James Ellroy

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INTERVIEWER

You were away from Los Angeles for twenty-five years. Why’d you come back?


JAMES ELLROY

One reason: Cherchez la femme. I chased women to suburban New York, suburban Connecticut, Kansas City, Carmel, and San Francisco. But I ran out of places, and I ran out of women, so I ended up back here.


INTERVIEWER

Did you miss the city?


ELLROY

While I was away, the Los Angeles of my past accreted in my mind, developing its own power. Early on in my career I believed that in order to write about LA, I had to stay out of it entirely. But when I moved back, I realized that LA then lives in my blood. LA now does not.

-- James Ellroy at The Paris Review (Fall 2009)

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Chess Zen

“In chess you may hit a man when he’s down.”

-- Irving Chernev, “Logical Chess: Move by Move”

This is for the Przepiorka-Prokes (1929) game. What names, right? Przepiorka is hammering away at Prokes’s defending knight against certain apocalypse, bringing piece after piece against it.