Untitled

They left the brisk secretarial facade of the outer office and moved into a netherworld of dark passages, dripping walls, and mossy cells.

They stepped over cables held to the floor with gaffer tape, and moved past gnomish figures hunched before consoles, their faces glowing like radioactive craters.

Two technicians were dumping spiders into a cobweb machine, while a dwarf on a wheeled ladder crammed items onto shelves already overflowing with oddities: sweat bottles and fog juice, jugs of rubber ears, boxes of sneezing powder, motorized rats.

A parade of signs offered unhelpful comments: Telecine, Continuity, Vegetation, Laughter.

Finally the passage they were following opened into into an enormous cavern. Above them the ceiling was hidden by a network of steel catwalks and racks of blazing lights.

In the distance a chip of blue sky was suspended overhead like a spacecraft in orbit.

Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants

The precursor to this book, The Encyclopedia of Chess Variants, lists 1450 different games, all based on chess. It was published in 1994, but is now out of print and hard to find. Thus I was overjoyed to learn that a second edition (with a slightly different title, The Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants) came out in 2007.

Since it's not currently available in North America, I had to order it through Amazon in the UK. By a strange coincidence it arrived the same day the local library called. Months earlier I had requested the first edition through interlibrary loans. Suddenly I had both books in hand and was eager to compare them.

The most obvious difference is that the second edition has been completely reorganized. Entries are no longer in alphabetical order; they are grouped by type, which explains the word "Classified" in the title. The table of contents runs to eight pages, and includes entries such as:

New pieces
Mutation games
Games for three
Transporting and teleporting
Unorthodox ways of capturing
Boards based on hexagons
Cylindrical, toroidal and spherical boards

If you're looking for a particular game and know its name, you must resort to the index at the back, which uses a decimal numbering system instead of page numbers. For example, the entry for Octopus Chess is 35.4, which means it is found in section 4 of chapter 35. The method is logical but a little cumbersome.

A somewhat larger failing is the sparsity of illustrations, which makes the book less useful than the first edition. Without an illustration, visualizing an unusual game board (such as Three-Player HyperChess, shown here) can be tough.

The reason for the paucity of illustrations is a sad one. The author passed away in 2005 while still working on the second edition. The task was completed by John Beasley, but the original artwork could not be found.

In sum, the first edition is easier to use and more fun to page through. But does that mean I regret purchasing the second edition? Indeed, not. I am delighted to own it and salute John Beasley for helping to keep this unusual and valuable publication in print.

[August 2015 note: The entire book is online at John Beasley's website.] 

More

Pritchard's Popular Chess Variants describes 20 of the most popular games, and in greater detail than his encyclopedia. It's available in North America. There's also lots of info on the Web:
Chess Variant Pages
British Chess Variants Society
Play Chess Variants

The Squares of the City

Though designated science fiction because the author, John Brunner, typically wrote the stuff, this book is more like a thriller by Eric Ambler, where an innocent chap is drawn into a deadly world of foreign intrigue.

The protagonist, Boyd Hakluyt, is a traffic analyst hired to tackle some urban problems in Ciudad de Vados, capital of the fictional South American country of Aguazul. The city is only 10 years old, created as a modern showpiece by the country's benevolent dictator, President Vados. At its core are four gigantic plazas or squares -- hence the novel's title.

The city's image is marred by a couple of unsightly blots -- a noisy stinking market and a slum under a monorail station. The government, fearing an uprising, does not want to use direct methods to clean up these places. Instead it hopes that Boyd can solve the problem by redesigning traffic flows.

Boyd tries to remain neutral as the conflict escalates, but can't avoid being drawn in. On discovering that he's been manipulated he confronts President Vados, who tells him, "You are no mere pawn -- you are a knight."

P-K4

This revelation is no surprise to the reader, for the secret has already been revealed in an introduction by Edward Lasker and a foreword by Brunner himself. The novel recreates an 1892 match between Steinitz and Tchigorin -- hence the true meaning of the book's title.

President Vados and the leader of the opposing forces, Esteban Diaz, Minister of the Interior, have agreed to a match using real people as players (though without their knowledge), thus avoiding an armed conflict that might destroy Vados's beloved city, and needlessly spill the blood of Diaz's people. The use of subliminal messages is one way of manipulating the players.

In a note at the end of the book, Brunner identifies the pieces represented by the characters. Even more impressively, he states that:

...the moves are all there, in their correct order and -- in so far as possible -- in precise correspondence with their effect on the original game. That is to say, support of one piece by another on its own side, threatening of one or more pieces by a piece on the other side, indirect threats and the actual taking of pieces, are all as closely represented as possible in the development of the action.

Note, however, that the city is not an exact analog of the chessboard. Brunner makes no attempt (as far as I could see) to divide Ciudad de Vados into 64 locations.

Steinitz vs Tchigorin

I found the book's conceit so engaging that I played through the actual game itself, and made a discovery. The causes of a couple deaths are hinted at in the book but not conclusively stated. In the game the truth is revealed.

I also found it interesting that Brunner avoids some obvious casting choices (the two queens are represented by men, and Bishop Cruz is a rook not a bishop), and that the novel ends without the conflict being concluded (though in the actual game Black resigns).

I wondered too about Brunner's choice of this particular game. Was there a sly subtext involved? Did it have something to do with the fact that Steinitz (born in Prague but living in the US) defeated Tchigorin (a Russian)? That is, that a peasant revolt against established authority was doomed to failure?

The game was played in Havana. You can replay it here. Choose no. 16.

Stranger Than Fiction

The Squares of the City was published in 1965. Thirty years later President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov of the Russian Republic of Kalmykia built a modern complex devoted to the game, situated outside the capital of Elista. He called it Chess City. Kalmykia is poor, but Ilyumzhinov, who is also president of FIDE, is obsessed with chess.

Where Chess is King and People are Pawns

King's Gambit

A Son, A Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game

At the highest levels chess is a brutal punishing sport, a black-hole that can swallow up lives. It's truth, it's beauty, it's the universe in 64 squares. Hence the billions of chess books about how to improve your game, though King's Gambit is not one of them. It focuses on the human side of chess -- the odd personalities, the strange behaviour, the game's narcotic fascination.

The author lunches with Garry Kasparov, visits Nigel Short at home, sits in on lessons given by Bruce Pandolfini, and travels to Libya for a tournament with his friend, the Canadian champion Pascal Charbonneau.

The book also exposes the sordid underbelly of chess, the scams and swindles, the shabby tricks and dirty politics. Nigel Short is quoted as saying, "Those who were brought up under [the Soviet] system all have the same warped outlook: 'You fuck with my wife--I kill you. I fuck with your wife--you keep quiet if you know what's good for you.'"

Running counterpoint to the author's explorations in the world of chess is the story of his own life, in particular his relationship with his father, a prodigiously talented person who taught literature at New York's New School, was once hired to write the entire issue of a leading women's magazine, and hustled at billiards and ping pong. Yes, ping pong! Unfortunately he was also a pathological liar.

The dust jacket quotes praise from Jared Diamond, Oliver Sachs, and Simon Winchester. When I read books this good, I wonder why I bother with fiction.

Author's Website

My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

Imagine Mark Leyner's brain as a blender into which he tosses a few basic ingredients -- science, entertain-

ment, consumer products -- then pauses at the array of buttons on the console.

Chop? Puree? Emulsify? Aw hell, he presses all of them. When the whirring stops, he tastes the resulting psychedelic smoothie:

a scented nuclear warhead manufactured by mcdonnell douglas in collaboration with estee lauder passes overhead, leaving in its wake a light, floral fragrance with a touch of citrus and spice...

Hmm, not bad, he thinks. His finger dips again:

tonight at madison square garden the new york rangers disembowelled the boston bruins' goalie, brought a hibachi onto the ice, roasted his intestines and served them on toast points to the howling hometown fans

Excellent, says Leyner, and pours the contents of his brain into containers of various sizes. Now for some titles. Let's see...

fugitive from a centrifuge
colonoscope nite
saliva of the fittest
i was an infinitely hot and dense dot
lines composed after inhaling paint thinner
yoo hoo! buzz called out. y'all got any creme de cacao?
in the kingdom of boredom i wear the royal sweatpants

Humming to himself, he packages them up and sends them off to various magazines. Some time later they appear in Esquire, Harper's, Fiction International...

Usiku

The path wound over the burnt earth, the black cotton soil, through random fields of yam and cassava, past mud huts sheltered by manyara hedges.

Suddenly Daudi stopped. "What's wrong?" asked the young woman beside him.

"There are two men ahead," he replied, stooping to the ground for a rock. Hussein followed suit, and together they advanced with their arms in the air. An immense granite boulder materialized out of the darkness.

"Usiku," cried Daudi. When there was no answer, he yelled the warning again, and this time a faint sound slithered down from the top of the boulder. Daudi and Hussein drew back their arms threateningly.

"Mchana," replied a grudging voice above their heads.

Daudi and Hussein dropped their rocks and guided her safely forward.

"I don't understand," she said. "What just happened?"

"Usiku means night," explained Daudi. "If you meet someone whom you suspect of wrong doing, you say that to him. If he means no harm, he will answer mchana, which means afternoon. If he means evil, he will say usiku, or nothing at all."

The young woman was incredulous. "But what's to prevent him from saying mchana and then knocking you over the head when you're not looking."

Daudi sounded puzzled. "I have never heard of such a thing happening."

At Swim-Two-Birds

Craziest novel I've ever read. First published in 1939, it's on Time Magazine's list of 100 greatest novels. My Penguin edition refers to it as an "experimental blend of satire, fantasy and farce."

On the back cover are blurbs from James Joyce and Dylan Thomas. The latter says, "This is just the book to give your sister if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl."

The central character, Dermot Trellis, is an Irish lout who spends most of his time in bed. He is writing a tale in which "there will be no hero, nothing but villains." Celebrating the "birth" of one of his characters, he informs the press that credit is due in part to another author, William Tracy, a writer of Westerns.

Soon several other Tracy-inspired characters appear, cowpunchers brandishing shooting-irons on the streets of Dublin. They fall in with some characters from Irish mythology, including Finn MacCool, mad King Sweeney, a type of devil called a Pooka, and a Good Fairy.

Events in Trellis's life are interspersed with extracts from the story he's writing. The extracts grow longer, and the characters become fractious after the author seduces one of them and brings into existence "offspring of the quasi-illusory type." Eventually they drug Trellis, beat the crap out of him, and take control of the novel.

The writing is humorous, erudite, and fey. The vocabulary is prodigious, and there are snippets of Latin, Greek, and Irish Gaelic. The narrative is destabilized by intentionally bad poetry and many authorial asides, including synopses for "the benefit of new readers."

As one character explains, "It's the sort of queer stuff they look for in a story nowadays."

Captain Francis Crozier

Last Man Standing?

In YK part of my job involved visits to a massive government warehouse that held everything from beer to kayaks. One day I stumbled across a forgotten flat of small blue volumes published by the GNWT.

Second-in-Command by May Fluhmann summarized in brief chapters the life of Francis Crozier, who was second-in-command on Franklin's last voyage. The book was a genuine work of scholarship, for Fluhmann had access to Crozier's correspondence from 1828 to 1845. But the volume had a slightly amateurish air, and I doubt it was ever widely available or attracted much notice.

Now there's been a resurgence of interest in Crozier. Dan Simmons made him the central figure in his novel, The Terror, which came out in 2007. And in the previous year Michael Smith published a more complete, more polished biography, which cites May Fluhmann as one of its sources.

Smith's book of necessity covers much familiar ground. For me, the most interesting part was Crozier's role in a four-year Antarctic expedition, of which he was second-in-command under his close friend James Clark Ross. According to Smith, both men were so unnerved by the voyage that afterward they were never quite the same. Ross began drinking heavily, and Crozier subsided into a depression from which he never recovered.

A second reason for Crozier's depression was his failure to win the hand of Sophy Cracroft. His "uncertain state of mind" caused him to "stand aside from the leadership battle" for what was to become Franklin's last expedition, even though he was the most experienced officer available and the logical choice for the position.

After Franklin was given the job, Crozier did a volte-face and agreed to act as second-in-command. Smith suggests that Crozier did so in the hope of gaining favour with Sophy, who was Franklin's niece and Lady Franklin's constant companion.

Soon Crozier began to rue his decision. Franklin had not been North in 17 years. Worse, Crozier had no hand in selecting the crews, a task that was given to Fitzjames, who was third-in-command but with no Arctic experience. Crozier turfed two of the men selected by Fitzjames as being "perfectly useless either at their trade or anything else."

Smith describes Crozier's last letter to Ross as "the dark, brooding missive of a troubled man harbouring major doubts about the dangerous undertaking which lay ahead." Many are the ironies, mysteries, and tantalizing possibilities surrounding that doomed voyage. According to Inuit oral history, Crozier was one of the last survivors. Indeed, it has even been suggested that he lived among the Inuit for many years afterward.

The two ships, Erebus and Terror, have never been found.

Nikolski

Beyond the uttering of superlatives, this is not an easy book to write about briefly. It’s a knotty postmodern tale in which a bookstore clerk in Montreal refers to his unborn self as “an imperceptible comma in an as yet unwritten novel.”

Later he acquires a “three-headed book” composed of fragments from three separate works that are as self-referential as the toy compass he wears around his neck. As he himself says, “I refrain from specifying that my compass did not point north but toward Nikolski—the story is already convoluted enough, thank you.”

Proof occurs on the last page when the reader cannot help but exclaim, “WHAT!” and immediately start flipping happily through the pages again. Happily, because the writing is playful and imaginative, full of marine imagery that is apt and entertaining: a high school career counselor named Mr. Barrier, a poissonnerie that sells sea horses in Cajun sauce, a cloud of phosphorescent plankton swirling around a street light.

In short, this is a nautical yarn set on dry land with three strange fish as protagonists. Noah, who never knew his father, was raised on the prairies by his aboriginal mother. They led a nomadic existence, living in a trailer with ancestral ghosts. Noah leaves for Montreal to study archeology, and falls under the influence of a prof who specializes in trash.

Joyce, who was abandoned by her mother, grew up in Tete-a-la-Baleine. She is a descendant of Acadian buccaneers and niece of Jonas Doucet, father of Noah and the aforementioned bookclerk. Joyce runs away to Montreal, takes up dumpster diving, and fulfills a childlhood dream of becoming a pirate.

Noah's and Joyce's stories are told in the third person and alternate throughout the book, while (in a brilliant conceit) the nameless bookclerk's story surfaces haphazardly and is told in the first person.

There are many more plot elements, most but not all neatly dovetailed together. The tantalizing loose ends simply add to the manifold pleasures of this book.

But enough already. (Though if you'd like to know more, I recommend this review.)

Nikolski was first published in Quebec in 2005 and won a slew of awards. In 2007 it was translated into English by Lazer Lederhendler. It’s a beautifully designed book, right down to the typographic fish used to indicate section breaks. The cover is gorgeous.

Another Whopper

Nikolski reminded me of another postmodern fish story that I read recently, Gould’s Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan. You can read my review here.

Doctor Sax

After finishing Ray Robertson's What Happened Later, I realized I had not read anything by Kerouac in far too long, and so picked up this book long mouldering on a shelf.

But at the back of my mind was a judgment rendered by a snooty prof in my grad school days. Would I find Kerouac a passing fancy, a faded juvenile attraction?

Not so! The book is a joyous paean to innocent youth, a mad inspired jazz solo of words. Listen:

Merrimac comes swooping down from a north of eternities, falls pissing over locks, cracks and froths on rocks, bloth, and rolls frawing to the kale, calmed in dewpile stone holes slaty sharp (we dove off, cut our feet, summer afternoon stinky hookies), rocks full of ugly old suckers not fit to eat, and crap from sewage, and dyes, and you swallowed mouthfuls of the chokeful water...

Doctor Sax is an imaginary figure from Kerouac's youth, modelled after The Shadow, clad in cape and slouch hat. He lurks only at the edges of the narrative until the final chapters, where he steps into the foreground to battle the Snake of the World.

It is only at this point that the book loses its way, turning into pure pulpish fantasy, no longer anchored in the real world of Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts.

Faust Part Three

From Ann Charters's biography I learned that Doctor Sax was Kerouac's favorite book. He wrote it in 1952, five years before On the Road was published. He was staying with William Burroughs in Mexico at the time, high on weed and writing in the bathroom. The book took him three weeks to complete.

Ah, the dilemma of Kerouac. How to reconcile the dashing figure of his autobiographical novels with the pathetic bloated drunk he became. How to admire the books and not be seduced by the lifestyle they celebrate. Reading Doctor Sax made me realize that this is what Robertson's book is about.

Faust Part Three is the subtitle of Doctor Sax and hints at the awful truth -- Kerouac sold his soul to the devil for literary immortality.

More Kerouac

Just last year was the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road and a new edition, subtitled The Original Scroll, was released. It restores the book to its original uncut version.

Another treasure is The Jack Kerouac Collection, three CDs of Kerouac reading his work, sometimes to the accompaniment of piano and sax. Kerouac's voice is perfectly matched to his material, and makes evident the jazzy scat rhythms of the prose. Gad, the man even sings!

What Happened Later

Kerouac's sequel to On the Road was going to be called What Happened Later. Author Ray Robertson has claimed that title for this dual-threaded story of Kerouac's last road trip and the coming-of-age of "Ray Robertson" in Chatham, Ontario.

Young "Ray" grows up worshipping a pair of handsome counter-culture heroes, Jack Kerouac and Jim Morrison of The Doors. They rebelled against the same stifling middle- and working-class existence that "Ray" finds himself shackled to.

Unfortunately "Ray" can't find a copy of On the Road anywhere. All he can do while planning his escape is listen to The Doors, and vicariously experience the lives of his two heroes through a pair of biographies, Jack's Book and No One Here Gets Out Alive.

Author Ray Robertson does a fine job portraying the family that "Ray" grows up in. Seen through the latter's eyes, they live a trite and dull existence. But through the reader's eyes, the family is a sweet idyll, especially when juxtaposed with what really happened later to Kerouac, who (like Morrison) turned into a bloated drunk.

While "Ray" seeks to escape his roots, Jack is trying to return to them, but the road trip to Riviere-du-Loup to investigate his Quebecois origins is a drunken disaster, nothing at all like the heroic journey related in On the Road. Yet part of What Happened Later's attraction is the homage Robertson pays to Kerouac:

Plus, riding shotgun across the country and back with brand new best pal Cassidy at the wheel gabbing his golden Okie patter from dusk to dawn and Jack realizing Oh my God, this is what literature is supposed to sound like -- one man simply telling another man the simple humiliations and agonies and always-too-late epiphanies that add up to his and everybody else's life -- and not a sack of tricky tropes to be toted out and professionally employed in order to expertly con the reader into imagining a pretty little Book Club approved daydream.

Author Website
Author on YouTube

King Leary

The title suggests tragedy, and indeed lives are ruined and the book ends in blood and death, but the allusion to King Lear is somewhat misleading, for the book was awarded the 1988 Leacock Medal for Humour.

The title is more firmly a reference to Francis Michael Clancy, to whom the book is dedicated, and whose life and nickname (King Clancy) provided a rough template for the character of Percy Leary, a slightly-built professional hockey player known for his speed and grit. Like Clancy, Leary played for Ottawa, was involved in a game during which he played all positions (including goal), and ended up in management with Toronto.

Yet according to the author, King Leary is not about hockey. It's "ultimately about winter, that thing that defines us most eloquently as Canadians." This sentiment is reflected in the epigraph from A Winter's Tale:

A sad tale's best for winter. I have one of sprites and goblins.

The book's humour comes from Leary himself, who has a distinctive grammatically-challenged way of expressing himself: "I amn't sure," he says, and "my peepers is shut." People are "mooks" and "goomers." Toronto's team is the "Maple Leaves."

One of the best things about the book are the magical hockey-playing monks -- the epigraph's "sprites and goblins." And there are plenty of great lines:

Mrs. Ames gives us a look that could crack nuts. His eyes looked like stones left over from digging a grave. I twist him around so good his socks end up on different feet. I was so full of ginger I could make a horse sneeze at thirty paces.

Tretiak: The Legend

I've wanted to read this book by Tretiak for a long time, and was particularly interested in getting a Soviet perspective on Canadian hockey. However, the English version of this book appeared in 1987 when the Soviet Union was still intact, so in many places the book reads like propaganda. Advice given by coaches is often trite or couched in language that reeks of ideology.

When the Soviet team fell behind in a game against the Canadiens, "the coaches suggested that our players skate faster and be more accurate with their passing."

In another game they said, "Lock up your opponents in their zone, force the goalie to make mistakes, fool the defensemen, and most importantly, show your character."

I assume the book was vetted by Soviet censors, making it impossible to know how accurately it reflects Tretiak's views. I have no doubt he is patriotic, so it is possible his words are genuine.

After retiring, he became a political worker with the Central Red Army Sports Club. And though he dismisses as "ridiculous" the suggestion that Soviet athletes were engaged in subversive indoctrination, he also says:

Athletes are, in fact, on the main line of the ideological fight of two social systems. Our athletes have to prove constantly that they are not only the strongest and most talented, but, more importantly, they must let the world know that behind them is the strength of Communist ideals, the all-triumphant truth of Soviet morality.

Hockey Thuggery

A number of Tretiak's complaints while playing in North America are similar to those made by Dryden, Esposito, and others while in Moscow during the 1972 Summit Series -- complaints about food, officiating, and accommodation. But Tretiak's harshest words are reserved for the "gladiator psychology" of NHLers.

The dirty tricks, punches, threats to the referees, and after-the-whistle hits were all tactics that the Canadians demonstrated without any trace of shame. They employ their tested weapon -- dishonest, dirty hockey. [They have] malicious, twisted faces, foaming at the mouth.

Tretiak overstates his case, but there is some truth in what he says. In The Game, Ken Dryden provides a careful analysis of the differences between the Russian and the Canadian styles. Because Russian hockey developed differently, it was able to avoid the limitations of the North American game, where (Dryden says) "violence had been allowed to make sense."

Compliments

Tretiak has many gracious things to say about us. He's particularly complimentary about Bobby Hull: "The legends about him are told for a reason. What a shot!"

Gerry Cheevers is "fearless, skillful and calm."

Bobby Clarke: "To look at him, you'd swear that Bobby was a wanted murderer, but once you got to know him, you realized what a very friendly and kind fellow he was."

Phil Esposito: "...his superb ability to control the puck, his powerful game in front of the net, and his astounding intuition were, as always, distinct Esposito trademarks."

He refers to the Montreal Forum as "a great hockey citadel" and suggests that Russians "could learn from the Canadiens everything that concerns respect for fans and players."

Trivia

Tretiak, like all the Russians, did an incredible amount of dryland training. This included having someone hit tennis balls at him with a racket. During games he watched the eyes of incoming players so intently that he was accused of hypnotizing them.

Before the first game of the Summit Series, Jacques Plante made a surprise visit to give him tips on how to play the Canadian forwards.

He was fascinated by Gerry Cheevers, who smoked a cigar before games, and had a clause in his contract permitting him to drink beer between periods.

He addresses Ken Dryden directly, responding to comments made in Dryden's first book, Face-Off at the Summit. "You're right, Ken. We all had the same feelings..."

The Stanley Cup: "a huge, paunchy, glittering trophy that looks like a Russian samovar."

Retirement

"Vladik" retired in 1984, stating that he never wanted to play in the NHL. "It wouldn't suit me, as an officer and Soviet citizen..." This may or may not be the truth.

The Wikipedia entry on him indicates he may have retired because he was not allowed to go to the NHL, and also because he no longer wanted to play for Tikhonov. It was Tikhonov who pulled Tretiak during an Olympic match against the Americans in Lake Placid (the "Miracle on Ice"), after Tretiak had let in a weak goal at the end of the first period.

In 1987 there was a reunion of the Summit Series players. Tretiak writes:

Now there was no trace of the old antagonism. We had become wise and kind. We looked at one another's aging faces and couldn't hold back the laughter, thinking about what bullies we had been in 1972.

Tretiak is one of the most admired and respected hockey players in the world. He was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1989.

The following year he became the goaltending coach for the Chicago Blackhawks. Among those he tutored are Ed Belfour, Martin Brodeur, and Dominic Hasek. Any goalie wearing number 20 does so as a tribute to Tretiak.

In 2006 he was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal by the Governor General.

He runs the Vladislav Tretiak Elite School of Goaltending in Toronto.

The translation is by Sam and Maria Budman.

The Game

You know what people say about goalies -- they're "different." Ken Dryden certainly is. Imagine the way his teammates saw him. Aloof and introspective, brainy (he's got a law degree!), unusually tall for a player in the 1970s (at 6'4" he was taller than just about everyone else in the league).

He's the only person to win the Conn Smythe trophy (as playoff MVP) before winning the Calder (rookie of the year). After playing two full seasons with the Canadiens, he rejected the contract he was offered and sat out a year. (Players just didn't do that then.) He abruptly retired after a short but brilliant career (seven and a half seasons), during which he backstopped the team to six championships.

He went on to become an Member of Parliament, and made a bid for the leadership of the Liberal party. Think of it, a goalie as PM!

Like its author, The Game is "different." One might have expected a book that recaps at least some of those Stanley Cup wins. But no, it's structured around a week near the end of his final season, when he's made his decision to retire, and takes us through several routine league games.

The book is a couch on which Dryden analyzes himself, his teammates, and the state of the game. He reflects on practices and warmups, pregame chatter ("Gotta play it, might as well win it") and dressing-room gibes ("Hey, you're the guy Plager scored on from the parking lot...").

He muses upon officiating ("like doing spot-checks on New Year's Eve"), and the "NHL theory of violence," and how Gretzky and the Soviets contributed to obstruction and the "dump-and-chase" style.

But he's best when fixing his gaze on those around him: the prankster Lapointe, Shutt "a perfect Shakespearian fool," Phil Esposito a "volume shooter," Don Cherry coaching the Bruins with "a tiny permanent grin on his face, like a ten-year-old kid holding a stink bomb behind his back."

And the brilliant but unlikeable Scotty Bowman whose playing career ended during a breakaway, his skull fractured by the stick of Jean-Guy Talbot, who was chasing him. How ironic that Bowman later coached Talbot, or that a typical pregame harangue by Bowman went like this:

...and that Woods, is there some reason we can't touch that guy? Is there? For crissake, I see Lupien pattin' him on the ass. And Mondou, sniffin' around, 'Hiya Woodsie. How are ya, Woodsie?' You're not playin' with him.

And Dryden's analysis of Larry Robinson:

More skillful with each year, doing more things, stretching himself wider, he has stretched himself thinner. Working hard, he is making more good plays; but, overextending himself, his stride now chopping, his invincibility in question, he is making more bad plays as well. The numbers are still hugely in his favour, but now it is a game of numbers, concrete and measurable, as for everyone else. By exchanging a game he dominated for a larger, more demanding one he cannot dominate, Robinson is no longer a presence.

The Game is earnest and rambling, often insightful, sometimes windy. It's been hailed as the best book about hockey ever written, and is lauded on the back cover by no less a personage than Mordecai Richler. It's one of only two hockey books listed in Sports Illustrated's Top 100 Books of All Time. (The other is Game Misconduct by Russ Conway, about Alan Eagleson.)

First published in 1993, it was reissued in 2003 as a "20th Anniversary Edition" with an additional chapter. The cover photo and most of the 16 pages of photos were taken by Denis Brodeur, father of another famous goalie. One of them shows Dryden sitting in the dressing room with a serene look on his face, cradling the Stanley Cup like a teddy bear.

Midnight Hockey

No one in Canada is better at the combined tasks of writing and hockey than Bill Gaston. Not Margaret Atwood or Michael Ondaatje. Certainly not David Adams Richards, whose memoir Hockey Dreams is subtitled Memories of a Man Who Couldn't Play.

Gaston on the other hand can play -- Junior hockey for the Vancouver Centennials, university hockey for the UBC Thunderbirds, and pro in Europe for a year. He's had his nose split open by Steve Shutt, and his bell rung by Denis Potvin.

He's also been short-listed for the Giller, the G-G, the Ethel Wilson Award; and he's won the Timothy Findley Award and the CBC/Canadian Literary Award.

In other words he's a ringer, a guy who can go top shelf with a puck or a well-crafted sentence.

The book's title refers to the late-night time slots that rec and oldtimer hockey games are given, the earlier times being reserved for kids. In hockey terms an "oldtimer" is someone who's reached the lofty age of 35.

Gaston has played a lot of rec and oldtimer hockey. Some of the teams he's played for are the Stinkhorns, the Old Goats, the Hurry-Kings. The names of these and other teams -- the Fogduckers, the Vasectomites, the Well Hungarians, the Flapping Dondalingers -- provide a clue to the nature of the book.

Humour is paramount. I laughed until tears ran down my face.

Sure, it's guy humour, but even my wife laughed when I read bits to her. But then she's a good sport. We spent our honeymoon in Florida, along with everyone else on my team. We were playing in a tournament.

Hockey has an almost mystical status in this land. The instinct to throw one's arms in the air after scoring a goal is something that Canadians are born with. But there's much more to hockey than scoring and winning. There's the camaraderie off the ice, the dressing room goofiness, the beer, the road trips, the nicknames, the goalies ("men from a distant galaxie").

For me, this was the perfect book to start off the 2nd Canadian Book Challenge -- and not just because it's such a darn good read. Once, as part of Canada Book Day, me and Bill took part in a progressive short story that travelled through each province and territory, with each writer tacking on a section. Sorta like the flip side of the Canadian Book Challenge.

Synchronicity or what?

The Dog of the South

When Ray Midge’s wife, Norma, runs off with her former husband, Guy Dupree, Ray sets out after them -- not so much to reclaim Norma but to get back his Ford Torino and his credit cards.

The chase, if it can be called that, is a rather desultory affair that leads eventually to Mexico and Belize.

Along the way Ray encounters Dr. Reo Symes, a rogue of the same ilk as Dupree, and a bail bondsman named Jack Wilkie. All are typical Portis characters, eccentric, self-absorbed, and ineffectual.

Ray is a sweet oddball, while Dupree and Symes are pathetic con men. Here’s Symes reflecting on an earlier incident in his medical career:

"A patient named J.D. Brimlett developed osteomyelitis,” said the doctor. “That was the claim anyway. I’m convinced he already had it. He had everything else. Emphysema, glaucoma, no adrenal function, you name it. Two little hard dark lungs like a pair of dessicated prunes. "He belonged in a carnival instead of an arthritis clinic. The world’s sickest living man. No blood pressure to speak of and you couldn’t find a vein to save your ass. Renal failure on top of everything else. The Mayo brothers couldn’t have pulled that chump through, but no, it was my zinc that killed him. A class B irritant poison, they said. "I should have screened him out. I should have closed my eyes and ears to his suffering and sent him on his way. I didn’t do it and I’ve been paying for that mistake ever since. There’s always a son of a bitch like Brimlett hanging around, doing anything to get attention, dying even and just ruining things for everybody else. Do you want it in a nutshell? I was weak. I was soft."

Symes has a broken-down schoolbus named "The Dog of the South," which makes a brief appearance early in the book. Using it as the novel's title suggests that other journeys in the book will end up in a similar state, for the characters themselves are leading broken-down lives.

Charles Portis is a former marine and newspaperman (New York Herald Tribune). He’s written five unusual comic novels: Norwood, True Grit, The Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis, and Gringos. His gentle portrayal of eccentrics, typified by self-serving monologues and folksy expressions (“in a nutshell”), have made him something of a cult figure.

Unofficial Website

Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

A self-described “quantum comedy,” this triptych of novels is spread across six parallel universes in a version of the USA called Unistat.

The writing is silly, sexy, and erudite. It uses a mosaic of events in place of a conventional plotline, and peels back layer after layer of reality and conspiracy. It's like an X-rated version of The X-Files scripted by Monty Python.

The trilogy's structure is as follows:

BOOK ONE – THE UNIVERSE NEXT DOOR
Part One – Purity of Essence
Part One – The Universe Next Door

BOOK ONE – THE TRICK TOP HAT
Part One – Stoic and Christian Ejaculations

BOOK ONE - THE HOMING PIGEONS
Part One – Who’s Zelenka?
Part One – Coming to a Head
Part One – Flossing

A large cast of recurring characters shows up in each part (universe) under a different guise. For example, Joe Malik becomes Josephine Malik, and Mountbatten Babbit is variously a scientific advisor to the President, a researcher at Orgasm Institute, and an admiral at Naval Intelligence.

Many of the names provide an indication of the author’s intent: Ms Karrige, Justin Case, Natalie Drest, Bertha Van Ation, Juan Tootreego, Frank Hemeroid, Clem Cotex, Furbish Lousewart, Marvin Gardens, the Mad Fishmonger, Benny “Eggs” Benedict…

A number of characters are motivated by a desire to know “what the hell is going on.” They lecture each other on quantum mechanics, politics, religion, philosophy, and economics. Some eventually come to the conclusion that they are simply characters in a novel.

Other common elements include a disembodied penis, L5 space cities, a computer called the Beast, and the town of Bad Ass, Texas.

The author, Robert Anton Wilson, was a former associate editor at Playboy. He is best known for co-authoring The Illuminatus! Trilogy with Robert Shea. The Schrodinger’s Cat trilogy is a kind of sequel, sharing a number of characters with the previous work.

The Golden Ass

This is a rambling collection of shaggy tales whose unifying thread is Lucius, a young man with a misplaced interest in magic. He seduces a maid named Photis and convinces her to steal a shape-changing ointment used by her mistress to transform herself into a bird.

When Photis brings the wrong stuff he makes an ass of himself, literally, and falls in with bandits, catamite priests, and various other captors. Twice he defends himself by defecating on his tormentors, and narrowly escapes castration, butchering, and a starring role in a sex show.

Occupying a central portion in the book is the tale of Cupid and Psyche. The latter has never seen her husband, who visits her only under cover of darkness. Convinced by her jealous sisters that he is a serpent who must be killed, she lights a lamp while he is asleep and discovers that he is a deity, a beautiful winged man. Cupid flees, and his mother, Venus, exacts retribution. Eventually Jupiter puts an end to the quarrel, and Cupid and Psyche are reunited.

Other tales of greed, cruelty, murder, cuckoldry, and divine meddling are recounted. In an ursine equivalent of the Trojan horse, a bandit named Thrasyleon allows himself to be sewn up in a bear hide to gain admittance to a rich man’s home. Thelyphron’s nose and ears are cut off by witches and replaced with wax replicas.

Miscellaneous Notes

Lucius is rescued by the divine intervention of the Egyptian goddess Isis, who at the time was not a mythological figure in the same sense that Cupid and Psyche are, but actively worshipped throughout the Greco-Roman world.

Romans often diluted their wine with hot water.

Sex is described in mock-heroic terms, either as a wrestling match or form of combat:

"Engage," she said, "and do so bravely. I shall not yield before you, nor turn my back on you. Direct your aim frontally, if you are a man, and at close quarters. Let your onslaught be fierce; kill before you die. Our battle this day allows no respite."

Despite such raunchiness (remarkably vital after 2000 years), I found the book rather shapeless and hard going in places. The combination of magic, gods, and alien culture makes it difficult to understand the author's intentions, and the literary nuances are lost on anyone without a sound knowledge of the classics.

Background

The Golden Ass (aka Metamorphoses, not to be confused with the Metamorphoses of Ovid) is the only Latin novel from the classical period to survive in its entirety. “Its later influence on the vernacular literatures of Europe has been immense,” writes P. G. Walsh, translator of the Oxford University Press edition. Boccaccio imported several of the tales into the Decameron, Bottom is transformed into an ass in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and a scene in which a drunken Lucius carves up three wineskins, mistaking them for ruffians, is replicated in Don Quixote.

The book’s author, Apuleius, was born in present-day Algeria during the 2nd century AD, educated in Carthage and Athens, and resided for a time in Rome. Though he lectured in Greek and Latin, Punic was most likely his native tongue. A Platonist and devotee of Isis, he was once indicted on a charge of magic (employing love-philtres to induce a rich woman into marriage).

The first English translation was by William Adlington in 1566 and is available here, at the Gutenberg Project. Many other translations are available, some fairly literal, others taking liberties to communicate the style and flow of the original.

An informative discussion of the book can be found here.

Hotel Honolulu

The narrator in Hotel Honolulu is a writer "with a hard-to-pronounce name." He grew up in Medford to become a "grumpy traveler in a book that had been a bestseller in the 1970s." He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. He arrived in Hawaii at age 49 having left "a house and a wife and a whole life in London."

Now he is the manager of a hotel, which becomes for him "a house of fiction," a collection of tales about himself, the owner, the staff, and the guests. Many of these stories are lurid – lots of sex and corpses. Some are told in a single chapter, others are more expansive. Unifying them are the evolving and somewhat parallel stories of the owner (he marries a whore) and the narrator (he marries a whore's daughter).

The owner is Buddy Hamstra, nicknamed Tuna, a wealthy foul-mouthed joker who won the hotel in a poker game. One of his favourite pranks is putting dogshit in hair dryers. He says to his latest wife, "I wouldn’t piss up your ass if your guts were on fire." Theroux tempers such crudeness (and there is plenty) with numerous literary references, in particular to Tolstoy ("Tolstoys 'R Us"), Henry James (he "would love Hawaii"), and Stephen King ("a modest talent").

In the end the narrator becomes a beekeeper. It's not too different from being a hotel manager: the staff do all the work.

Miscellaneous Notes

The hotel has 80 rooms, the book 80 chapters. The name of the hotel's bar is Paradise Lost. One of the hotel's signature dishes is Serious Flu Symptoms Chili.

Referring to some of the characters in the novel, the narrator says: "If they had read anything I had written, they would never tell me stories." Some of their names: Clamback, Fishlow, Godbolt, Lionberg, Malanut, Figland, and Kamakawiwo'ole, a 650-lb Hawaiian singer who needs a forklift to get around.

The narrator provides a blurb for a novel by Ruth Jhabvala, upon a request from Jackie Onassis (who, after the death of her second husband, worked as an editor for Viking and Doubleday). Does she represent a royal figure in this beehive of a novel? The Kennedy lineage figures elsewhere in the book.

Leon Edel is a Henry James scholar who grew up in Saskatchewan, attended McGill, and was living in Hawaii at the time of his death in 1997. Theroux makes him a character in the novel. Edel, says the narrator, is "the only person in Hawaii who knew me – and in the most profound and subtle way, through my books, the detailed autobiographical fantasies of my fiction."

Whereas Theroux's travel books are sometimes referred to as "travel novels," Honolulu Hotel, a work of fiction, is semi-autobiographical. Thus, much of his work is about himself. But then what writer's isn't? Theroux does so more provocatively than most.

Theroux is a beekeeper. The brand of honey he produces is called Oceania Ranch Pure Hawaiian Honey.

Excerpt

"Man, he got one big book, howlie bugga." "I never wen see no book." "In he office." "Bugga office?" "Yah. Howlie bugga office. Big book. Hybolical book." "Eh, no easy fo read, yah." "Too much easy for howlie." "Yah." "Yah. Bymbye, da howlie bugga be rascal." "Frikken big rascal."

The book is Anna Karenina. The "howlie bugga" is the narrator. Like Paul Theroux, he is a "frikken big rascal."

Honolulu Star-Bulletin Interview

Gould's Book of Fish

A Novel in 12 Fish

This is an outrageous fictional account of the life of convict artist William Buelow Gould, who in the early part of the 19th century was transported to Van Dieman’s Land (now Tasmania) for stealing a coat.

The Commandant of the penal colony is a felon himself, having appropriated the identity of a dead English lieutenant. He corresponds with the lieutenant’s sister, who later turns out to be a famous English opium-eater. He wears a gold mask to hide his chancre-ridden face, and diverts himself by riding a locomotive around a circular track and gazing at painted vistas provided by Gould.

The Surgeon, who has hopes of being admitted to the Royal Society, enlists Gould to paint fish, and sends barrels of pickled heads to an English phrenologist. When the Surgeon meets an untimely end, his bones get sent to England too, resulting in a comic scientific mixup.

Gould becomes obsessed with fish. He confuses the people around him with the fish he is painting. He lives in a saltwater cell. He turns into a fish. His book finds its way into the hands of a 20th century purveyor of fake antique furniture named Sid Hammet. Sid turns into a fish.

Each of the 12 chapters is named after a fish and accompanied by a beautiful reproduction from the real William Gould. In the hardcover version there are magnificently marbled endpapers, which resemble a tidepool, and ink colour varies by chapter, reflecting the handmade ink that Gould himself is using. The writing is ornate and grotesque:

As I bob about my cell now I think back on it, we were not surprised when we felt upon us as an implacable hatred the malignant stare of that unholy army of the persecuted—filthy little clawscrunts & half-starved wretches, their pus-filled eyes poking like buttercups out of scaled scabby faces, their misshapen backs hacked & harrowed out of any matural form by endless applications of the Lash; brawn-fallen, belly-pinched wrecks of men bent & broken long before their time, the one I thought the oldest only thirty-two years of age.

This is an entertaining, though at times mystifying, recursive fish story.

Marbled endpapers

Historical Note

Several times the novel mentions Colonel Arthur, the Governor of Van Dieman’s Land. He was recalled in 1836 and the following year installed as Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada. Arthur’s replacement was Sir John Franklin, who governed until 1843, when he was removed from power without warning. Stung by this disgrace, Franklin set out two years later on his final expedition from which no one survived.

The book concludes with a doctored biographical note on Gould. His real bio can be found here.

Cubaism

At Biran she knelt before the shrine where the great man had been educated, but not for the reason the soldier thought. She'd been feeling unwell since joining the convoy at Guardalavaca.  Perhaps it was the bilious colours of her hotel, a clunky Soviet-built affair in the Brutalist style. Or the memory of an American Airlines jet at Holguin, parked next to a sign that said, "Socialismo o muerte."  The soldier, standing in the shade of a tree with strangely geometrical five-sided fruit, shifted his rifle restlessly.  Would he shoot if she threw up?

"He had relatives here."
"Well, it's where he was born."
"No, not him.  He was a communist, you know."
"Of course, he was, but what kind? Analytic or synthetic?"
"You're thinking of someone else."
"Orphist, then. He was elected, right?"

"So we're off on an adventure," she said, climbing into the SUV.

The Losers' Club

Martin Sierra, a would-be writer with a dead-end job, has accumulated a mountain of rejection slips, and is in love with a woman who is in love with another woman. He cruises the personal ads and the club scene in NYC's East Village, which is weird beyond belief -- transvestites, retro-punks, rockabilly boys with "elephant trunk haircuts," nuevo-hippies with "fruit-coloured granny glasses, top hats, and love beads."

He meets Amaris, who's into vampires, and Lola, a painter who takes him to a graveyard to introduce him to her parents. When she shows him her paintings of dismembered NYPD officers, she nudges him and says, "Is mah' clit showin' or what?"

There are some very funny lines in the book. Some typical examples:

"And that was Atomic Bitchwax from their 'Total Castration' CD," Starr would announce. "Catch them later this month at the Fierce Pussy Festival, along with The Post-Christ Disciples, Screaming Headless Torso, and Shirley McDicklips and the Ass Clamps." * * * * On the corner of 6th Street, ragamuffin skate punks congregated, soliciting funds, while up the block, a high-spirited gal with neon-green hair and yellow day-glo lipstick hawked issues of a revived journal entitled, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. "Fuck you, sir?" she cried to the impassive pedestrians. "M'am? Fuck you?"

The author, Richard Perez, cites Bukowski and Henry Miller as influences, and lists as favourite books Lolita by Nabokov, Nausea by Sartre, The Fan Man by William Kotzwinkle, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson.

Author Interview

Through Siberia by Accident

Dervla Murphy is a beer-swilling cigar-smoking travel writer with more than 20 books to her credit. She is also an eccentric Irish granny who prefers travelling by bike. She does not own a car, microwave, washing machine, computer, TV, or central heating.

The misfortunes she has suffered during her travels are many:

Afghanistan – broken ribs, scorpion bite
Albania – three attempted robberies
Cameroon – “triple tooth abscess”
Ethiopia – dislocated knee, robbed by bandits
India – heat stroke, mumps, brucellosis (brucellosis!)
Laos – torn tendon in right foot
Madagascar – gout, more broken ribs, Hep A
Nairobi-London flight – life threatening clot in leg
Pakistan - amoebic dysentery
Rumania – robbed by police, concussion, fractured coccyx, broken foot
South Africa – tick bite fever, shattered left arm
Zimbabwe - malaria

In 2002 she crossed the Russian Federation by the Baikal-Amur Mainline, her intention being to cycle through a portion of Siberia. In this she was prevented by a couple of injuries that occurred before her starting point was reached. Instead she continued to travel by train and boat in the Baikal and Sakha areas.

She extols the friendliness of Siberians, and falls under the spell of Lake Baikal and the Lena River. Her observations are intelligent, well-informed, and contain none of the usual whining often found in travel writing. She complains about toilet facilities only once. She is gutsy, pragmatic and open-minded.

My sole complaint is her continual fussing over pets. No incident is too trivial to report on:

As I drank, the pup farted – potent farts which at first provoked only laughter and comically expressed disgust. Then, as they increased in volume and frequency, filling the cabin with asphyxiating fumes, the consensus was that he should be exiled. Tears gathered in the little boy’s eyes. But I had finished my beer, and thawed, and was returning to the platform where the pup could sit on my lap because Baikal’s wind would disperse his wind. When I had found the most sheltered corner he gazed up at my face with a puzzled expression. No doubt I smelt wrong, foreign. Soon he struggled to be free, loudly relieved his bowels behind a milk churn and thereafter farted no more.

Murphy undertook this trip in 2002, when she was in her early 70s. A few years later she returned and completed it, the results being published as Silverland: A Winter Journey Beyond the Urals.

The Real World

A voice hisses in your ear: "If you're not at the table in two nano-seconds, you're dead meat."

You jump up from the computer and dash out of the room.  You can feel the floor vibrating behind you from your father's heavy tread.

He is a big man with round shoulders and a round back. At the table he hunches over his plate, his head bobbing as he eats.

You mother says, "What were you doing, dear?"

"Just goofing around on the computer."

She shakes her head in disapproval. "You spend entirely too much time on that thing, Donald. You're going to lose touch with reality."

You roll your eyes. If anyone's unreal, it's your parents. Sometimes it's almost as though they occupy a different universe, one which intersects yours only at the supper table.

Take your dad, for instance. Sets off every day briefcase in hand, crisp and alert, and 10 hours later returns home looking like he's been mugged. Who knows for sure where he goes or what he's been up to?

Your mother on the other hand might as well belong to another species. The stuff she does! Cleaning the bathroom, doing the laundry. Bizarre!

"Donald."

Maybe  they're not even your parents. Maybe they're aliens.

"Donald?"

From another dimension. And those aren't their real faces, they're masks. Latex masks they peel off every night before climbing into bed and--

"Donald!" hollers your father.

"Yes, dad?"

"Fer crissake, kid, your mother's talking to you."

"Oh, sorry. What is it, mom?"

"There's something your father and I want to tell you."

A horrible thought enters your mind. "Oh no, you're not pregnant, are you?"

She smiles and shakes her head. "How would you like to take a few days off school?"

Your eyes bug out in disbelief. "Seriously?"

"We thought it might be good for you and your father to spend some time together."

"What?"

You mother reaches out to reassure you. Her touch is cool and slimy. "At the office," she says

Your father seizes another lungfish from a platter and bites its head off. "Time you see what the real world is like," he grunts.

Descartes

The Life and Times of a Genius

One of my favourite biographies is a life of Pepys by Claire Tomalin. Pepys lived in the 17th century and was a child during the English Civil War, of which Tomalin said something quite remarkable: the intellectual revolution accompanying it was so profound that it is difficult to understand how people thought before it occurred.

That remark was much in my mind as I read this new biography of Descartes, who also lived in the 17th century. It was a time when religion and science were closely linked, and science itself based upon the discoveries of the ancient Greeks, filtered through centuries of Scholastic thought.

People believed the sun revolved around the earth, and that angels, humans, and animals were linked in a “great chain of being.” There were four elements in the universe (earth, air, fire, and water), and four humours in the body (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile), the balancing of which was necessary to maintain good health. Vying with this traditional approach to knowledge was “a heady mixture of notions, beliefs and practices from cabalistic, occult, astrological, alchemical, hermetic and magical sources.”

Into this array of the hidebound and the bizarre stepped Descartes, whose great contribution to science was the assumption that "the natural world can be examined and understood as a system of matter in motion obeying natural laws, without the need for any invocation of supernatural forces or agencies."

He proposed to do this by jettisoning the past and starting anew, basing all science on what could be known for certain – hence his starting point, Cogito ergo sum. He promulgated this approach in his famous Discourse on Method, and applied it in his own investigation of the natural world, which included the grinding of his own lenses and the dissection of cadavers.

His Life

Descartes lived a rather adventurous life for an intellectual barely five feet tall. He spent several years wandering about the continent when it was embroiled in the Thirty Years War (1614-1648), which began as a religious conflict and devastated central Europe. He was, for a period, a mercenary, first joining the Protestant army of the Prince of Orange, and then the Catholic army of Maximilian of Bavaria. He was with the latter at the Battle of the White Mountain (near Prague) where the Protestant forces of Frederick of the Palatinate were routed. [Other sources have also placed him at the infamous siege of La Rochelle, where Cardinal Richelieu starved to death 20,000 Huguenots.]

The author of this bio, A.C. Grayling, has an interesting theory for why Descartes so often turned up in contentious areas in Europe. He may have been a Jesuit intelligence agent. Descartes was educated by Jesuits, who in turn encouraged the Habsburg rulers of the Holy Roman Empire to reclaim Catholic territories lost to Protestant forces during the Reformation.

If true, it may explain why Descartes spent the remaining portion of his life in the Protestant Netherlands. His pro-Habsburg Jesuit interests would not have endeared him to France, which had reasons of its own for opposing Habsburg ambitions. The need for caution was further underlined when in 1633 Galileo was tried for heresy by the Inquisition, and required to remain under house arrest for the remainder of his life. Descartes immediately abandoned plans to publish his masterwork, Le Monde, and changed residences frequently.

Whether or not Descartes was a spy, it was a good time to be in the Netherlands, which was not only wealthy and tolerant, but also enjoying the Dutch Golden Age. Descartes wrote all of his major works there, and shared with Rembrandt the patronage of Christiaan Huygens's father. It was there he met Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, with whom he struck up a close intellectual relationship.

When he finally did venture back to France, he supped with Thomas Hobbes and met Blaise Pascal, who showed him the calculating machine he had made (“the first ever computer, based on the technology of knitting machines”). Improbably his life came to an end in Sweden, where he was enticed by Queen Christina to serve as her personal tutor.

Grayling points out several ironies here. Princess Elizabeth was the daughter of Frederick, the Elector Palatine, whom Descartes helped to overthrow at the Battle of the White Mountain. Christina of Sweden was her cousin, and daughter of the great Gustavus Adolphus, who brought Sweden into the Thirty Years War on the Protestant side. Christina was instrumental in ending the war, and after Descartes died she abdicated and converted to Catholicism.

His Legacy

Many of Descartes’s scientific notions were wrong. Indeed, some of them sound as unlikely as other crackpot ideas of the time. He believed that the pineal gland was the seat of the soul, that the motion of the planets is explained by vortices in a universal fluid, and that vision results from "pressure on the eye" by that fluid.

Despite these missteps, Descartes is today considered the “Father of Modern Philosophy.” Among other achievements he discovered the law of refraction and created analytic geometry, which is taught in high schools today. His Discourse on Method is one of the seminal texts of the modern world. After four centuries the book is still in print and taught in universities around the world.

King of Russia

A Year in the Russian Super League

Dave King coached Canada’s national team for nine years, followed by stints with Calgary, Columbus and Montreal in the NHL. Later while coaching in Europe he was courted by Metallurg Magnitogorsk of the Russian Super League, which includes such fabled teams as Central Red Army and Moscow Dynamo.

In taking the job King became the first Canadian to coach in the league, and led Metallurg to their most successful season ever. They finished first overall with only five regular season losses in 51 games. They also won the Spengler Cup, a five-team mid-season tournament played in Davos, Switzerland. However, they fared less well in the league playoffs. They were hit with a lot of injuries and went out in the semi-finals, losing 3 games to 1, all their losses being in overtime.

Nineteen-year-old Evgeny Malkin was the star of the team, and King has a lot of good things to say about him. When the team played in Finland for the Tampere Cup, Malkin did “such dazzling things with the puck that the fans just stood up and applauded.” But it’s not just his natural skills that make him a great player. “Sometimes Russian players can be extremely dour. Malkin smiles all the time. He seems to enjoy practice. He loves to compete. He plays the game with tempo. He’s unselfish.” Eric Lindros played for King as a nineteen-year-old, and King ranks Malkin ahead of Lindros at that age.

At the start of the season King thinks the team needs more grit, and convinces the management to bring in a couple of warhorses, ex-Leafs Dmitri Yushkevich and Igor Korolev. It was a smart move, as both players made major contributions to the team. King is particularly complimentary about Yushkevich, who with a bad knee is “as close to a one-legged player as you can get.” His great heart makes up for this deficiency. During one game he's hit in the face with a puck. King says:

I didn’t think I’d see him for a while, but the next day, who’s there at practice? It’s Yushkevich -– and he looked like hell. If little kids on the street had seen him they would have run the other way. He looked like a character in a horror movie, with all those scars of his and now his face all lopsided.

Likewise Korolev. In the playoffs he’s cut by a skate and receives 23 stitches. “It was so bad that our doctor was practically throwing up.” Korolev refuses to stay out of the game and comes back “with a great big patch over his eye, blood all over his sweater and his face.”

Observations about Russian Hockey

Before the season begins a Russian Orthodox priest enters the dressing room and sprinkles the players with holy water.

Not only must teams travel vast distances for league play, but Metallurg's pre-season training took place in the Swiss Alps, and included an exhibition tournament in Finland, while mid-season dry-land training was located in Dubai.

For top-level players the Russian Super League is as lucrative as the NHL. Yet on some teams players went unpaid for months.

The amount of physical training is phenomenal. King says:

I’m no doctor, but we don’t have nearly as many groin strains here [as in the NHL] and I’m wondering if that has something to do with the tremendous strength the Russian players develop in their quadriceps... To a man, the leg strength of a Russian player will amaze you. The quadriceps muscles, which deliver so much power to the stride, are huge on virtually every one of them. Right from the time they turn eight or nine years old, they do an immense amount of work to build up their leg strength.

Also the whole approach to coaching is different:

The players rarely complain or give you any emotional reaction... I blame it on the fact that, starting at young age, coaches confront players one-on-one on the bench, in the dressing-room, or on the ice, scolding them harshly for mistakes. They rarely do it privately, so in order to cope the players simply don’t react. They absorb the comments and show their strength to their teammates by wearing a blank expression. I’ve seen grown men coaching young ten- or eleven-year-olds go nose-to-nose with a youngster, ranting and raving almost incoherently -– and the young player simply takes the medicine...

King decided to stay for the 2006-2007 season, but many of his top players had moved on, including Yushkevich and Malkin, who is now with the Pittsburgh Penguins. After just eight games King was fired. His record was 3-4-1.