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#1
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Here is one of the nine essays I wrote in my
examination of Edward Winter's attack against GM Evans at the ChessCafe in 2001. MR. WINTER ATTACKS HIS BETTER - III "Larry Evans: Stylist, Essayist" "If we all thought Bobby had deserted chess for two decades, he corrected us at the press conference. Chess had deserted him. 'No one has played ME for those 20 years,' he said. Reality is in the 'I' of the Fischer beholder."- GM Larry Evans, Chess Life, November 1992, p. 56 A fair specimen of Edward Winter's heavy-potato irony: "While 'Mother Teresa was ministering to the Caribs, the Dictator (so the November Chess Life suggested) was indulging in 'arm-twisting'. On a less physical plain, Campomanes made only one notable contribution to the Press (in the November CHESS - sent out when everything was over). The British Gentleman, however, was to be found philanthropising in print almost everywhere. In the May BCM he set the tone with a declaration of unswerving principle: 'Honesty and openness is always the best policy!'"-Edward Winter, Chess Explorations, p. 217 In "The Facts About Larry Evans," Edward Winter attacked his better as a stylist, essayist and chess searcher. The intent was to destroy an adversary's reputation for lively, authoritative writing. The ploy was to recycle about two dozen old errors, pad them with hundreds of words of invective to suggest heft, and treat them as representative of GM Evans' oeuvre. That is the main line of the Winter Variation. Repeat something, just anything - time and again. Regurgitate errors long since acknowledged and corrected - time and again. Rehearse feigned outrage - time and again. Fortunately, though, Mr. Winter's slings and arrows boomerang. His targets remain whole, and he somehow ends up looking more riddled than a piece of well-aged Swiss cheese. "Envy," in the words of the ancient Greek proverb, "slays itself by its own arrows." Just as a derelict marooned on a desert island waves his arms frantically to catch the attention of a passing ship, Mr. Winter waves his armaments frenetically at passing audiences hoping to catch some attention. Even as he gets cancelled from New in Chess for want of reader interest, writers such as Raymond Keene and GM Evans continue to interest large audiences. Indeed, as noted in an earlier essay in this series, every Chess Life reader survey has rated GM Evans at or near the top among the magazine's contributors. Evans interests. Winter bores. EVANS AS STYLIST Take the Evans prose style. It crackles with sass and pizazz. At Evans' best, he bubbles. At Winter's best, he foams. Glutinously. Like a Staunton without any of the edgy earth and energy. No suet-pudding is more viscous than Mr. Winter's sentences, written in the mannered cadences of third-rate Victorianese. Winter's wit is heavier than one of those Swiss potato dishes. The man's irony? Few ingots of iron are more leaden. Forum readers should consult his eye-opening "Reviews/Commentary" chapter in Chess Explorations which is, paradoxically, a real eye-shutter. The work of a mouth in search of an ear. The truth is that nothing ever written by Mr. Winter has the insight, the liveliness and the human involvement of a typical Evans feature. Here, for example, is GM Evans' introduction to his wonderful "Bobby's Back!" piece in the Chess Life of November 1992. Enjoy: BOBBY'S BACK And non-chess people know it. They know it because unlike the Loch Ness monster, so often sighted but never seen, Bobby Fischer showed up on September 1 for a press conference at the Maestral Hotel, the site of Fischer-Spassky II. The hotel is on the tiny peninsula of Sveti Stefan, an erstwhile playground of the rich and famous, a mere 100 feet off the coast of Montenegro and some 70 miles from a civil war raging in Bosnia. At his first press conference in 20 years, Bobby fired the spit heard 'round the world. He took out a letter from the U.S. Treasury Department warning of severe penalties for violating U.N. sanctions by playing Boris Spassky in the rump state of Yugoslavia - and spat on it. There's more. "Communism is Bolshevism is Judaism," he declared. When asked about his reported anti-Semitism, he said Semites included both Arabs and Jews. "I'm definitely not anti-Arab, OK?" On the two Super Ks, usurpers to his throne, he opined, "These criminals Karpov and Kasparov have been ruining chess with immoral, unethical, prearranged games, and are the lowest dogs around." As usual, Bobby had the organizers hopping. The playing table was built and rebuilt seven times; all toilets in the playing hall were raised an inch to accomodate [sic] his bulk; an extravagant birthday bash was thrown for his 19-year-old Hungarian girlfriend, Zita Rajcsanyi. A bemused Fischer looked on as torch-bearers dressed in folk costumes lined the isthmus leading to Sveti Stefan. Eerie - and reminiscent of the scene in Frankenstein when peasants with torches marched on the castle to destroy the monster within. In Yugoslavia, this $5 million duel is billed as "The Return Match of the Century Between the Never-Defeated Champion of the World, Bobby Fischer, and His Challenger Boris Spassky." All his wishes are fulfilled. He gets 10 wins with a 9 - 9 tie clause, which FIDE had denied him in 1975. The patented Bobby Fischer chess clock, which may revolutionize tournament chess, is being used. The purse is for a million more than Kasparov's next title bout. Further, FIDE, despised by Fischer, the body of amateurs that stripped Bobby of his title, is cut out of the picture (something which Kasparov despite all his efforts failed to accomplish). But there's trouble in paradise. Before the start of the third game, Bobby suddenly added an ultimatum that journalists be barred from covering the match unless they acknowledged it's for the world championship. He relented - for now. BOBBY'S BACK And we chess people know it. We know it because at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, September 2, Bobby committed an act stranger than any recorded above: he played a game in public for the first time in 20 years. Many pundits were convinced that it would never happen. How shocked he must have been in 1990 when former GMA chairman Bessel Kok balked at organizing a comeback match because Bobby's demands "were too tough to meet" and his extreme views espousing neo-Nazism and denying the existence of the Holocaust "went beyond the abhorrent." Bobby had barked, and for the first time a chessman failed to jump. In the October Chess Life, Arnold Denker and Larry Parr wrote that all efforts to coax him from retirement were "doomed form the start." They continued, "His personal chess legend as an incomparable and undefeated genius means everything to him. It is his raison d'etre - the single support for a very frail ego." Elegantly written, closely reasoned and utterly wrong! Bobby is back because even for him time does not stand still. He's nearly 50, and he either makes a pile now or dies broke. Perhaps Ms. Sweet 19, whose own ambition is to become world champion someday, prodded him ever so gently about the future. But Denker, Parr and many of us ultimately got it wrong about Bobby for a far more basic reason. We forgot, as a French philosopher once put it, that normal men do not know that everything is possible. Normal men cannot imagine the solipsistic absorption of a genius such as Fischer who has sunk, in the words of Vladimir Nabokov, "into the abysmal depths of chess." If we all thought Bobby had deserted chess for two decades, he corrected us at the press conference. Chess had deserted him. "No one has played ME for those 20 years," he said. Reality is in the "I" of the Fischer beholder. No matter what happens in Yugoslavia, I have a feeling we may be watching Bobby's last hurrah. Instead of launching another assault on the citadel, he'll probably take the money and run." Great writing meant for the chess ages? Not at all. A piece of provocative, insightful, brightly written, and what Tartakower might have called "Sun journalism"? Absolutely. More interesting and faster paced than Mr. Winter's chloral hydrates? Oh, yah! Instead of GM Evans' snappy headline and lead-in, "Bobby's Back," Mr. Winter would have served up something like the arch, "Return of Robert Fischer." Instead of Evans' lead-in and first two sentences - "BOBBY'S BACK ... And non-chess people know it. They know it because unlike the Loch Ness monster, so often sighted but never seen, Bobby Fischer showed up on September 1 for a press conference at the Maestral Hotel, the site of Fischer-Spassky II."- Mr. Winter's work would have dispensed with Evans' snappy economy: Robert James Fischer has returned to the arena, and even non-chess playing people have heard the news. They have heard because Fischer, who has been caught only in glimpses like the Loch Ness monster these last two decades, showed up on September 1 for a press conference at the Maestral Hotel, the site of Fischer-Spassky II. Not bad. Though not so good as energetic Evans copy. Still, it is better than most of Mr. Winter's lather, which brings to mind the Russian aphorism that paper can stand anything. EVANS AS ESSAYIST As much as I admire Larry Evans' CL feature stories and columns, I regard his newspaper work more highly. The various versions of Evans' syndicated columns have been appearing for over 30 years. His essays, so elegant in their economy, range from 300 to 500 words. They are minor miracles of compression. They tell complete stories in literate though completely accessible language, and they have kept tens of millions of readers interested. Nothing - or, perhaps, just one thing - was more unjust in Mr. Winter's ChessCafe attack than the man's attempt to tar GM Evans' enormous oeuvre with the brush of his oft-repeated litany of Evans errors. Not only were most of these errors acknowledged and corrected by GM Evans, but they comprise less than a hundredth of one percent of his total work. Over the past half century, GM Evans has written quite literally thousands of pithy and eloquent essays for his newspapers and magazines. Mini-pyramids. Lovely work. Mr. Winter and the ratpackers are unconcerned with the thousands of such essays written by GM Evans in which he illumined so many corners of our great chess globe. The Winter technique is to look for inevitable gaffes or even mistakes unconnected to the author - such as a publisher's "aviod" on the spine of a book rather than "avoid" or for an absence of umlauts over the last name of Eero Book because such diacritical diereses are not in the CL stylebook - in order to reach what IM John Watson has called "one-sided and pre-ordained" conclusions. "Pre-ordained"? Even the ratpackers know in the foul recesses of their minds that Mr. Winter digs for evidence to support prior conclusions rather than delving for conclusions (explanations) to explain prior evidence. EVANS AS SEARCHER For nearly 35 years, GM Evans has been conducting a grand dialectic (rather than a Winterian Grand Guignol) in the pages of Chess Life. Working in partnership with his readers, he has reestablished old chess knowledge and sought new knowledge. In my view the nastiest ploy in Mr. Winter's ChessCafe assault is neither the "shameless" character assassination nor the mischaracterization of GM Evans' oeuvre by regurgitating the same two dozen or so errors over and over - errors, moreover, that were earlier acknowledged and often corrected. To my mind, Mr. Winter's lowest, in fact subterranean, device is to argue that GM Evans is loath to admit mistakes. Mr. Winter is betting that most of you are without historical memory or, at least, bound annuals of Chess Life. He is betting that you do not recall or have never read the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of columns in which he gladly conceded errors in his own analyses or statements. No matter whether these errors occurred in his famous MCO-10 edition, in his many feature articles, in his numerous books or in his hundreds of CL columns! "No matter," I say, because GM Evans was and is hungry, indeed ravenous, for such corrections because they are the vital viands that keep a column such as his alive - just as a shortage of audience participation recently led to the demise of Mr. Winter's column in New In Chess. I mentioned earlier that GM Evans is a searcher after new chess knowledge. Given the wonderful, saving difficulty of chess, mistakes are inevitable. Dialectic is the corrective. Mr. Winter and the ratpackers want to get GM Evans out of Chess Life and out of newspapers. No doubt about that. They do not care whether CL readers enjoy reading his column as evidenced by every reader survey ever conducted. They do not care whether readers fail to flock to wintry page after wintry page of such games as Fahrni-Maliutin, Wiker-Sandehn, Williams-Wight or the immortal L. Loewy II - Felix masterpiece played at the Cafe Pirus in 1904. And on and on and on. They have contempt for those stubborn chess readers who unaccountably wish to know more about the games of Kasparov and Fischer (Mr. Winter's games section of Chess Explorations has one of Kasparov's games, none of Fischer's.) and to read the opinions of a famous grandmaster about the burning chess issues of our time. Evans interests. Winter persists. |
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#3
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That is the main line of the Winter Variation.
Repeat something, just anything - time and again. Regurgitate errors long since acknowledged and corrected - time and again. Rehearse feigned outrage - time and again. It seems that the Winter Variation is one of Liarry's favorites, seeing as he essays it himself so frequently. |
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#4
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#5
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"Taylor Kingston" wrote in message ups.com... wrote: That is the main line of the Winter Variation. Repeat something, just anything - time and again. Regurgitate errors long since acknowledged and corrected - time and again. Rehearse feigned outrage - time and again. -- Lary Parr It seems that the Winter Variation is one of Liarry's favorites, seeing as he essays it himself so frequently. Interesting. I didn't recall that particular passage by Parr, but it's eery how he actually describes his own modus operandi while purporting to describe Winter's. It's like Josef Goebbels claiming English news is all lies and propaganda. Or closer to home, Ezra Pound doing fascist propaganga for Mussolini? Can Parr actually be that oblivious to himself? Just yesterday, commenting on such a "time and again" case, I observed: "Parr and his sycophants a name given to people who actually know something about chess, or Russian history keep bringing this matter up every few months, despite the fact that [they] have no evidence either (hint: [they] don't have it because it does not exist). [They] treat rgcp like it's like some Kafka novel, where an innocent man can be arrested over and over on the same charge." Its amazing that I received in one month in 2002 something exceeding 20,000 words which did nothing but berate Parr and Evans. I can't remember at the moment who wrote them, possibly because they had absolutely nothing to do with what either Parr or Evans addressed. In respect of the sending individual, innocent of what he spoke of, or would rant of, would be the subject, which is not Kafkaesque but Burlesque. Phil Innes |
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#6
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Chess One wrote: Or closer to home, Ezra Pound doing fascist propaganga for Mussolini? "Propaganga"? Is that another drug you like, Phil? I've heard of ganja, but I did not know there were proper and improper forms of it. And I always thought the fascists tended toward opiates (e.g. Göring) or amphetamines (e.g. Hitler), rather than cannabis derivatives. |
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#7
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"Taylor Kingston" wrote in message ups.com... Chess One wrote: Or closer to home, Ezra Pound doing fascist propaganga for Mussolini? "Propaganga"? Is that another drug you like, Phil? I've heard of ganja, but I did not know there were proper and improper forms of it. And I always thought the fascists tended toward opiates (e.g. Göring) or amphetamines (e.g. Hitler), rather than cannabis derivatives. You seem to like Nazi references taylor, having not shrunk from comparing people to Mussolini, Hitler and now Göring. Did you think this was clever or that you were not called, and bust? BTW, if you snip my posts to avoid any context or to pervert a context, and call me a liar, I shall 'unrespect' your own messages public and private, even though you wrote 'private, not for publication' in them. There is a limit you know, and you are way out of your depth, and not only can't take a hint, you are now drunk on your own prospects. That's not a fair warning. Its not enough. I am going to write as I like on this subject, and ignore your protestations, childish diversions, and your essential duplicity. Even the idiot Brennan is not worth exposing more than his preoccupation to lie and distort does expose himself. But there is something a bit sinistre about you, and your whitewash about all these Soviet subjects, and your non-stop tirade over nothing bigger than your ego. Phil Innes |
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#8
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Chess One wrote: There is a limit you know, and you are way out of your depth, and not only can't take a hint, you are now drunk on your own prospects. Phil, one of us is indeed acting in a manner far from sober. Even the idiot Brennan is not worth exposing more than his preoccupation to lie and distort does expose himself. But there is something a bit sinistre about you, and your whitewash about all these Soviet subjects, Hmm -- recently here on rgcm/p we had a spate of posts by your friend Goran Tomic, who wrote of Josef Stalin as if he were Jesus Christ, and of other latter-day petty Stalins in glowing terms. About this you said virtually nothing, and yet you accuse others of "whitewashing Soviet subjects"? Rrrriiiight. and your non-stop tirade over nothing bigger than your ego. Phil, you're always good for a laugh, I'll give ya that. |
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#9
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I am going to write as I like on this subject, and ignore your protestations, childish diversions, and your essential duplicity.
And you don't already do that, Phil? It seems to me that you have no trouble saying what you think, whether it is something pertinent to the subject, ephemera, or just your own delusions. Not that delusions are bad; you find Taylor "sinistre," I find him rather dextro. And yes, there is as much unintended humor, as Taylor notes, in your posts as in an Ed Wood film. I suppose the class fool keeps acting as such for the attention? |
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#10
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Taylor Kingston wrote: Phil, you're always good for a laugh, I'll give ya that. And that's about all he's good for. |
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