I'm not trying to pass the buck to the comps, or anything. Just that -- if I apparently vanish off the face of the virtual Earth over the next day or three - that may be a contributing factor.

I'm sorry I doubted you.

I really *was* mortified to read the way I posted that first six months I was here.

I was in fact "putting on"- trying to impress with every post- name dropping left and right--

It made me see that there was some merit in <DaneilPi's> excoriating lambasteing of me during the last World Chess Championship.

Viz- I saw myself through the eyes of his critique and I was filled with self-loathing.

I guess I fell back on the notion that at least I wasn't actually lying about factual matters to do with myself.

Like implying that I read books I haven't read (tristram shandy for example) or saying I have 17 degrees or something.

Also I thought you were calling me a Cretin because I didn't get the reference about Cretan liars. I actually didn't know that story. If I once did, I've forgotten it.

Ok thanks again for accomodating me so thoroughly-

And again, my self-doubt and horror at my "earlier persona" is what got me so thin skinned.

A persona is a form of lie and I guess I was already feeling like a liar when I read your posts.

- Michael Taussig, 'The Magic of the State' (1997)

Oh crumbs -- this isn't one of those bleeding dialectical images, is it?

There are plenty of genuine Pollard titles you could have chosen to wave as your freak-flag. All of them so apt! zB:

Discussions in the Cave
Conspiracy of the Machine Operators
Dementia is Rising
Bingo Pool Hall of Blood
Be in the Wild Place
Harboring Exiles
How's My Drinking?
In the House of Queen Charles Augustus
A Proud and Booming Industry
Dodging Invisble Rays
7 Strokes to Heaven's Edge
Circus World
Drugs & Eggs
Dungeon of Drunks
I Can't Help But Noticing
A Kind of Love
(All You Need) To Know
Battle for Mankind
Mongoose Orgasm
Confessions of a Teenage Jerk-off
Devilspeak
Dumbluck Systems Stormfront
Eureka Signs
Mix Up the Satellite
Pictures from the Brainbox
Fantasy Creeps
Let's Go Back to Bed
Fascination Attempt
No Wonder They Don't Stand Tall
Battle for Mankind 2
Reality

...and so on. What do these (re)names say to me? Merely that Walty Benjamin was right about the state of emergency and its being the rule, not the exception. Smash cut to:

Angelus: Now that's everything, huh? No weapons. No friends. No hope. Take all that away, and what's left?

Buffy: Me.

Schmaltzy fade to:

Clink. To continued communication, with heads bowed to the inevitable condition that there must always be some noise in the system. Clink, cheers, awhooooga. Any money raised goes to ... clarity. The clarity of your choice.

I kinda skimmed over the fact that you'd been reading the old stuff, including your own posts. I haven't looked back over that stuff myself in ages ... and I probably never 'saw' whatever mortifies you. And if you were trying to impress, so was I ... wouldn't CG be a big blank space if all the 'trying to impress' posts were deleted?

Yes, and well ... all is good again, yes? An irony of the communication blip is that, in the original 'offensive' post, I was merely trying to find a 'clever' way of saying "You, Jess, are not stupid and never were".

Because I have 30-odd years of notebooks, fragments of published fiction, journalism where a semblance of self seeps through, I'm used to living with evidence of earlier idiocies. And something that, as years flicker by, may be even worse: the sense that one's younger self had an edge, a dexterity, a sharpness that may never be regained ... hey, I 'show off' with a short story published in 1986. QED.

I'm strongly reminded, on all sorts of levels, of Pynchon's introduction to Slow Learner -- where, from the vantage point of 1985 he looks back over his early short stories in apparent horror.

It -- the intro -- is a wonderful piece of writing, if you have access to it. Unlike the stories themselves, I can't find it online ... which is not to say that, like its author, it isn't out there somewhere.

Inter alia, he says "My first reaction, reading these stories, was *oh my God*, accompanied by physical symptoms we shouldn't dwell upon ... I now pretend to have reached a level of clarity about the young writer I was back then. I mean I can't very well just 86 this guy from my life. On the other hand, if through some as yet undeveloped technology I were to run into him today, how comfortable would I feel about lending him money, or for that matter even stepping down the street to have a beer and talk over old times?"

One more quote. It's Rick Moody, writing about Pynchon. And it's one of those sentences that I wish I'd written:

" ... forgetting is a self-protective trope, one that is crucial to the formation of identity and purpose, an essential gesture in the bittersweet pursuit of life here in the Gnostic, entropic wasteland ..."

I was in a place called Pollardstown once. Famous, like certain chess games, for its Fen.

Which reminds me ... whenever I cock an ear to a news bulletin these days, vast swathes of it go by in wodges of incomprehensible sporting or financial jargon. Two languages which I do not speak.

And yet, outside these zones, the newsfolk have this urge to explain all sorts of simplicities. Yesterday I heard glosses on the (highly technical) terms 'wetlands' and 'lowlands'.

So the latest name, <Waxwing's Wah-Wah Rabbits> comes from two sources.

Blodgett Waxwing, a mysterious 1940s criminal whose calling card is a ♘, features in Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon. The name Waxwing also evokes the opening of the 'Shade' poem in Nabokov's Pale Fire: "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/ By the false azure of the window-pane".

Element II is stolen from a piece by the Bonzo Dog Doo-dah Band: "That was the sound of Roger's Wah-wah rabbits eating endives, they're very cheap at this time of year".

Roger Ruskin Spear *did* keep rabbits and feed them on endives.

Rabbit is also a verb.

There's also a minor Pynchon character named Fergus Mixolydian, the 'Irish-Armenian Jew' (three psycho-nationalisms in one, could be dangerous) ... he comes into this equation tangentially. Via myxomatosis, the rabbit virus disease, most likely.

The new name, <Opposition & Sister Squares> is much more fitting. It's also chessic and Duchampian, so more than one person might 'get' it.

It's taken from the title of Marcel Duchamp's 1932 book about certain rare pawn endings, wherein two different approaches are combined and reconciliated.

The book was coauthored with Halberstadt and entitled <L'Opposition et les Cases Conjuguées sont Réconciliées> -- usually translated as "The Opposition and Sister Squares are Reconciled".

click for larger view

Black to play wins with 1 ... Ke3, but not 1 ... Ke4?? which hands White the win after 2.Kc5!

'Trebucher' means 'to stumble'. *Trebuchet* is a type of trap: Duchamp had used the title years before for one of his Readymades.

Not that we didn't know that it's all connected, but guess what? It's all connected! Coz Rick Moody also wrote the (splendid) introduction to Pollard's coffee table book of collages, 'Town of Mirrors'. Here Moody insists that 't]he popular song sometimes meets history like the tick meets the capillary of its host, and it is perfection, and through it and in it you know more about the pulsations of humanity than in any other art form.’

So true. As you know, many weekend tournaments of the type you and I sometimes indulge in decree that players should provide their own set, board and clock -- a chess outfit, a works, a gizmo, a needle and spoon for chess fixers.

Play chess if you *must*, kids, but never share a clock. You can never be sure what kind of weird and dangerous times it has been set to.

Luckily - in Ireland anyhow - they almost always provide kits for players in the top section, which has tended to include me. Even as the 'bottom seed' - sounds painful - as in Galway last year.

A year ago I didn't own a proper set and only an old analog clock. Then I bought a proper chess-travel kit with digital clock, plastic pieces, vinyl flexi-board and special black bag. The bag means that people ask me whether I'm a musician or a hitman.

The guy who sold it to me demonstrated the best way to roll up the board to ensure that it stays flat next time around. Counter-intuitively, one rolls with the squares on the outside.

Which is how chess players roll their own.

I think I should submit this idea as a proposal to some open-entry art event: a performance entitled 'Rolling your own, or, Artist Rolls His Board' (Polymer resin, DNA, organic compounds, leather, textiles, glass; dimensions and duration vary; £28,500).

Anyhow, I may not technically be one any more. We haven't gone all the way, of course -- I still lack the guts to play 1.e4 in a tournament game, never mind 3.Bb5. But I've been studying ...

Thanks. I mean, *really* thanks.

That's what I get for trusting that Bono person. It takes Great Neck to perform in Barcelona and compare your own stage set to a Gaudi sculpture, as he did.

Anyway, I think the Catalan might be playable in Moab, and the other lost cities of Deseret, now known as Utah.

Hope you don't mind if
I practice some haiku here;
No criticisms meant,

They're pretty basic,
And don't mention any seasons,
Hope it doesn't matter

Pardon the puns
and 1.5 entendres;
Have only half the wit