-pound gorilla.

He had read the economic tea leaves: America’s exports had grown by two-thirds over the past decade but Western Europe’s had more than doubled. Japan’s had more than quadrupled, and doubled with the United States from 1965 to 1967 alone. The world trading system agreed to at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 set a gold standard: $35 of U.S. currency could always be exchanged for an ounce of gold. That was swell when the United States was the free world’s unquestioned economic superpower. But this novelty—a trade deficit—was making it more worthwhile for a foreign country to exchange dollars for gold than to buy any U.S. goods, the ounce being worth more in real terms than the thirty-five bucks. America was becoming weaker vis-à-vis the rest of the world.

Nixon outlined all this in a strange and apocalyptic July 6, 1971, tour de horizon to a gathering of media executives at a Holiday Inn in Kansas City. The High Cold War was over, he explained; the last third of the twentieth century would be “an era of negotiation rather than confrontation.” The real arms race was over trade and markets. “Economic power will be the key to other kinds of power.” Thus the global chessboard became not a chessboard at all. The game was multipolar: “When we think in economic terms and economic potentialities, there are five great power centers in the world today,” the United States, Western Europe, Japan, the Soviet Union, and China—with Japan and Western Europe the real potential rivals.

Had they known where this was headed, the execs’ media outlets might have given Nixon’s speech more notice. But his diplomacy was so secret, it was hard to see why the speech was significant: that the tilt away from Europe and Japan would be balanced by a lean toward Russia and China. The significance of Kansas City’s Holiday Inn in the annals of world diplomacy was only recognized years after the fact. For all his listeners knew, when Henry Kissinger disappeared from the diplomatic press corps’ radar the next day on an official visit to Pakistan, it was just as his handlers claimed: that he was indisposed with a stomachache. He had actually ducked inside the People’s Republic of China to close the deal for a presidential visit.

— Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008)

[hydralisk98]

Topics

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~~~~

I BELIEVE IN YOU KLARA, JUST DO IT AND CALL IT A DAY.

[theatticoneighth]

Watching The Queen’s Gambit; on the Remarkable Unexceptionality of Beth Harmon

‘With some people, chess is a pastime. With others, it is a compulsion, even an addiction. And every now and then, a person comes along for whom it is a birthright. Now and then, a small boy appears and dazzles us with his precocity, at what may be the world’s most difficult game. But what if that boy were a girl? A young, unsmiling girl, with brown eyes, red hair, and a dark blue dress? Into the male-dominated world of the nation’s top chess tournaments, strolls a teenage girl with bright, intense eyes, from Fairfield High School in Lexington, Kentucky. She is quiet, well-mannered, and out for blood.’

The preceding epigraph opens a fictional profile of Beth Harmon featured in the third episode of The Queen’s Gambit (2020), and is written and published after the protagonist — a teenage, rookie chess player, no less — beats a series of ranked pros to win her first of many tournaments. In the same deft manner as it depicts the character’s ascent to her global chess stardom, the piece also sets up the series’s narrative: this is evidence of a great talent, it tells us, a grandmaster in the making. As with most other stories about prodigies, this new entry into a timeworn genre is framed unexceptionally by its subject’s exceptionality.

Yet as far as tales regaled about young chess wunderkinds go, Beth Harmon’s stands out in more ways than one. That she is a girl in a male-dominated world has clearly not gone unremarked by both her diegetic and nondiegetic audiences. That her life has thus far — and despite her circumstances — been relatively uneventful, however, is what makes this show so remarkable. After all, much of our culture has undeniably primed us to expect the consequential from those whom we raise upon the pedestal of genius. As Harmon’s interviewer suggests in her conversation with Harmon for the latter’s profile, “Creativity and psychosis often go hand in hand. Or, for that matter, genius and madness.” So quickly do we attribute extraordinary accomplishments to similarly irregular origins that we presume an inexplicability of our geniuses: their idiosyncrasies are warranted, their bad behaviours are excused, and deep into their biographies we dig to excavate the enigmatic anomalies behind their gifts. Through our myths of exceptionality, we make the slightest aberrations into metonyms for brilliance.

Nonetheless, for all her sullenness, non-conformity, and her plethora of addictions, Beth Harmon seems an uncommonly normal girl. No doubt this may be a contentious view, as evinced perhaps by the chorus of viewers and reviewers alike who have already begun to brand the character a Mary Sue. Writing on the series for the LA Review of Books, for instance, Aaron Bady construes The Queen’s Gambit as “the tragedy of Bobby Fischer [made] into a feminist fantasy, a superhero story.” In the same vein, Jane Hu also laments in her astute critique of the Cold War-era drama its flagrant and saccharine wish-fulfillment tendencies. “The show gets to have it both ways,” she observes, “a beautiful heroine who leans into the edge of near self-destruction, but never entirely, because of all the male friends she makes along the way.” Sexual difference is here reconstituted as the unbridgeable chasm that divides the US from the Soviet Union, whereas the mutual friendliness shared between Harmon and her male chess opponents becomes a utopic revision of history. Should one follow Hu’s evaluation of the series as a period drama, then the retroactive ascription of a recognisably socialist collaborative ethos to Harmon and her compatriots is a contrived one indeed. 

Accordingly, both Hu and Bady conclude that the series grants us depthless emotional satisfaction at the costly expense of realism: its all-too-easy resolutions swiftly sidestep any nascent hint of overwhelming tension; its resulting calm betrays our desire for reprieve. Underlying these arguments is the fundamental assumption that the unembellished truth should also be an inconvenient one, but why must we always demand difficulty from those we deem noteworthy? Summing up the show’s conspicuous penchant for conflict-avoidance, Bady writes that: 

over and over again, the show strongly suggests — through a variety of genre and narrative cues — that something bad is about to happen. And then … it just doesn’t. An orphan is sent to a gothic orphanage and the staff … are benign. She meets a creepy, taciturn old man in the basement … and he teaches her chess and loans her money. She is adopted by a dysfunctional family and the mother … takes care of her. She goes to a chess tournament and midway through a crucial game she gets her first period and … another girl helps her, who she rebuffs, and she is fine anyway. She wins games, defeating older male players, and … they respect and welcome her, selflessly helping her. The foster father comes back and …she has the money to buy him off. She gets entangled in cold war politics and … decides not to be.

In short, everything that could go wrong … simply does not go wrong.

Time and again predicaments arise in Harmon’s narrative, but at each point, she is helped fortuitously by the people around her. In turn, the character is allowed to move through the series with the restrained unflappability of a sleepwalker, as if unaffected by the drama of her life.  Of course, this is not to say that she fails to encounter any obstacle on her way to celebrity and success — for neither her childhood trauma nor her substance-laden adolescence are exactly rosy portraits of idyll — but only that such challenges seem so easily ironed out by that they hardly register as true adversity. In other words, the show takes us repeatedly to the brink of what could become a life-altering crisis but refuses to indulge our taste for the spectacle that follows. Skipping over the Aristotelian climax, it shields us from the height of suspense, and without much struggle or effort on the viewers’ part, hands us our payoff. Consequently lacking the epochal weight of plot, little feels deserved in Harmon’s story.

In his study of eschatological fictions, The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode would associate such a predilection for catastrophes with our abiding fear of disorder. Seeing as time, as he argues, is “purely successive [and] disorganised,” we can only reach to the fictive concords of plot to make sense of our experiences. Endings in particular serve as the teleological objective towards which humanity projects our existence, so we hold paradigms of apocalypse closely to ourselves to restore significance to our lives. It probably comes as no surprise then that in a year of chaos and relentless disaster — not to mention the present era of extreme precariousness, doomscrolling, and the 24/7 news cycle, all of which have irrevocably attuned us to the dreadful expectation of “the worst thing to come” — we find ourselves eyeing Harmon’s good fortune with such scepticism. Surely, we imagine, something has to have happened to the character for her in order to justify her immense consequence. But just as children are adopted each day into loving families and chess tournaments play out regularly without much strife, so too can Harmon maintain low-grade dysfunctional relationships with her typically flawed family and friends. 

In any case, although “it seems to be a condition attaching to the exercise of thinking about the future that one should assume one's own time to stand in extraordinary relation to it,” not all orphans have to face Dickensian fates and not all geniuses have to be so tortured (Kermode). The fact remains that the vagaries of our existence are beyond perfect reason, and any attempt at thinking otherwise, while vital, may be naive. Contrary to most critics’ contentions, it is hence not The Queen’s Gambit’s subversions of form but its continued reach towards the same that holds up for viewers such a comforting promise of coherence. The show comes closest to disappointing us as a result when it eschews melodrama for the straightforward. Surprised by the ease and randomness of Harmon’s life, it is not difficult for one to wonder, four or five episodes into the show, what it is all for; one could even begin to empathise with Hu’s description of the series as mere “fodder for beauty.” 

Watching over the series now with Bady’s recap of it in mind, however, I am reminded oddly not of the prestige and historical dramas to which the series is frequently compared, but the low-stakes, slice-of-life cartoons that had peppered my childhood. Defined by the prosaicness of its settings, the genre punctuates the life’s mundanity with brief moments of marvel to accentuate the curious in the ordinary. In these shows, kindergarteners fix the troubles of adults with their hilarious playground antics, while time-traveling robot cats and toddler scientists alike are confronted with the woes of chores. Likewise, we find in The Queen’s Gambit a comparable glimpse of the quotidian framed by its protagonist’s quirks. Certainly, little about the Netflix series’ visual and narrative features would identify it as a slice-of-life serial, but there remains some merit, I believe, in watching it as such. For, if there is anything to be gained from plots wherein nothing is introduced that cannot be resolved in an episode or ten, it is not just what Bady calls the “drowsy comfort” of satisfaction — of knowing that things will be alright, or at the very least, that they will not be terrible. Rather, it is the sense that we are not yet so estranged from ourselves, and that both life and familiarity persists even in the most extraordinary of circumstances.

Perhaps some might find such a tendency towards the normal questionable, yet when all the world is on fire and everyone clambers for acclaim, it is ultimately the ongoingness of everyday life for which one yearns. As Harmon’s childhood friend, Jolene, tells her when she is once again about to fall off the wagon, “You’ve been the best at what you do for so long, you don’t even know what it’s like for the rest of us.” For so long, and especially over the past year, we have catastrophized the myriad crises in which we’re living that we often overlook the minor details and habits that nonetheless sustain us. To inhabit the congruence of both the remarkable and its opposite in the singular figure of Beth Harmon is therefore to be reminded of the possibility of being outstanding without being exceptional — that is, to not make an exception of oneself despite one’s situation — and to let oneself be drawn back, however placid or insignificant it may be, into the unassuming hum of dailiness. It is in this way of living that one lives on, minute by minute, day by day, against the looming fear and anxiety that seek to suspend our plodding regular existence. It is also in this way that I will soon be turning the page on the last few months in anticipation of what is to come. 

Born and raised in the perpetually summery tropics — that is, Singapore — Rachel Tay wishes she could say her life was just like a still from Call Me By Your Name: tanned boys, peaches, and all. Unfortunately, the only resemblance that her life bears to the film comes in the form of books, albeit ones read in the comfort of air-conditioned cafés, and not the pool, for the heat is sweltering and the humidity unbearable. A fervent turtleneck-wearer and an unrepentant hot coffee-addict, she is thus the ideal self-parodying Literature student, and the complete anti-thesis to tropical life.

[nealiios]

THE THIEF OF DREAMS: PART I - Resets & Revolutions

Every time I begin a new project, I start with the compilation of encyclopedia for the world that I'm building so that I can organize all of my notes about cultures, religions, politics, and major world events. These encyclopedias tend not to be directly related to the plotline, but instead are about laying down the foundations of the world in which the story will be built. They're a kind of workshop for figuring out the mechanics of how things function and what motivates the characters. Already, the encyclopedia for The Thief of Dreams is approaching novel-length just on its own and is undergoing constant updating and rewriting. It can't be treated holy writ until the first novel is done because I'm still learning new things every day.

Creating the encyclopedia, even for a fantasy world, requires a great deal of real world research...at least for me. It's absolutely possible to write a world that is nothing at all like our own, but honestly, a setting like that becomes very difficult to make communicable and relatable to a reading audience. That's why we see so many fantasy novels that are really just analogues to medieval England, or China, or downtown Chicago, or pick your setting de jour. At the outset, I had intended the setting to be something akin to Enlightenment-era England with an overlay of the politics of the Italian Republics during the Renaissance. But the more that I dug in and researched and wrote, I found myself gravitating increasingly to a different cultural touchstone: mid-19th century and pre-Revolutionary Russia.

In one of my earliest list of characters that I originally had intended to develop for The Thief of Dreams, there was a minor character named Zhari who was dealing with a revolution unfolding in her home country. The more that I worked on developing her story, however, I found that her milieu was more compelling than either of the characters I'd originally intended the novel to be about. And so, after a great deal of soul-searching, I upended the entire premise of the book for her. In doing so, I discovered that I immediately understood a great deal more about the world and the plot.

HEROINE OF ZHOVAR - A slapped together composite reflecting how I imagine the main character, Zhari Eknoya, to appear at the start of the novel.

Perhaps it was because I'd grown up in the 1970s and the 1980s, and I already had a strong affinity for the spy stories of my childhood, all of which involved the Soviet Union. In my imagination, Russia was always an exotic place, a nation evidently populated by chess-loving, novel-writing, deeply passionate people who were struggling to find an identity between their tsarist past and a (potentially) democratic future. I always found Russian characters much more interesting and nuanced, caught between so many conflicting personal and cultural stressors. Once I began to try to step into this mindset, I at last began to see the world of the novel much more clearly, though what I'm creating can't be seen as a 1:1 parallel. There's a lot that's going into the pot from other real-world cultures, and there's some stuff that will owe more inspiration to fantasy novels (and a computer role-playing game in particular) than history books. Hopefully you'll enjoy the recipe.

[doritihanyi]

The Queen’s Gambit

I’ve decided that in this semester the theme of my blog moves from the pages of books to the (big) screen. Yes, I will write about movies and TV series! It’s not surprising that my favourite ones are often adaptations of books, like the first series I’m writing about. 

The Queen’s Gambit is a screen adaptation of Walter Tevis’ book, published in 1983. (which I haven’t read but planning on) The Netflix limited series is fresh, it aired in 2020, only a few months ago. Fortunately I had time to binge watch it before the start of the spring semester, and trust me, if you start it you wouldn’t be able to leave the screen. This series grabbed me like no other, I was thinking about it before sleep, during lunch, and so on. But what is it about?

The main character is Beth Harmon, who grows up in an orphanage in the 1950s. Her two escape are chess and the sedative pills the children are given. It turns out that she is a chess genius, and with that she creates a new life for herself. But her addiction isn’t as easy to deal with.

What did I like about this series? The layered story, the characters, the actors, the setting, the emotions...

Although I know almost nothing about chess (only the basic rules), I was amused during the scenes when Beth played. It felt like a whole other world. I was excited, nervous and happy during her tournaments. It was also interesting to see how a woman played with men, and faced the struggles of sexism during that period of time.  I liked that her character wasn’t perfect, her sruggle with addcition changed the dinamic of the story. We saw how it affected her relationships, and career.  Anya Taylor-Joy did a fantastic job in portraying Beth and her personality.

The other character who was close to me was Benny. Thomas Brodie-Sangster was one of the reasons I decided to watch the show, because he is a great actor. And he was super in this production as well!

The show is set in the ‘50′s and ‘60′s. Since I love history, I liked the design, the costumes, the makeup and even the dynamic between Americans and Soviets. It showed a slice of the American life from that era, and I saw how different it was from the ‘eastern world’. The costumes of Beth were breathtaking, and it’s always fun to observe fashion history.

I would recommend this limited series to anyone who likes emotinal stories with tragedies, loveable characters and drama. There are also heavy topics, so you will need to prepare for that. If you are interested in the USA during the 1960′s, and how woman were treated that time, you should defintiely watch it. 

[agentnico]

The Queen’s Gambit - Netflix Limited Series (2020) Review

I wonder how high the chess set sales have risen after the premiere of this show?...

Plot: Set during the Cold War era, orphaned chess prodigy Beth Harmon struggles with addiction in a quest to become the greatest chess player in the world.

Who would’ve thought a show about chess could be so interesting? Okay, that’s harsh to chess players, in fact, I play chess casually with my dad, and I have no intention of being harsh to myself so I retract my statement. But still, what a show this is! Very well written and put together so seamlessly, that to be honest you truly don’t need to be a chess player or know much about the game to enjoy the series. Heck, all of the chess games in this show are filmed like they are an action sequence, with the intense camera shots and music really emphasising this. And yes, there is some chess talk that may challenge and cause non-chess-aficionados to scratch their heads, but the raw emotion and the excitement around it would make any viewer enthralled. 

One small criticism would be that the ending is understandably predictable. To be expected, as you want your lead character to succeed, so it comes as a surprise to no one. Like the Queen? She gambits all over the place, you know what I’m saying? But I’ll give the writers and showrunners their due, they make the happy ending feel worth it. Things fall into the right place, but its satisfying to watch due to the journey you’ve taken with this character. From her childhood at the orphanage where she discovered the game of chess for the first time by sneaking into the dark basement to see the janitor......its not as wrong as it sounds!!..... to her teen years and mastering the craft, to falling into drug addiction and problems with her insecure adoptive mother to discovering her womanhood to eventually having the expected mid-life crisis in her 20s all leading up to her biggest chest match against the Soviet champion, it’s an incredible journey to experience from beginning to end. Also, as a Russian it was lovely to see an American show that didn’t represent Russians in a bad light. Like, they were the competition, but they were shown as respectful competitors. 

Anya Tayor-Joy continues to surprise everyone by being one of the most interesting young actresses to grace our screens in the past few years. And whoever her agent is, that guy (or gal!) should be paid well, as they set Anya up for some really good projects, allowing her to have quite the range in her acting career. But this show might have her give her best role yet as Beth Harmon. There’s a lot going on behind her eyes and intense gaze, and her mix of cat-like playfulness with more straight faced “I’m gonna check mate the fudge outta everyone!” persona really work well. And the kid actor playing her child counterpart is impressive too. The rest of the cast is great too, with shout-outs to Harry Melling, Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Marielle Heller, all of whom do great in their roles and also help pave the way for Beth Harmon’s layered journey. Also, the actor who plays the Soviet champion Vasily Borgov (Marcin Dorocinski) - talk about a performance that manages to be so intimidating without saying hardly a word!

Also, the aesthetic of this show is great to look at. Set in the 50s and 60s, you get to enjoy the environment of the time, through the fashion trends (Anya Taylor-Joy gets to wear a whole load of great dresses) to the old-school cars, the show is good to look at basically. On the whole, this series, though grounded in realism, is actually not based on a true story, so the whole thing plays out as a fairytale rather than the sports movie or biopic its trajectory and tropes keep pointing viewers towards. And presumably the fact that it doesn’t confine itself to the generic tropes of the genre is why this series is such a great success. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go lose another chess game against my dad!

Overall score: 8/10

[theliterateape]

"You’ll Never See His Like Again!": Revisiting Comics Legend Stan Lee’s Best, Most Literary (and Vastly Underrated) Story, The Silver Surfer (1978)

By Jarret Keene

Stan “the Man” Lee is dead, but his creations are alive, pouncing across theaters, game screens, and t-shirts with equal parts vitality and sorrow. Today, Spider-Man and Thor and Captain America and Black Panther and so many others dominate our media landscape to a degree unthinkable 40 years ago when my father bought me The Silver Surfer graphic novel from a B. Dalton inside Tampa Bay Mall.

Back then comics (22-page floppies) were relegated to a single spinner rack in mall bookshops, a gimmick to draw kids into the store so their parents felt obliged to pick up garbage Sidney Sheldon’s thriller Bloodline. But The Silver Surfer didn’t fit in a metal rung; instead it was displayed amidst the regular literary trade paperbacks. Today it is vaguely praised on obscure blogs as being among the very first efforts to push comics into the realm of the literary epic during a brutal moment in the history of the comics industry. Staggering inflation, a crushing 1977 (and then a 1978) blizzard, and rising paper costs nearly sank DC Comics. Marvel, though, endured such challenges with Stan Lee’s relentless cheer, his grace under pressure, his courage to always try something new when everyone else cowered, caved.

In the late 1970s, the U.S. continued to fall apart. There was the ongoing energy crisis, serial killers like Ted Bundy lurked in every shadow, the Jonestown mass suicide played out like a dress rehearsal for a larger and more diabolical event, toxic waste burbled in landfills adjacent to pleasant neighborhoods, and Soviet Russia  rattled its nuclear saber. You wouldn’t know this from reading Marvel Comics, every issue offering a column called Stan’s Soapbox, wherein Lee waxed passionately, positively, and with the eloquence of a poetry-reading pitchman, about what was forthcoming from “the House of Ideas.”

Today Marvel is an idea-resistant shell of the company Lee built and oversaw, a house of ideology teeming with dour, OMG-chirping social-justice superheroes (gay mutant Iceman, lesbian Latinx warrior America Chavez, Muslim teenager Kamala Khan a.k.a. Ms. Marvel, female cancer-stricken Thor). Instead of debuting new characters, the current editorial team is content to reverse race and flip gender of, and add a dash of disability to, classic characters. In its prime, though—and starting in 1961 with the first issue of Fantastic Four — Marvel excelled at depicting authentic outcasts who felt a fierce responsibility to protect even those who hated them, feared them, wanted them dead. Lee’s characters — which he co-created with Jack Kirby, the artist who visually defined comics for an international audience — didn’t nurture wounds of identity and grievance; they waged their internal battles on a mythic scale. In the same way Oedipus confronted the ignorance of his birth, in the same way petulant Achilles struggled to overcome his narcissism, so did hapless high school reject and science nerd Peter Parker combat his own teenage doubt and ego and feelings of inadequacy.

Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962) containing the debut of Spider-Man, is arguably the single greatest and most important comics story ever written, its 11 pages defining not just the Marvel superhero but also the last half-century of U.S. comics. “With great power comes great responsibility” wasn’t merely an inspirational and moral slogan; it was also a metaphor for American exceptionalism, which could only result in senseless death (like, say, the murder of Peter’s uncle, Ben) if not applied toward just and proper ends. Parker is spoiled, his own worst enemy. He’s a purveyor of fake news, taking photos of himself in action as Spider-Man and selling them to the Daily Bugle to cover the cost of college tuition. We love Parker for his flaws, though, and for his commitment to overcoming them. We cherish his humanity even as we’re thrilled by his brawls with violent predators like Kraven the Hunter, bulky crime boss Kingpin, hideously armed Doctor Octopus.

The Silver Surfer isn’t human like Parker. The Surfer is carved from the “doomed messiah from beyond” mold a la Superman (or Beowulf or Jesus). But he isn’t adopted as a baby and given a Midwest upbringing. He is a silver-skinned alien riding a floating board, arriving on Earth to determine if it’s suitable for his planet-eating master Galactus. Lee and Kirby made a wise choice in never pinning down the exact size of this god of interstellar death, who, like the Surfer, was first introduced in the pages of Fantastic Four #48–50 (1966). That three-part story is a must-read, yes, but then, a decade later, Lee and Kirby collaborated on a 100-page retelling of the Surfer-and-Galactus saga, only this time the superheroes were removed, leaving just the god and his fallen angel. The result is a romantic, philosophical, and artistic statement that outstrips everything else Lee and Kirby collaborated on prior — which is saying a lot. It is also the last major work either of them would produce for Marvel, or for any company thereafter.

Today Marvel is an idea-resistant shell of the company Lee built and oversaw, a house of ideology teeming with dour, OMG-chirping social-justice superheroes

The Silver Surfer was published by arrangement with Fireside Books, an imprint of Simon and Schuster in New York known for publishing a famous chess book. Based on a Kirby sketch, the cover is by artist Earl Norem, known for painting the covers of men’s adventure magazines and more than a few Marvel mags (like Savage Sword of Conan). Indeed, the painted cover gives the book literary gravitas. The interior art is all prime Kirby, with eloquent inks by Joe Sinnott, colors by Glynis Wein (first wife of the late Len Wein, who created Wolverine). The Silver Surfer is a feast for a comics-lover’s eyes; my battered copy still radiates visual power. But it’s the heartbreaking story and dialogue that set this effort apart from anything else in the history of comics and in the bibliography of Lee and Kirby.

Here the protagonist must choose between living forever to serve a devourer of worlds, or else die alongside eight billion earthlings to be rejoined with the obliterated love of his life, lovely and golden Ardina. In The Silver Surfer, Lee gives us a hero who sells his soul to the devil so as to thwart a holocaust and save a populated globe. He only meets a few dozen — many of who attack him physically. But he understands their potential to grow beyond their limitations. It’s not a story in tune with the 1970s, that post-Vietnam, post-JFK, post-Watergate era during which Marvel delivered dark, humorous characters like Ghost Rider. No, this was something else entirely.

The opening splash page is the closed fist of the planet-eater: Behold! The hand of Galactus! Behold! The hand of him who is like unto a god. Behold! The clutch of harnessed power — about to be released! The tone here is elevated, serious, Lee is writing in a style that evokes the Old Testament of the King James. The second page is a splash, too; in it, the mitt of Galactus opens and from it erupts the Surfer, who “streaks through the currents of space — ever-seeking, ever-searching — for he alone is herald to mighty Galactus.” The image is the visual distillation of an artist’s self-confidence, his arrogance. After all, doesn’t every artist believe himself to be God as he  manipulates his characters, his images, to suit his imaginative fancy? It’s also a breathtaking rendering of a big bang, or a biblical birth of the universe, without a benevolent designer in control. Here the god of the universe is a destroyer.

The universe seems endless and infinitely alluring to this mysterious star-wanderer, who yearns for  his own homeworld, Zenn-La, lost to him forever for reasons Lee doesn’t initially explain, but we presume Galactus ate it.

The Surfer enters the atmosphere of “a verdant sphere” unlike any he’s seen before. Soaring high above the streets of New York, he doesn’t hide from view. He is fascinated by the fear in the eyes of people, noting “how it is always the young who are the first to accept — and to trust.” He sees a woman who reminds him of Shalla Bal, a woman the Surfer loved on his own world. Haunted by her memory, he pursues this woman through the alleyways of Manhattan while imagining a conversation with this Shalla Bal lookalike. We learn that, years ago, the Surfer sacrificed his mortal body to Galactus to save Zenn-La from destruction.

Finally, the woman abandons him to his painful recollections… and then Galactus suddenly appears in a whirlwind of crackling energy, ready to devour Earth.

He congratulates the Surfer on a job well done and articulates in excruciating detail how he plans to sate his appetite: “Here shall I drain the gently rolling seas. Here shall the bountiful land yield to me its gift of life.” It is an impending act of reverse creation, a backward Genesis. But the herald of Galactus isn’t having any of it. When the Surfer fails to convince his master that the price of eight billion souls is too high, he lashes out at Galactus with “the power cosmic,” using it seal the destroyer in a concrete cocoon. It doesn’t hold Galactus for long. Disgusted, the world-eater blasts the Surfer from the sky, cursing the herald to live amidst “the dunghills of man” for a spell in order to ponder his mistake. Then Galactus disappears.

The Surfer recovers from his fall, then disguises himself by altering his appearance to resemble a male fashion model from a billboard. He wanders the city with admiration for its denizens until muggers approach him in Central Park. The Surfer shoos them away with a pyrotechnical display, then pledges to walk around without hiding his identity; concealment did nothing for him anyway. Meanwhile, we witness Galactus gorging on a planet in another solar system. Sated, his thoughts turn toward his missing herald. What can Galactus do to make the Surfer submit? The world-eater’s counsel, a sniveling Master of Guile, advises Galactus to provide the Surfer — our alien Adam — with an Eve, someone to betray the Surfer’s heart.

And so beautiful Ardina enters the picture. She sneaks the instantly smitten Surfer beyond Earth’s atmosphere, and they share in the pleasures of the spaceways. Floating now on a patch of green ringed with bright flowers in a neighboring galaxy, our hero is tempted to give up his standoff with Galactus. In the same way Dido tempted Aeneas to give up his destiny to found Rome, so does Ardina begin to entice the Surfer to submit to her — and by extension Galactus. He refuses, says he’s willing to die to save Earth, and so Ardina leads the Surfer on a journey into human darkness. “You will perish for a worthless cause,” she warns. She shows him “brutal images, a morbid montage of heart-rending scenes filled with carnage and strife.” Domestic violence. A child killed by a hit-and-run driver. A mass execution. Bombed ruins of a once-thriving city. The Surfer is jarred but not dissuaded.

And then something interesting happens: Ardina, designed to coldly seduce the Surfer to make him betray his convictions, ends up feeling a warm love for him.

So much so that when the Surfer, driven mad from having set foot inside a suburban home where the walls seem to be closing on him:

The ceiling — almost touching my head! No room to move! No place to soar! I see no sun — no sky — no endless reaches of rolling space! Wherever I face — wherever I turn — I am surrounded by smothering objects! Shelves and books! Pictures, clocks, and lamps! Chairs and drapes and shuttered windows! But where is the sky? Where is the cold, crisp touch of rolling space? Where are the hills, the seas, the nourishing stars in endless profusion? Without them I perish! 

Interestingly, the aspect of humankind that nearly causes the Surfer to surrender his mission is man’s stultifying existence inside tract-housing boxes.

Troubled by the experience, the Surfer races to escape Earth’s atmosphere. Riding bitch, Ardina screams: “The barrier! You have forgotten the barrier!”

The Surfer falls to Earth while Ardina re-materializes before Galactus inside his giant space vehicle. She admits she has failed. She confesses her love for the Surfer. Displeased, Galactus recalibrates her cloned body for one last mission. A mission that involves shattering the Surfer’s heart.

Meanwhile, the Surfer continues to be attacked by various humans. He is shot at, shackled and hammer-smashed, then the U.S. military blasts him with an ultra-sonic cannon, which nearly kills him. Ardina consoles him for a moment, kisses him, telling the Surfer she is with him and by his side, even after death. Which is when Galactus dissolves her into dead particles using a matrix-drone.

Now Galactus asks the Surfer to again join him in scouting the universe for other edible planets. It’s the only way Earth can be saved. The command is agonizing, for what Galactus offers is a living hell. To save Earth, the Surfer must cast off death, the ultimate escape and the one chance he has at being reunited with Ardina. But as the Surfer himself says: “Never was there a choice!”

The curse of immortality at the cost of true love is a familiar idea in ancient epics. The sea nymph Calypso offered Odysseus eternal life, but he refused it in order to be with his wife Penelope. But the Surfer has no options; he can’t be selfish enough to die and thus doom the Earth. What makes him a hero is his refusal to surrender and his willingness to embrace the agony of existence, of enslavement. He must deny himself every exit for humans to live on until they hopefully change themselves for the better. They must have a chance; the Surfer and Galactus give them one. 

The Surfer returns to the gauntlet of Galactus, disappearing within the destroyer’s fist.

✶

In this story, there is no Fantastic Four. No cameo appearances by Lee and Kirby. No clever narrative captions. Just the purest narrative of a hero fighting for an ideal, for the steadfast belief in our ability to one day rise above our petty evils, our arrogance and wrath. Lee wrote so many masterpieces of comics literature, but this one is his best because it best speaks to the principle he and his characters lived by: Never succumb to nihilism and despair. Never forget that we are similar in our anxieties and weaknesses, and that our individual identities matter less than our collective aspiration to improve our world and the lives of the people who inhabit it.

It’s a moral stance that today remains obscured by Internet social-justice frothing and the political insanity of being ruled by a reality-TV star. But the embers of Lee’s views are there for anyone to ignite and carry forward. Make no mistake: the world is poorer now without Lee. As the blurb on The Silver Surfer ’s back cover announces: “You will never see his like again!” We can, however, always see Lee’s passion and his love for humanity — for life! — in the work he and Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and others left for us to enjoy.

Lee didn’t need to die for our sins. He endures, and so will we.

Never was there a choice.

Jarret Keene is an assistant professor in residence in the English Department at UNLV, where he teaches creative writing and ancient and medieval literature. His fiction, essays and verse have appeared in literary journals such as New England Review, Carolina Quarterly, and the Southeast Review. He is the author of several books and editor of acclaimed short-fiction anthologies. He is currently working on a critical biography of comic book legend Jack Kirby.

[brotherhoodnovel]

It’s hard to describe how impressive the Kansas City Central Library is. First of all, it’s built in a former bank, so the downstairs vault opens into a film theater. They also have an extensive film collection and local KC collection, There are multiple art, film, history and conceptual exhibits at all times on multiple floors. There are Degas and Monet paintings on the walls. There are multiple grandfather clocks with extensive descriptions. There are miniature piggy banks. There’s a piano room you can reserve and just play the piano by yourself. The teen and childrens rooms are large. You can check out chess sets and there are actual people-sized chess pieces on the roof. You can hang out on the roof and learn about the architectural history of the city. The security guards are amazingly knowledgeable and helpful. And I came upon an opera performance based on the poetry of a Stalin-era Soviet dissident, and even texted the husband of the singer some pics I took. There were some cool Indian cats on the roof. A part-time rep gave me helpful tips on places to go in rural Kansas. Oh and there are lots of books too, people seem to be checking them out, and they have computers and everything else. NYC libraries can definitely learn! #Libraries #LibrariesTransform #kansascitymo #KansasCity #library #LibrariesRock #opera #poetry #filmphotography #films #SilentMoves #chess #travelblogger #travel #travelphotography #travelgram #art #degas #monet #traveling #travelling #traveller #traveler #architecture https://www.instagram.com/p/CdmQAiHFUWb/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[aion-rsa]

The Queen’s Gambit: Why ’60s Retro Feels So Fresh in 2020

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This article contains mild The Queen’s Gambit spoilers.

It’s not the image that first springs to mind when you think of chess. In a swanky Parisian parlor, with a bank of breathless photographers following her every gesture, Anya Taylor-Joy’s Beth Harmon rushes in while still in a daze. She’s clearly missing a step after a late night of bad decisions, yet even at her most disheveled she emanates ‘60s style.

Like Ann-Margret in The Cincinnati Kid, Beth’s fiery mane of red hair is turned up at the sides in a flip. The idol of her age. But with that 1965 movie, Ann-Margret was peripheral, an underdeveloped distraction to a story about grizzled men playing grisly high-stakes poker. Beth is the Cincinnati Kid here, or rather the Lexington Prodigy: a young woman breaking into the boys’ club and who is about to challenge Russia’s greatest chess player in front of the whole world. And she’s doing it with a hangover.

That’s our introduction to The Queen’s Gambit and its vision of chess as a contact sport, and for a series about a game whose origins lay in the Middle Ages, it feels startling fresh. Perhaps that is why it’s capturing the zeitgeist in unanticipated ways. For nearly two weeks now, the limited Netflix series has been the most popular content—show or film—on the streaming service in the U.S., as per their “Top 10” ranking. In the same timeframe that saw 2020’s slow-motion presidential election, folks have been embracing (and clinging to) the retro stylings of intellectual combat on a chessboard. As a result, Queen’s Gambit has become the rarest of things in the modern age: a watercooler show that has more than a 72-hour shelf life.

Why?

Obviously the series is a visually chic production that reinvents the game of 64 squares with lavish production value and design. Co-writer and director Scott Frank films the limited series in a restrained and desaturated color palette of earthy tones and contemporary pastels. Sequences like a chess tournament montage at an Ohio university moves in virtual rhythm with Mason Williams’ grandiose “Classical Gas” orchestrations. When coupled with editing that reduces her opponents to squares on the screen, suddenly Beth and viewers alike are looking out at a sea of vanquished pawns, and her real rival (a deliciously obnoxious Thomas Brodie-Sangster) waiting across the field as a nerdy counterculture monarch.

It’s clearly a visual throwback, but the appeal of the series doesn’t truly reside in its ‘60s setting. Instead The Queen’s Gambit reminds me of a different era when smart adult entertainment about sacrifice, say Chariots of Fire or Amadaeus, could be regularly anticipated and celebrated… in movie theaters. Based on Walter Tevis’ 1983 novel of the same name, Queen’s Gambit feels like a sharp underdog story from that era—a hero’s journey for grown-ups where the protagonist’s superpower is intellect and chess is sexy. Is that a fantasy? Maybe. But it’s one many are finding comforting at a moment where they worry if intelligence, and institutions that should be as ironclad as a chess rulebook, are enough to still win the day.

Before Scott Frank cracked the code of turning it into a miniseries, there were previous attempts at adapting The Queen’s Gambit. The most famous near miss was Heath Ledger’s hope to turn the story into his directorial debut with Ellen Page as Beth Harmon. That film fell apart after Ledger’s tragic death in 2008, but other attempts at adapting this yarn go back to its ‘80s publication, with filmmakers like Michael Apted and Bernardo Bertolucci being attached at one time or another.

It is easy to see why it would’ve appealed as a movie several decades ago. With its emphasis on young Beth Harmon battling drug addiction and collecting an assortment of allies from her defeated foes as she rises up to face down the Soviets in the belly of the Moscow beast, it’s an anti-hero’s Cinderella story—one with uppers, downers, and the ever reliable Vodka Gibson. Yet unlike so many other anti-hero yarns, our underdog is a woman who is popping pills and having flings: Ann-Margret finally with a seat at the table.  

In that role, Anya Taylor-Joy is phenomenal. With luminous eyes the size of bay windows, she is able to convey every introverted, pensive thought in a woman who lives almost exclusively inside her own head. Even with the stoniest of poker faces during chess matches, viewers understand the emotional truth of the character they cheer on, which is all the more impressive when one realizes Taylor-Joy is essaying Beth from her teen years to adulthood. It’s led some critics to opine the performance is a revelation, but the actor’s been turning in sterling work for years, from The Witch through this year’s Emma.

Yet the reason this may be a “star-maker” says much about The Queen’s Gambit and the time it is coming out in. As a Netflix series told over seven-plus decompressed hours, the series is in most Americans’ homes at a time when they cannot go to a cinema—and even when they could a year ago, it was rare for so many to seek out something this thoughtful. As a film, a condensed two-hour version of this series with the same exact talent likely would’ve still been an awards contender (as Queen’s Gambit is now considered to be at the Golden Globes), but it would never have penetrated pop culture so quickly or so thoroughly.

As a long-form limited series, Queen’s Gambit is finding a large audience hungry for adult stories with flawed characters and triumphant finales, especially if those flawed characters have largely been ignored by the white male-dominated Hollywood hits of the past. Beth wins the day through meticulous hard work and a driven ambition that borders on self-destruction, and as a streaming serial, its real revelation is the comforting respite it’s offering at the tail end of 2020’s horrors.

So Taylor-Joy’s ability to externalize her incredibly internalized characters is meeting a wider audience, and Frank has seven hours to tell what used to be a strictly cinematic story. Indeed, the way Frank crafts sequences like his series opener or his “Classical Gas” overture are just two examples of the multiple kinetic sequences in The Queen’s Gambit. No two chess games are filmed the same way in the series, and each has an aesthetic flourish that defies the regular expectation for scripted television.

Read more

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Anya Taylor-Joy Infiltrates the Boys’ Club of Chess in The Queen’s Gambit

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As a consequence, we get more time wallowing in the strange quirks and minutia of the professional chess world, from late night speed chess ego-measuring contests in student unions to an almost comically stark showdown in Russia that appears as if it’s occurring in the bowels of a medieval castle. We imagine Rocky Balboa would approve.

It also gives Frank and company more space to meticulously explore their world. Arguably the most interesting relationship in the series is that between young Beth (Isla Johnston) and Mr. Shaibel (Bill Camp). This even more introverted and nearly deadened janitor becomes an unlikely Mr. Miyagi for the nine-year-old orphan, teaching her the rules of chess inside of her orphanage’s basement.

If Queen’s Gambit had been made as a crowdpleaser in the ‘80s, or an awards season darling in the 2000s, Mr. Shaibel and the epiphany that Beth is a chess prodigy would’ve likely been reduced to flashbacks. But in the series, it gets a full episode, and the show then pays it off six hours later with an emotional breakthrough when Beth, at the bottom of her addict’s pit, finally revisits her past.

As a series, Queen’s Gambit has room to breathe, which has in turn given it room to become something addictive to many right now: a breath of fresh, reassuring air.

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[newstfionline]

Two Border Cities Share Russian History—and a Sharp European Divide

By Andrew Higgins, NY Times, Nov. 9, 2017

IVANGOROD, Russia--Little divides the Russian town of Ivangorod and its Estonian twin, Narva, but a fairly narrow river. That, and a vast cultural chasm.

If any more proof were needed, it came when the European Union decided to give the two Russian-speaking towns money to build promenades on each side of the river, with the idea of promoting cross-border harmony and tourism.

When the work was done Narva, which got about $830,000, had a promenade almost eight times as long as the one built in Ivangorod, which received nearly $1.2 million.

What accounts for the difference? Topographic challenges, say Ivangorod officials. Systemic problems, say those in Narva--and probably a little corruption, as well.

“It is a different world over there,” said Sergei Stepanov, the former longtime editor of Narvskaya Gazeta, a Russian-language newspaper in Narva. “You see and feel the difference as soon as you cross the bridge across the river--the roads, the bureaucracy, the mentality.”

The reason Ivangorod got a much smaller promenade for so much more money, he added, was “almost certainly” the result of corruption.

Viktor Karpenko, Ivangorod’s mayor and a former officer in the Federal Security Service, or the F.S.B., Russia’s domestic security service, said the difference was because of the difficult terrain and legal restrictions on the Russian side of the river--not corruption.

“On our side, everything was a lot more complicated than over there,” Mr. Karpenko said.

Narva, with a population of around 60,000, has five times as many residents as Ivangorod and, as a result, bigger and better facilities--including modern hospitals, swimming pools, shopping malls, a new university and free Wi-Fi access across much of the town.

All those amenities are absent in Ivangorod, though the Russian town is building a municipal swimming pool. The average salary there is around $500, barely half what it is in Narva. The gap in pensions is even wider.

Leonid Pelesev, an ethnic Russian who coaches Narva schoolchildren in chess, said that many of his fellow Russian-speakers in the Estonian town watch Russian state television and support, on an emotional level, the muscular nationalism promoted by Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin. But, he added, no one he knows actually wants to live in Russia.

“We are all Russians, but we have a different mentality here,” he said. “We are used to European ways.”

The youth center in Narva where he teaches chess has three well-heated rooms set aside for players. Enthusiasts across the river in Ivangorod, mostly retirees, gather in a sports complex, which provides a small, frigid room three times a week for a chess club run by a Soviet war veterans association.

Ivangorod has seen some improvements. Only a few years ago, the city looked like a wreck, and there was little hot water and no sewage treatment. That is no longer the case. But lately, with Russia’s budget squeeze because of falling energy prices, the money has largely stopped coming.

In Ivangorod, the town’s biggest attraction, aside from a fortress first built in 1492, is the newly renovated Church of the Holy Trinity, a charming cluster of spires and cupolas on the edge of a lake. It fell into ruin during the Soviet period but has been lavishly renovated with money from Russia’s state railway company.

The church, along with the fortress and various museums, make Ivangorod an attractive destination for tourists. But getting them to come is not easy: Russian law and its security apparatus have put Ivangorod out of bounds for all but the most determined visitors.

All Russians who live outside the border area and any foreigner who wants to visit must submit a written application in Russian and obtain permission from the Leningrad Region branch of the F.S.B., the successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B. It took a reporter for The New York Times two applications and four months to get the permits needed to spend time in Ivangorod.

Svetlana Valishvili, who edits Ivangorod’s only newspaper, teaches at a school and runs a center to help small businesses, said she had been trying for years to get foreigners to visit and to invest in her town but had been frustrated by the entrance restrictions.

Ivangorod’s mayor, Mr. Karpenko, acknowledged that the town’s classification as a restricted border zone “does not help us develop tourism.” It puts the town at a distinct disadvantage to Narva, which also has a fortress and museums but is open to anyone who lives in Estonia or is a foreign visitor.

Red tape and other complications also stalled the rebuilding and long-awaited reopening of a bridge for pedestrians between Ivangorod and Narva that has been closed since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and turned what had been a single city into two towns in two countries.

The walkway, crucial to the revival of a derelict district of Ivangorod filled with the ruins of grand 19th-century buildings, was supposed to open last year. But a state-run Russian company that contracted to erect a customs building on the Russian side failed to complete its work.

Other plans to lift Ivangorod’s fortunes have similarly stumbled, including a European Union-funded project that would have started a shuttle bus service to Narva. The project was abandoned after the Russian town demanded more than $4 million to build a bus stop, while Narva, where salaries are higher and construction materials more expensive, asked for $1 million to construct its bus shelter.

Russia’s difficulty in keeping budgets and work schedules under control has helped create the biggest, or at least most visible, difference between Ivangorod and its Estonian neighbor: the state of their infrastructure.

On the Estonian side, streets are generally clean and well-repaired, while many in Ivangorod are scarred by potholes and, in the fall, scattered with leaves and other debris. Each town has a large stock of ugly, Soviet-era apartment buildings, but while those in Ivangorod show their age, Narva’s have been given a face-lift and their grounds mostly cleared of weeds and garbage.

As each part of the sundered city went its own way after the collapse of the Soviet Union, both struggled with the same economic calamities as Soviet-era factories went bankrupt. A giant textile plant in Narva laid off more than 10,000 workers, while a printing machine plant and other manufacturers crumbled in Ivangorod.

Public discontent grew so severe that calls went out on both sides of the river for a redrawing of the border to make the city whole again. An opposition member of Ivangorod’s local council, Yuri Gordeyev, collected signatures for a petition asking that Estonia incorporate the Russian city.

That effort, begun in the late 1990s under President Boris N. Yeltsin, fizzled when Mr. Gordeyev died in 2012 of a heart attack and Ivangorod’s once-boisterous local politics gave way to a new era of lock-step loyalty to Mr. Putin.

When Russia seized Crimea in 2014 and began stirring up separatist unrest in eastern Ukraine, there was widespread concern in Western capitals that Narva might also fall prey to jingoistic Russian propaganda and, as happened in Ukraine, to separatist subversion by Russian soldiers and secret agents masquerading as local activists.

Tarmo Tammiste, Narva’s mayor, recalled how, when traveling abroad, he was constantly asked whether Narva might be next.

“Narva is not next and never will be,” he said. “Russians here do not want to go back to the motherland.”

Some people are moving across the border to set up new homes, but they are mostly citizens of Russia buying property in Estonia either as an investment or as a way to get access to Narva’s better health care and the security offered by the European Union, of which Estonia is a member.

Aleksandr Bogens, the head of a real estate company in Narva, said that around half of all property transactions in Narva-Joesuu, a nearby resort area on the Baltic Sea, involved purchases by buyers from Russia.

Even stalwart Russian patriots in Narva concede that, despite their support for Mr. Putin and their anger at Estonian citizenship rules that they say discriminate against Russian speakers, they have no desire to move over the river to Ivangorod.

“It is not really even a town over there--just a road or two,” scoffed Vladimir Petrov, the leader of the Union of Russian Citizens, a group that lobbies on behalf of Russians living in Narva. “Of course it is better here in Narva than in Ivangorod.”