In the introduction to this newsletter, I mentioned that it was inspired by George Steiner’s coverage of the ‘72 World Chess Championship which appeared in The New Yorker and was later anthologised as White Knights of Reykjavik.
Steiner himself had a fascination with what he liked to call the ‘metaphysical triviality or irresponsibility’ of chess—a phrase that has been running around my head for the last few weeks. In order to get it out of my head, I had the idea of having a conversation with two philosophers who are also chess aficionados to try and get my ideas out into the ether. The result was this podcast episode with JJ Lang and Dan Gallagher, where we cover a lot of ideas behind chess’s place in the grand chain of being (or not) of the universe.
You can book JJ for chess coaching here. Dan is also available for coaching. If you’re interested, go through his Twitter profile: @BishopPair
If you want to subscribe to this podcast through your podcast aggregator, the RSS feed is: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/566439.rss
The intro music for this podcast episode is from my good pal, Joe Hill. Bishop to D9 is part of the Joe Hill’s North Ark project which you can buy here.
The Metaphysics of Chess