I wrote a post last year about my father’s professional chess career in the ’50s and ’60s and his connection to Bobby Fischer. At the end of that post, I mentioned that he’s spent many years working on a big, definitive book about blindfold chess—the art of playing without sight of the board or the pieces. It’s an extraordinary intellectual feat that has a long, colorful history, and it’s deeply related to my father’s other main lifelong interest, psychology. (He retired from Indiana University in the mid-’90s after many years as a distinguished professor of psychology.) The book, which my father wrote with a co-author, John Knott, is now in the final stages of publication, and it should be out by the end of the year. I’ve designed a teaser site, blindfoldchess.net, that features a summary of the book and links where you can preorder a copy. I pushed the site live yesterday. Check it out.

When the book comes out, I’ll be posting an in-depth Q&A with my father about the rich intellectual and psychological history of this amazing skill.

Here’s a reprint of the book summary from the site:

[Continue reading "New Teaser Site for My Father’s Upcoming Book About Blindfold Chess"...]

Or so it might seem. One doesn’t have to have one’s mind completely in the gutter to think that maybe, just maybe, this image was an unfortunate choice for the cover of a children’s book:

[spotted here via here.]

Out soon from Harry N. Abrams, Inc.:

From the book description: “Body Type is an eye-opening look into the amazingly creative ways that tattoo artists are utilizing typography. Whereas the majority of tattoo art uses images to convey messages, here the message actually is the image.”

Via BibliOdyssey, which is bursting with gorgeous graphical stuff, I just discovered Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie, an admirably geeky blog devoted to the history of the bookplate. As the American Society of Bookplate Collectors and Designers explains,

Since the fifteenth century, distinguished artists and their patrons have given serious attention to this art form. It represents a miniature art developed to adorn books and a convenient, individualized way for the book’s owner to be identified. The bookplate, or ex libris, is a label placed on the inside of the front cover of a book.

These celebrity bookplates are apparently from the blogger’s personal collection:

Go here for more of this blogger’s celebrity bookplates.

The website of the Los Angeles-based ReadInk Books contains a bunch of other Hollywood bookplates, along with some historical background about each.

Next Monday, October 10, the nice people at Bookforum are hosting a Katrina benefit at Cooper Union’s Great Hall. The event will be hosted by Chris Rose of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and participants will include Donna Tartt, Robert Stone, and Roy Blount Jr. Proceeds will go to the Acadiana Arts Council to benefit “artists, writers, and musicians affected by Hurricane Katrina.” More details here.

Erstwhile New York Times rock critic Neil Strauss appeared on The View last week to promote his new book, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. The book, published by Judith Regan, no less, chronicles the two years he spent picking the brains of dudes like these so he could learn how to get into the pants of chicks like these. He became very, very good at it. He originally wrote about these experiences in a January 2004 article in the Styles section of The New York Times.

Here’s the footage of Strauss’s seven-minute kaffeeklatsch with the ladies of The View. Alas, Barbara Walters was not on the panel that day.

In 1985, when I was a sophomore at Bloomington High School South in Bloomington, Indiana, my English teacher gave us one of those assignments that all students dread: an oral report. I was 16 then, with long, Allman Brothers-style hair and a potentially tinnitus-causing obsession with playing loud rock guitar. Sometimes I’d drive home at lunch, five minutes each way, just to play my guitar at bone-crushing volume for 15 minutes before heading back to my boring classes.

My English teacher’s assignment was an oral report on a book of our choice. I had no trouble selecting a book, because I had just read the definitive work on one of my favorite topics: Led Zeppelin. Stephen Davis’s cheesy Led Zep biography, Hammer of the Gods, had just been published, and I probably read it front to back the day it came out. (I still have my copy, and it’s a first edition!)

To make my report more entertaining—and, possibly, to deflect some of my anxiety about having to speak in front of my classmates, when I might accidentally get, I don’t know, a boner or something—I showed up to school that day with a boombox and a cassette of Led Zeppelin II cued to the first track. When it was my turn to stand before the class, I walked to the front of the room, pressed play on the boombox, and delivered my report to the sounds of “Whole Lotta Love.” I even paused my reading during the guitar solo so everyone could listen to it. Was I a dork? Yes, yes, I was. Did I like to get the Led out? Yes I said yes I did Yes.

My report was a big hit with the class. I still have my hard copy of it, all creased and faded and dog-eared. A couple of times in the last few years I’ve re-created that English-class performance in front of audiences here in New York, complete with the “Whole Lotta Love” accompaniment. The first performance was at one of the great John Hodgman’s Little Gray Book Lectures; the second was at Lindsay Robertson’s inaugural Ritalin Reading in March 2004.

I’ll post the text of the report after the jump.

The picture below was taken in late 1986, during auditions for my school’s battle of the bands. My group was a power trio, and I was the singer and guitarist. We did three songs at that battle of the bands: “Scuttle Buttin’” and “Lovestruck Baby” by Stevie Ray Vaughan (my hero) and “Red House” by Jimi Hendrix. Guess what: We won the damn thing, and there was actually some decent competition. I have this performance on videotape, and it is fun to watch. Don’t ask me to tell you the name of that band, because I won’t tell you. It’s too embarrassing. Anyway, don’t I look like a ROCK STAR? Check out the Led Zep shirt I’m wearing.

A few friends who’ve seen this picture tell me that my haircut is a mullet, but I have to disagree. The sides aren’t short enough for it to qualify as a mullet. Am I right, people? I am so right.

(Here is what I look like now, and here is what some of my guitar playing sounds like now.)

[Continue reading "Jimmy Page Was My Co-Pilot"...]

The Summer 2005 issue—no, wait, the “June/July/Aug/Sept 2005” issue—of Bookforum is coming out in a week or so, and it contains a special section on Thomas Pynchon. Check out the section’s stellar list of contributors:

The man on the cover is Irwin Corey, a loopy comic actor whom Pynchon sent to represent him at the 1974 National Book Awards. When the time came for Pynchon to accept the fiction citation for Gravity’s Rainbow, it was Corey who went onstage and accepted the award from a baffled Ralph Ellison. Corey then delivered a bizarre humdinger of an acceptance speech. You can listen to a short excerpt of it here (Windows Media format). And you can read a transcript of the whole thing here.

The 1974 National Book Awards took place on April 18, a mere two and a half weeks after what is perhaps the most famous streaking incident of all time: On April 2, a streaker named Robert Opel bounded across the stage as David Niven was presenting an award at the 1974 Oscars. Toward the end of his Pynchon acceptance speech, Corey expressed his thanks to “Mr. Knopf, who just ran through the auditorium.” (The transcript indicates that a streaker actually ran across the stage during the ceremony, but I don’t think this is true—I couldn’t find confirmation of it anywhere online. For a couple of minutes, though, I was thinking, “Yes! A streaker! At the National Book Awards! Awesome!” How fucking hilarious would that have been?)

[Side note: According to a website I stumbled onto a few minutes ago, the German term for streaking is Nackerblitz, which translates roughly as “nude lightning.” However, there are only about five Google hits for Nackerblitz, so the word is apparently not widely used.]

Update, May 26: Some content from Bookforum’s summer issue is now online, including part of the Pynchon section.

Don DeLillo’s America is by far the best website devoted to DeLillo’s work. The site’s proprietor, Curt Gardner, just added a couple of cover scans to the Japanese Editions page. The handful of book covers on that page are pretty excellent and weird. Here is White Noise:

In February I posted about an annotation of the first page of White Noise that was published in the Austin American-Statesman.