12.04.2009
Chess Match (2)
By: Joshua Glenn | Categories: Spectacles

chess-vogu

But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
It’s so elegant
So intelligent
‘What shall I do now? What shall I do?’
‘I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
‘With my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow?
‘What shall we ever do?’
The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

— T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

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Second in an occasional series.

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About the author: Joshua Glenn

Joshua Glenn is a Boston, Mass.-based writer, editor, and cultural semiotics analyst. He's cofounder of HiLobrow (named by TIME one of the Best Blogs of 2010), Significant Objects, and Semionaut. He's been a columnist for the Boston Globe, the Observer (London), Feed.com, and the Idler; he's toiled as a magazine, website, and newspaper editor; and he's authored and edited Taking Things Seriously (2007) and The Idler's Glossary (2008). In the '90s he published the seminal intellectual/pop culture zine Hermenaut.

Read more from Joshua Glenn (323 posts) on Hilobrow.

1 Comment to “Chess Match (2)”

  1. Peggy says:
    December 4, 2009 at 1:38 pm

    LISTS! They needed lists! They needed Lillian Gilbreth’s domestication of scientific management (http://bit.ly/n71aP), in which every home is full of projects! Or certainly full of lists about them. Whatever shall we do? That is certainly not our question today, we are busy, busy, busy.

    I do love Eliot though, rhythm and imagery, rhythm and imagery.

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