For some time now, I’ve been playing chess using Lichess, an open source app that is free, sans ads, and full of chess activities, including live games, coaching, analysis, and community. I’ve limited my involvement to the chess puzzles and “play with the computer” games, where I select a game timed at 10 minutes, and where I usually win only about 1 in 10 games – playing standard variant, Stockfish level 3 (of 8). I usually play using the app on my cell phone, while waiting for an appointment, the pasta to finish boiling, in between chores. But I’m quitting chess.
The games can be relaxing, but they also can create a bit of unwanted tension, particularly when the game is timed. Chess reference is full of analysis of personality types of players, pros and cons of involvement, history of chess and chess players. Not too long ago, I read “Eve’s Hollywood,” by Eve Babitz (1972, NYRB Classics 2015), the entertaining stories of a Hollywood High girl coming of age in the 60’s. Anyone with an interest in Hollywood, Los Angeles, the 60’s, will enjoy Eve’s accounting. Eve wound up being famous, or infamous, depending on your coastal view, for a number of what today might be called gone-viral moments, including posing nude while playing chess with Marcel Duchamp. But she was a good writer. She could be defensive about her Hollywood: “I think Nathanael West was a creep. Assuring his friends back at Dartmouth that even though he’d gone to Hollywood, he had not gone Hollywood” (189). “Eve’s Hollywood” is a kind of “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies” (1971, UC Press 2009), where we might substitute Cultures for Ecologies.
Anyway, I’m quitting chess. Not because it’s the Lenten Season. And it’s not the 9 out of 10 losses, since really it’s impossible to beat the computer (I can’t explain how I win one when I do). The online version is, like most activities app-related, addictive. There are of course addictions that are recommended as being good for you, though one should always consider who’s doing the recommending, and what they’re suggesting in place of. And chess proves, at least the 10 minute timed version might prove, it is possible to live in the moment. And it’s probably better than maladaptive daydreaming or even the lesser automaticity when what our purpose really calls for is paying attention. In any case, I just think I’d rather spend my time on music than on chess. In fact, music is chess, though chess is not music.
The Coming of the Toads 