Word: chess
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...lured into Leavitt and Pierce, a tobacco shop on Mass Ave., by its amazing marbles and tin cars. Upon close inspection the store offers more than kitsch and tobacco. Up a small catwalk and past a culturally-sensitive Native American cigar seller statue are five wooden tables with inlaid chess boards...
...popularity of the poolroom, it was necessary to expand it to a room upstairs. The loft area is the former balcony which lead to that poolroom upstairs. When the poolroom was eliminated years later, the balcony was kept as a place for patrons to enjoy their cigars and play chess...
...vapors could tolerate. He tried Davos in Switzerland, Saranac Lake in New York State, a deserted mining camp above California's Napa Valley, and finally Hawaii and the South Pacific. His pattern was to write (and drink, converse, hike and sail) to exhaustion and illness; Fanny's was marital chess playing, countering his real collapses with her vividly enacted imaginary ones...
...have had intermittent success applying the technique to my most chronic addiction: chess. George Steiner is right that chess is ultimately an entirely useless, self-referential experience, but telling yourself so is of no use because it is also totally absorbing. During, say, a 10-hour binge of speed chess, you tell yourself other things. You tell yourself it is a noble game. You tell yourself it was Ben Franklin's favorite pastime while ambassador to France ("I call this my opera," he would say, explaining his absence from the Paris opera). You tell yourself that Natan Sharansky kept...
...that does not help. As the hours slip away and you see life passing you by, you remember the real chess paradigm, Nabokov's Luzhin, the genius who finally apprehends "the full horror and abysmal depths of chess" and goes quite bonkers. And you know you've got to stop...