Chess book

On the road from the station, just under the bridge, there’s a man who sells books. When I was at university he sold them there as well. I once bought a copy of Heironymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights triptych from him. And then more recently I bought ‘Wolf Solent’ by John Cowper Powys from him. I had been searching everywhere for books by John Cowper Powys quite unsuccessfully after visiting his native Dorset. I spoke to the bookseller about him. He said he knew of John Cowper Powys and that he was hard to find. The bookseller is from Dorset and at heart he is a Pagan, he sympathises with the Pagan aspect of John Cowper Powys’ writings.

On our most recent encounter I bought a chess book from him: ‘Batsford’s Chess openings’, a collaboration between Gary Kasparov and Raymond Keene, British GM, a combination described on the cover as ‘a real coup’. The page are full of chess notation. It’s like code. It’s like maths.

I decided against buying this book once. I thought ‘I don’t need this. I’ve got enough chess books already.’ But below that thought deeper, in my unconscience, was the thought: ‘you can never have enough chess books.’ And this thought asserted itself later on when I passed the street bookseller, one Saturday and all it needed was for him to offer me 50p off, for me to offer him the cash.

He’s getting old now. His curly hair is grey. His face is lined with wrinkles now. And he drinks. The sight of a can of special brew resting among the books, I realised was a familiar one, as is the sight of him in a nearby pub in the mid-afternoon. As I was buying the chess book he was talkative with the alcohol. He told me that when he was young he was bright and he played chess. He, and he told me this as if he was imparting a singularly interesting anecdote, magnified by drunken expansion and the soft tints of the past, he played someone five years older than him in a tournament and two of the games were stalemates – that’s how close it was. It’s like war, chess, he said, he always liked the bigger pieces, but he hasn’t played for years.

I told him how I always play chess on my phone – that way I can always be playing, wherever I am, and that’s how you get better – by practising. I play on the internet on my phone. I always have about six games going at once.

I buy the Batsford Chess Openings Encyclopaedia with columns and rows of notation. If I concentrate on one opening then I can learn all the variations and my opponent will be at my mercy.

Questions of purity

My generation and the previous generation have all necessarily built up collections of media objects: CDs, books, records, cassettes, videos, DVDs. They feature in almost every house in the world, certainly in the West: bookshelves full of books, piles of DVDs near the television, stacks of CDs near the stereo, all lovingly sorted into alphabetical order.

These media collections take up space. They are displays, exhibitions, large in size and content and colour, objects assembled together in one space for people to see and use.

Though these collections are treasured and often beautiful, it makes one think about how so much space is being taken up by these things, and then it makes one think that it’s actually rather strange how we collect physical manifestations of what are unphysical things to begin with.

A film, for example, though it must be recorded on something to be communicated, is not a piece of film, it is an experience, you watch it happen on a screen. The pictures you see are not physical, they are projections of events, pretend or otherwise, which have been captured and communicated via a medium. Let us remember that the obsolescent media we are investigating and writing about in this project are just that: media, mediums, through which messages, pictures, musics, travel to our sense receptors. There has to be a medium, but the medium is not de facto necessary and indeed with the new digital technology, the media through which art travels are thinning out and in the process it is a purer communication. The vinyl record or the CD was only necessary because there was no other more direct way of getting the recorded music to the listener. It is not the shiny disc that matters and it’s not the artwork in the plastic case that matters, this is just a by-product. Musicians are musicians. They have chosen their method of communicating their expression. They are not visual artists. The artwork in CDs or vinyl is a welcome addition, maybe, adds meaning maybe, but it’s someone else’s meaning, the visual artist’s meaning. Everything except the music is extraneous. An mp3 is the purest version of the recording of a musician’s expression because there is nothing else to distract from the listening and consumption of the music.

With books, it’s slightly different because to absorb the words you must physically interact with something. You are actively involved in the process of consuming the writing. It takes effort to read a book, you don’t just watch it or listen to it passively, and as such, the physical medium of the book is more important to preserve, but not essential, and could also be said to sully the author’s intentions with added meaning: cover art, blurbs, fonts, etc.