(no subject)

As research for my current writing project Quiet Game, I'm researching chess, Scrabble, and crosswords - brain sports, if you will. It's my suspicion that the feats of pattern recognition involved in all three games use the same brain hardware.

My favourites so far are the book Word Freaks by Stefan Fatsis, about Scrabble, and the documentary Word Wars, which overlap a great deal. The dedicated players in both are such likeable characters, with all their fanboy foibles.

I saw the movie Looking for Bobby Fischer (aka Innocent Moves) a while ago, which was mercifully unsyrupy given that it's basically a sports movie about a cute kid and his dad; and I'm currently reading the book. (Disappointingly, from my research POV, much of it is taken up with a Kafkaesque trip to the USSR.)

The Scrabble and the chess scene share something: dedicated, brilliant players who are poor, even homeless. In the West at least, brain sports are the opposite of physical sports - marginal, eccentric hobbies, not high-paying careers.

The documentary Wordplay, which I'm watching right now, is basically a panegyric to the New York Times crossword. It's disappointing for two reasons: one, it's about a quick crossword and not proper cryptic crosswords - although I'm learning that the clues and answers can be similarly devious. Two, human genius and madness are conspicuous by their absence, rendering the tournament and its players dull. Or should I be pleased that the documentary is presenting the puzzlers as having normal lives and a fun hobby?

Jon and I do cryptic crosswords - I keep a book of SMH puzzles in the loo - and play the occasional game of scrabble, and recently shellshear and I have faced each other across the duct-taped remnants of my high school chess set. I'm often tempted to take up chess or Scrabble as a serious hobby, much as I'm often tempted to start seriously learning languages. I think it all has to wait until I've got some original books into print.