One day in May, chess grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura was watching the last two moves of Felix “xQc” Lengyel’s online chess game. Ever-patient, Nakamura had been mentoring Lengyel, a top Twitch streamer and former Overwatch pro, on his chess journey since April. Despite fan and viewer criticism that Lengyel wasn’t very good, Nakamura believed that his pupil had talent. Streaming himself watching Lengyel’s match, Nakamura analyzed the board for his viewers. “The guy has one move here.” Then, more doubtful: “He’s not gonna take with the rook and make a stalemate...?”
After a millisecond more mental math, Lengyel did just that. He hadn’t seen the winning move. Lengyel’s viewers completely lost it in his Twitch chat: “STALEMATE,” “SO BAD,” “you had checkmate,” and a barrage of Pepe the Frog and Omegalul emotes. Not yet realizing his mistake, Lengyel said, “GG?,” or “good game?”. His eyes shift back and forth, still unsure. Nakamura, silent, stared at the ceiling. The viral clip viewers created of that moment is titled “Talent.”
It is hard to imagine anyone less suited to living with any kind of restraint than Charles Dickens. Especially, I think, the hyperactive Dickens of 1857, the year he turned 45. By the last days of the summer, he had already written, staged and starred in his own play in London and Manchester; bought, renovated and moved into the house of his childhood dreams in Gad’s Hill, in the village of Higham, Kent; and taken trips to Brighton and Southampton, where he waved his 16-year-old son on to a troopship bound for India.
Until very recently, the idea of going for a walk for fun never crossed my mind. I preferred more heart-rate-boosting, woo<!-inducing forms of exercise; my idea of a good time included sailing off lippy kickers on my mountain bike or floating through fresh powder on skis. I just didn’t have much use for walking when I didn’t have to. Walking wasn’t going to get me ripped. Walking wasn’t shredding. Walking was good for digestion and something nice I did with my aging parents. Walking too far made my feet swell and my lower back ache. Walking was boring.
But like many of us this spring, I started doing a lot of things that were out of character. I stopped drinking. I started baking bread. I planted flowers and succulents and somehow kept them alive. I played board games. And I started going on long walks.
Writers & Lovers is a puzzling and beautiful novel about writing and love. Its beauty lies in its precise observations. King notices the “sea” of crusted glasses and lipstick-smeared napkins that clutter a restaurant at the end of service, and the jostling community forged by its jaded staff as “blue daylight” cedes to dusk on a long shift. What’s puzzling about the novel is how swiftly and intensely its quiet heroine captures your attention. Casey is a slight and elusive figure, getting soaked by rain as she cycles through lonely streets or shrinking from a bully at work. There’s a stomach-churning pathos to the paucity of her resources and a dogged naivety in her commitment to writing in such meagre circumstances. King makes her struggles feel monumental, grindingly bleak. Yet somehow, Casey takes hold with a vice-like grip on your heart. Reading the book feels like waiting for clouds to break – a kind of gorgeous agony.
What if we lived in a world in which Glyn Morgan and C. Palmer-Patel had not put together Sideways in Time, a new collection of essays on Alternate History? Would a new sun have gleamed in the horizon? Would the globe have slowed its warming? Would election results have differed? Most likely, the answer to all of these is negative, and yet, how lucky are we that in our timeline this indispensable volume has been published?
Made up of 10 chapters from contributors across a spectrum of professional expertise and experience, Sideways in Time makes a rich, valuable, and timely intervention in the nascent field studying alternate history. The opening meditation by fiction writer Stephen Baxter sets the tone for the volume, mapping out two key questions that define the entire genre: What is the nature of history? What role does the individual have, therein? Indeed, all the chapters in part one, “Points of Divergence,” tend to reflect on texts that can either be considered alternate histories themselves or act as “commentary on the genre of alternate history itself,” offering close readings of primary texts while presenting illuminating insights into the political stakes each text negotiates.
Clemena Antonova’s monograph on the maverick Russian thinker and polymath Pavel A. Florensky (1882–1937) introduces the reader to the little-known, but fascinating and often enigmatic world of Russian religious philosophy. Yet the book is of interest not only to the small circle of specialists. Rather, Antonova’s aim is to explore “the value of Florensky’s theory of the icon to our contemporary modernity.” She raises the question whether his thought can “contribute to the analysis of some of the most urgent questions in aesthetics and philosophy that we face now.” This is not to say that she neglects the historical and cultural context within which Florensky lived and worked. Quite the reverse: one of the book’s strengths is the profound background knowledge it provides, which helps the reader to understand Florensky’s key ideas about the icon and visual art. This is important because his intellectual horizon is unusually broad, and the bold cross-fertilization among different disciplines characteristic of his writings can easily confuse a lay audience. While visual art is the main topic discussed in the book, Antonova competently comments on most major influences on Florensky’s work, such as the Russian tradition of “full unity” (vseedinstvo), Byzantine mysticism, mathematics, and Cubism, among other things.
There’s a city in my body
and its been barricaded, its walls
spray-painted, mural-full; less
a collection of neighborhoods