Jim West On Chess: "NY Times" Review of "The Machine"

Friday, August 30, 2013

"NY Times" Review of "The Machine"

[photo by Joel Chester Fides]

In The New York Times, Roslyn Sulcas reviews The Machine.

Last Sunday's chess column did not appear in the New York edition of the newspaper. I phoned their offices on Monday where a man at the Culture Desk told me that an "emergency" decision had been made to replace page A19 with an obituary of the actress Julie Harris.

"My study of chess was accompanied by a strong attraction to music, and it was probably thanks to this that from childhood I became accustomed to thinking of chess as an art, and have never regarded it as anything else, for all the science and sport involved in it. And, moreover, an art which in some ways is closer to music than it is customary to think. Perhaps chess and music are drawn together by laws of harmony and beauty which are difficult to formulate and difficult to grasp, or perhaps by something else." - Vasily Smyslov