More Hastings

Leigh Dyer is a self-taught metal sculptor working out of Hastings, the English town best down for a battle that took place nearby nearly a millennium ago.

Hunt, who heads Incurva Studios, is adorning the town with statues that combine sea life with giant chess pieces. As the English Chess Federation reported, the town already had a giant chess board in a park. But now it also has:

• a conger eel wrapped around a king.
  
• an octopus gripping a rook.
  
• a seahorse knight.

In addition, Dyer’s giant winkle on a column with fish, a separate work, looks a lot like a pawn.

And Then the Boy and the Balloon Soared Away to Seize Kamchatka

Top of this week’s list of Things I’m Having Trouble Getting My Head Around—

Albert Lamorisse (1922-1970) wrote and directed The Red Balloon (1956) and White Mane (1952), two beautifully photographed movies about young French boys, their unicolor companions, and how together they run away from this cruel world.

Both movies won prizes at Cannes, the Oscars, and elsewhere, and remain popular and admired. (I grew up with the picture-book adaptation of The Red Balloon, which was less scary because I could take it at my own pace.)

And here’s the Thing: Lamorisse was also the creator of the cut-throat strategy board game Risk. Its original name in 1957 was the, frankly, more accurate La Conquête du Monde.

The Game of Life, the Universe, and Everything

This weekend the Boston Globe reviewed Jill Lepore’s The Mansion of Happiness, an examination of American life and values through board games—particularly the game Life itself.

Reviewer Buzzy Jackson wrote:

Lepore, a staff writer at The New Yorker and a professor of American history at Harvard who has written about the intellectual and political history of Colonial and 19th-century America, isn’t really interested in board games. Instead, she wants to know what [Milton] Bradley’s game can tell us about American values and aspirations. As in the game of Life, each chapter takes the reader a little further along the path of human development. . . .

The marriage chapter examines the life and work of Paul Popenoe, famous for posing the eternal question, “Can this marriage be saved?” The oddly contentious story behind E.B. White’s story, “Stuart Little,” makes up the chapter on childhood, and Lepore dismantles the myth of Taylorized efficiency in “Happiness Minutes,” the chapter on working.

Now did Lepore actually start her investigations and ruminations with board games, or did she realize that Bradley’s Life provided a structure to unite essays on several disparate concerns?

Lepore will speak about this book and the history of American board games, with pictures, at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester on 5 June at 7:30. This illustrated lecture is free and open to the public.