Like "magic!"

<Limerick Open> Next weekend? True - don't arm yourself from top to bottom with countless opening lines to the point you can hardly move...

So the countryman of yours (forgot his nick) you talked to a month or so ago, did pull you over the line? Quite an enthusiastic fella if I recall correctly...

I'd say just make sure you're fresh and rested.

Great attitude - save all your energy for just before the tourny, don't worry about the outcome. Energy release onto the chessboard...

Make sure, though, to have plenty of Na+ Ka+ and Cl in your diet- and you may well experience a stunning Neuro-synaptical Transmitter Secretion Feast! (including several barely discovered "comicals")

Did you know that certain Native American tribes invented the nicotine patch? They used to wrap a pile of tobacco leaves in a bandage or poultice, and slap it on to the skin. Of course there was a hugely toxic dose in the bandage, and they tended to see visions, or die.

Are visions useful during a chess tournament? Maybe. Is OD-ing at the board 'ungentlemanly play'? Absolutely. Think I'll stick with nicotine gum.

I don't experiment, much
I usually move what I touch
Bird's Opening, reversed
Sounds little rehearsed
But it's normally known as the Dutch.

It's solid as any park bench
So despite the unfortunate stench
Of garlic-rolled pawns
And opponents' wry yawns
I continue to play the old French.

For a ride on a virtual pony
For an Oscar, an Emmy, a Tony
For whiplash and thrills
And occasional spills
There's nothing to match the Benoni.

H.P. was a saucy young man
Who toyed with a devious plan
He could, then he wouldn't
He should, but he couldn't
But now we all know Caro Kann.

... you want I should give my whole repertoire away in dodgy verse? Speaking of literary and artistic types (we were, honest), it occurs to me that <Frogspawn> has insufficiently praised Mr Vladimir Nabokov. All this talk of Duchamp, Borges, Stanshall, Pynchon, Burroughs, Beckett, Kafka, Conrad and Syd Barrett, poor old Vlad almost got overlooked.

You can count, in a week, to a million
In a few dozen years to a billion
But infinite time
And the need for a rhyme
Will never embrace the Sicilian.

Pff, two can play at that game:

I have very few tricks;
I just play 1...g6

The company known as <Irish Rail> has another name in Irish Gaelic or Gaeilge: <Ironrod Eireann>, meaning <The Iron Roads of Erin>. Pretty poetic for a PLC, nach ea?

<Nach ea? = Nicht Wahr = N'est-ce pas?>

<mack> With a bit of juggling... or jiggling... your <pff> verse could almost qualify as a <Limeraiku>.

<Rules: combine the forms of the Limerick and the Haiku: an AABBA rhyme scheme, with 17 syllables (with a 5-7-5 substructure, and a kind of Zen version of predicate logic. Ideally, the Limeraiku should *also* feature the louche 'old man' yarn of the classic Learesque Limerick with the moment-of-illumination mode of the Haiku.>

The <Paradigm Limeraiku>, *slightly* cleaned up, follows (nobody can say we don't do our bit for <All That is Decent>...).

Why, even <The Saintly Jessica>, whose vocabulary is as fragrant as it is enormous, could recite this without blushing (or being banished forever, a more realistic scenario).

I'd be banished too, probably, but I ain't gonna complain as long as electronic communications survive... when they go dark, I'll start whining in the blackness ("And we'll sing out a hymn/ To the dark/ And the dim/ And the damp/ And we'll all die of cramp" -- *not* a Limeraiku, btw, or even anything close).

But this is one:

<There's a vile old man/ In Japan/ Who roars/ At whores:/ 'Where's your sodding fan?'>

Yes, 'sodding' is weak; also, compared to the pun in the original intensifier (as used by *former unified champion Kramnik in normal games*), anatomically impossible.

<Proof that "dirty verses" and "high culture" often coincide? Yep. Not a mathematical proof, maybe, but nor is it from Burroughs or Pynchon or my usual feelthy sources...>

"Beautiful... ah-ah-ahhahh... the only thing that I can play is, I'm sitting on an upturned wastepaper basket. It was the fashion... The family sat around their living rooms trying to harmonize... I've forgotten the names of the songs in German, they're both very dirty songs... oh, one is "It's so Long Since I've Been with You" and the other is "Cabbages and Turnips"...

- Glenn Gould, The Goldberg Variations 1955 Recording Outtake

Finally, after due preparation, persons of a sensitive disposition are advised to avert all their sensory input organs... now.

<An Attempted Limeraiku:>

He plays Black/ Opens, cack/ One bag of tricks/ An early g6/ Oh, mack!

However. Unrestrained joy has broken out. I *thought* I'd read all of VN's novels about 20 years ago. Many of them more than once. Favorites: Luzhin's Defence, Ada, Pale Fire, Pnin, Lolita... and most of the others too, really.

Today, I picked up my old Penguin paperback of 'The Gift' (Dar) and suddenly realized that I'd never actually read it...

Oh, Joy. A 'new' Nabokov, from his early Russian 'Sirin' period, published by emigres in Berlin and Paris, like The Defence (but 'translated' by Nabokov himself in the 1960s).

Set in the world of 1920s literati, chessplayers: a coded message from Nimzo's Planet... a text from Marcel, grappling with hypermodernism. Even if The Gift doesn't actually feature chess, it's there in the imaginary air which his creatures breathe.

Parla, Memoria. Speak, Memory. The past, most unexpectedly, just made a pass... as it were.