251. Secret Autobiography

The purpose of being here is to experience being here. An attribute of being here is to speculate about other purposes, some of which we may select as valid, but these are not consistently resilient. "Well, I am here," said the troubled man to himself. He looked around and saw things and people. A red design on a white bowl. A woman with long black hair. "This is here, and I'm in it," he said, with the follow-up thought that the sentences we speak to ourselves compose a secret autobiography, oblique but meticulously accurate.



hans ostrom 2016

250. The Art of Losing at Chess

I'm partial to the droll yet revolutionary third (and last?) book published by the mysterious Mervlov: Losing at Chest (first edition, hardcover, red binding). Listen to me: many ways of losing he describes are bold, others intricate, not a few comical, and at least two, absurd. There is, argued Mervlov, an art to losing when and how one chooses, and losing thusly provides a sustained excitement far more satisfying than that experienced when winning.

Of course, with this book Mervlov enraged the chess community, and he disappeared--last seen in a corner of a bar, trapped by a figure garbed in Catholic vestments and an exquisitely dressed, alluring Turkish woman, whose gaze is described in accounts I've read as "poised and menacing."

Never heard from or seen again, was Mervlov, a genius to many of us who've grown accomplished at losing the grand game.



hans ostrom 2016