Word: chess
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Three-Level Chess. Credit for the installation goes to Guggenheim Museum Director James Johnson Sweeney, who discovered that laying out pictures in a spiral museum is like playing three-dimensional chess at a distance of 80 ft. (the inner diameter of the core). Pointing and counterpointing pictures on three different levels at once, Sweeney was able to orchestrate modern art in a way that no horizontal museum can hope...
...Chess, Anyone? As for Gourgaud, he was a temperamental bachelor who seems to have had a homosexual crush on Napoleon, but Bonaparte was strictly heterosexual, and Gourgaud eventually left the island in a vicious pet. Las Cases had gone to St. Helena for the book he knew Napoleon had in him, and took dictation till his eyes gave out. Indeed, they all took dictation and kept journals, perhaps suspecting posterity's avalanche of books about Napoleon, though some of the entries are revealingly non-Napoleonic, e.g., Gourgaud's statement that if Las Cases tried...
...usually the most taxing of rituals. At 5 p.m., everyone assembled in the dining room at Longwood, Napoleon's home, officers in dress uniform, ladies in low-cut gowns. Napoleon bolted his food, and often ate with his hands. After dinner, there were games. If the game was chess, the officers had to stand throughout, and Napoleon almost invariably lost unless the other player sycophantically threw the game. At other times, Napoleon read aloud from Racine, Corneille and Moliere. Sometimes he held the little band spellbound with accounts of his great campaigns. After one such evening, he stared into...
...week's end the Crown called Dr. Francis Busby, senior medical officer at Brixton Prison, who pronounced Podola's amnesia "definitely not genuine," and insisted that if Podola's memory really had vanished he could not have played chess and vingt-et-un with his guards without first being shown how. Podola, he said, had "deceived" Edwards and other doctors who held that he was not fit to be tried...
...readable. Author Painter has picked up every aristocratic name that the snobbish Proust dropped, and whole pages read like excerpts from the Almanack de Gotha. Relatively free of footnotes, the book is really one gigantic footnote to Proust's masterpiece. When he is not playing the elaborate chess game of fact v. fiction, Author Painter does communicate his passionate curiosity about Proust, and he draws a lively portrait of the sick, sick, sick French society that molded the Proustian sensibility...