Another very quiet day...

And the general reorganization continues.

Moreover, the two-week Idol hiatus didn't do me any favors at all. I am as bereft of any ideas to write about as Congress is of any kind of political sanity.

If nothing else, the reorg is showing me just how much data there is in my office. Once the effort is complete, the real trick is going to be to figure out just what part of it I need, which is not the same as the part that I can easily transport with me.

Cheers...

An old "editorial"...

Perhaps the strangest thing about living in Jacksonville, Florida in the early 80s was the existence of a chess club in town that managed to maintain a membership of over 100 members, if memory serves, and to meet on a regular basis. Back in those days, the club was ramrodded by one Ed Butler, a retired real-estate operator who wasn't very skilled over the board, but was very skilled at talking to people and raising enough money to keep the club going.

He somehow managed to talk the Florida Chess Association into letting the club publish the state's newsletter (the Florida Chess News, an 8-page publication that came out 11 times a year) and then talk me into being the editor, which basically meant using the typing, editing, and pasteup skills I had acquired at Plenum to put the thing together on a monthly basis and deliver it to the printer.

I am reminded of all this after having run across the April 1983 issue (Vol. 3, No. 3), wherein I allowed myself half a page to respond to something I had read, about why so many people in the U.S. don't play chess. Here's that editorial:

I recently read an assertion, penned by a leading Florida chess player, that chess notation is the reason more people don't play chess in this country.

Fiddlesticks.

The reason more chess isn't played in the U.S. is that the game doesn't fit in with our cultural mentality.

Chess has been branded an intellectual game, requiring great brainpower. Never mind that such a view is only partially true; such an association is like a kiss of death in this country. Intellectual pursuits are shunned in the U.S. Go to Europe, and you'll find a general interest in culture; people talk about art, music, and literature to a much greater extent than people do here.

Chess lacks physical, leave-your-mind-at-home action, which is a key ingredient for success if a pastime is to flourish in America. This is related to the point above.

The media are of little help. Chess players are depicted either as wizened old men ossifying in the park, as cherubic youngsters adept at taking on the world, or as neurotic misfits. Time after time, television shows what are supposed to be good players stunned by bolt-from-the-blue checkmates, yet maintains that players must be able to "think" three to five moves (or more) ahead.

Chess players are supposed to need prodigious memories as well. Regardless of the merits of this assertion, it's another black mark against our game's popularity. Americans will go to great lengths to avoid memorization (indeed, some educators have made their reputations by advocating the abandonment of memorization in our schools).

Notation, of course, doesn't help (it reinforces the "egghead" image and looks too much like memory work), but it is a relatively small stumbling block to the development of chess in America.

Like most people of my generation, I cut my teeth on what is called "English Descriptive" notation, gravitating to the "algebraic" system (which has nothing to do with algebra, but was in use everywhere except in Britain and the U.S. in the 1970s) once I started working in the Soviet Union. Learning to read notation is, for a chess player, a lot like a music aficionado learning to read music: it's not an absolutely necessary skill to have, but in its absence, enjoyment and capacity for deeper understanding are hobbled beyond any reasonable ability of native talent to overcome.

The editorial still flows, almost 30 years later, and I only caught myself wanting to change the wording a couple of times while transcribing it. On the other hand, the piece seriously suffers a lack of focus; there's no "call to action" when clearly the tenor of the piece makes you expect one.

With the benefit of almost three decades of hindsight, I am past thinking of any really good "call to action." The world appears to have followed the United States down the road to heavily marketing and glorifying mass "reactive" entertainment that has decidedly physical aspects to it.

And now I'm wondering whether all this has been my subconscious simply doing a little "first world problem" dance on my keyboard?

Let's assume—that dangerous word—that this last is the case. Here's an even harder one to solve: how does one make the situation interesting?

Cheers...