Pale Fire Book

I¹ liked² this book³, especially the poem⁴.
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¹ When I use the first-person singular pronoun, I am here referring to my normal persona. I have also, at various times, maintained other personas. For example, between 1999 and 2001, I used to play chess regularly on the KasparovChess site under the handle "swedish_chick".

I find this a strange example of what makes people believe things. Everyone was extremely skeptical on first meeting her; but, for some reason, as soon as they discovered that she actually could speak fluent Swedish, they were also ready to believe that she was an attractive 26 year old graduate student living in Stockholm. I still can't explain why this might be.

² People liked hearing stories about Chick, as she was known to my circle of friends. At the time, I was working at a start-up in Cambridge, England, and one of my colleagues was a young woman I will call G. G took a lively interest in Chick, and helped me considerably with the development of the back-story. Chick borrowed several features from her; in particular, everyone, for some reason, wanted to know if Chick was blonde, and the agreed-on answer was "yes, during the summer at least." Even more remarkably, G began to acquire features from Chick, which went as far as learning Swedish and moving to Linköping in order to do a PhD there.

³ The stories about Chick would fill a small book. She was a charming person, and I've often wished that I were as nice as she was. She was always happy to play chess with lower-rated players, and commented encouragingly on their progress. When people became abusive, as inevitably happens on the Web, she never lost her cool. She would occasionally give regular opponents glimpses of her private life, but only after she had known them for some time and felt she could trust them. The back-story was in fact quite complicated, even though it was hardly ever used; she was bisexual, and had a female lover in California that she sometimes visited. No one was ever told this straight out, however.

It was inevitable that men would fall for this wonderfully attractive person. The first time, I managed to hide successfully, and he went away after a while. (She had poignantly reminded him of a brief encounter he had had many years ago, that he'd always regretted not following up). The second time, it was too complicated. Her admirer was a regular habitué of KasparovChess and kept pestering her for a date in real life. He offered to take her on vacation in Germany and seemed completely smitten. With great regret, we had to terminate Chick.

⁴ One day at work, we were discussing clerihews. We looked up some examples on the Web. Suddenly, G started laughing uncontrollably; she had been visited by divine inspiration! She rushed to her laptop, and shortly afterwards mailed out the following very fine poem: Manny Rayner, could be saner
Plays chess, in a dress. My friend is nothing if not PC. I'm sorry that I can't remember the exact text of the accompanying note, but she made it clear that she was not literally implying that I wore women's clothes when I impersonated Chick, and that, if I had chosen to do so, she would have regarded it as a completely defensible exercise of my right to wear apparel that expressed my personality in whatever way I chose.

This review is in my book What Pooh Might Have Said to Dante and Other Futile Speculations