Programmable Computers and Konrad Zuse

Posted on 22 Jun 2014 by Frank Moraes

Konrad Zuse It’s quite a day for birthdays, as you can see from last year’s post, The Private Life of Billy Wilder. In particular, three women are retiring today: Meryl Streep, Lindsay Wagner, and Elizabeth Warren. But none of the people really inspired me. And talking about Freddie Prinze (who died at just 22) is too depressing.

On this day in 1910, Konrad Zuse was born. “Who?” you ask? He invented the first programmable computer. Up to that time, people built computers but they did whatever they were hardwired to do. His first attempt was the Z1 computer that he built in his parents’ apartment. It was programmable, reading instructions off “perforated 35 mm film.” I find that amazing. It was made of 30,000 parts and never really worked properly because of mechanical imprecision. As a result, it isn’t generally considered the first programmable computer, but it really ought to be.

Unfortunately, the original computer and the blueprints were all destroyed during a bombing mission in 1944. Toward the end of his life, along with three others and at a cost a half million dollars, he recreated the Z1 as you can see here:

He improved upon the initial computer, creating the Z2, which was based on telephone relays. It took up several rooms of his parents apartment. It is generally the Z3, however, that is considered the first programmable computer. According to Wikipedia, “The Z3 was a binary 22-bit floating point calculator featuring programmability with loops but without conditional jumps.” It was the first of his work to get actual government support—from the Nazis, but what was the guy supposed to do?

Perhaps as important as his hardware work, Zuse realized that coding in machine language was not going to work, so he designed the first ever high level language, Plankalkul (“plan calculus). It was not implemented in his lifetime. It looks kind of like the original Matlab code. But it is the idea that is critical.

After the war, he went into business making better and better computers. He was the first man to sell a working computer (another was sold before his but never really worked). His Z22 computer was the first to use magnetic storage. I don’t think he was much of a business manager, however. His company was sold to Siemens in 1967. I’m sure he was well placed financially, but as is typical, it is not the true pioneers who are rewarded the greatest. This is why the conservative movement fetishizes people who are large scale producers of commodities but not really the people who invented them.

Zuse died in 1995 at the age of 85. So he got to see the full extent of where his work had led. But by that time, he was retired and spending most of his time painting.

Happy birthday Konrad Zuse!

Thankful for Henry Ossawa Tanner

Posted on 21 Jun 2014 by Frank Moraes

Henry Ossawa Tanner - Eakins - Detail It would be fun to write about Mary McCarthy today, given her decades long argument with Lillian Hellman. But regardless that McCarthy was the more serious political thinker, Hellman was the great writer. In a hundred years, people will still be performing The Children’s Hour, while McCarthy will be a footnote, which doesn’t take anything away from her; most of us will never even be footnotes.

On this day in 1859, the great American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner was born. The son of a free black man and an escaped slave mother, he grew up in Pittsburgh. There is a tendency to think of the United States at that time as being divided into the racist south and non-racist north. But that wasn’t true at all. The issue was slavery. Racism was the norm everywhere. As a young man, Tanner found it impossible to become a painting apprentice, because painters simply wouldn’t take on African Americans. Eventually, he was allowed into the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

The timing was good, because the great realist painter Thomas Eakins had recently begun teaching there, where he revolutionized the study of art. Tanner became one of his favorite students and even did him the honor of painting his portrait, displayed at the beginning of this article. You can definitely see the influence. But I find Tanner’s work far more compelling. For one thing, Eakins was primarily a portrait painter. Tanner’s subjects were far more diverse. He had a particularly interesting approach to religious painting, which is what he spent most of his later years on.

I’m most fond of his paintings of everyday life. This best known painting is The Banjo Lesson, which in addition to its thematic value makes use of intense shadows, which is typical (though not universal) in his work. From the same period (probably with the same models), is The Thankful Poor:

He also did a lot of landscapes, although few as pure as Georgia Landscape:

Happy birthday Henry Ossawa Tanner!

Lillian Hellman

Posted on 20 Jun 2014 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1905, the great playwright Lillian Hellman was born. I was kind of amazed that on the Wikipedia page, well over half of the overview section about her discussed not just her blacklisting by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), but the fact that she really did lie at the time when she said she hadn’t been a member of the Communist Party. There are still a lot of small minds out in the world, I guess.

Something I don’t understand to this day is why it was such a big deal that people turned to the Communist Party at the height of the Great Depression. It just makes sense that when a capitalist country is going through a period that ought to repudiate the idea of pure capitalism, people would look to other political and economic systems. There was no witch hunt for fascists in the 1950s. What’s more, when Stalin made a pact with Hitler in 1939, that was pretty much the end of American leftist support for the Soviet Union. But for Hellman, it wasn’t even about that.

As she wrote in 1952, “I attended very few meetings and saw and heard nothing more than people sitting around a room talking of current events or discussing the books they had read. I drifted away from the Communist Party because I seemed to be in the wrong place. My own maverick nature was no more suitable to the political left than it had been to the conservative background from which I came.” But the HCUA and Joseph McCarthy’s similar nonsense in the Senate were very much about going after mavericks and trying to turn America into the same kind of place that despots like Stalin liked where dissent was not accepted.

Hellman is known primarily for two incredibly powerful plays. The first is The Children’s Hour, which deals with false allegations of lesbianism between two teachers, which ends up destroying the school and the teachers. The second is The Little Foxes, which deals with a rich southern family and their financial machinations. It features Regina Hubbard Giddens, one of the greatest evil female characters ever. But by Hellman’s standards, it’s kind of upbeat. The Children’s Hour is just horribly depressing.

She also had a long term relationship with Dashiell Hammett. Last year I wrote that she was the only one who really loved him. I think that’s about right. I think without her, he would have died a lot younger. But again, Wikipedia refers to him as “fellow left-wing writer.” Is that how anyone thinks of Hammett. I think they remember Sam Spade and Nick & Nora Charles. It’s clear that the conservatives have got to the Hellman page. She deserves better.

Happy birthday Lillian Hellman!

Oh How Nick Drake Come and Go

Posted on 19 Jun 2014 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1948, the great singer-songwriter Nick Drake was born. He was a very depressed guy. This has special meaning to me, because most people think of me as a depressed person. This is not especially true. What I am is an extremely anxious person. But having been on anti-anxiety medication for the last month, I have found that they have made me depressed. I’m glad to have the anxiety gone, but I’m not sure the swap is worth it. I’ve always had manic-depressive swings in my life, but this constant feeling of depression is extremely unpleasant. I feel like I have for the first time in my life a very good idea of why people kill themselves. This is unrelenting and I don’t think that the anti-anxiety meds are long for my life.

Nick Drake was a brilliant songwriter, who played the guitar beautifully, and had one of the most haunting voices you will ever hear. He released three albums but none of them ever really took off. After his third album flopped, he went back to living with his parents. Some work was done on a fourth album but that was it. One night, he took an overdose of amitriptyline, a really nasty anti-depressant. I doubt very seriously that it was suicide. But the one thing I’ve noticed is that when you are depressed, what you really want is to sleep. And amitriptyline will put you to sleep. Until reading about his death, I didn’t know that it was such a dangerous drug.

Here is the song “River Man” off his first album, Five Leaves Left. It’s kind of mysterious. I think it is about how people and their affection flows past you like a river. It’s a lament. But you don’t have to listen to the lyrics; it’s just beautiful:

This second album Bryter Layter was more upbeat, probably because of the accompaniment by Fairport Convention. Although it is probably his most accessible, I find the niceties of the music get in the way of the songs. It works best on “Northern Sky”:

And then came Pink Moon, which is his most depressing album and undoubtedly why I like him so much. The whole album is only 28 minutes long and the whole thing is on YouTube (at least for now), if you want to listen to it. But here is the title track that defies description; you just have to listen to it:

Happy birthday Nick Drake!

Paul McCartney Is 8 Years Past 64

Posted on 18 Jun 2014 by Frank Moraes

I hate to say it, but Paul McCartney is 72 today. There is something about him as a human being that I just don’t like. He strikes me as arrogant in a way that annoys me. But he has reason to be. He is an excellent pop singer. But above all, he is one of the greatest pop songwriters ever. This really can’t be overstated. If he had just been a songwriter, we would place him with the very best—people like Cole Porter.

Most of my friends are much bigger fans of John Lennon. And I understand this. Lennon was the cool one. Lennon was the searcher. Lennon was the one who struggled with understanding the world. And Lennon wrote a few great songs—most notably “Strawberry Fields Forever,” the verses of “A Day in the Life,” and the bizarre “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” But he was nowhere near the talent that Paul McCartney was.

Let’s start with “Yesterday,” which is one of the best pop songs of the 20th century:

Of course, lyrically this song is right on the edge of being as awful as McCartney often was in songs like “The Fool on the Hill”—although musically that one (like pretty much everything he ever did) was fine. But it is wrong to say that McCartney wasn’t a good lyric writer. He was simply lazy at times. His lyrics were often excellent as they were in his straight blues tune “Get Back”:

And let’s just finish the Beatles period with what is probably my favorite McCartney tune, “Penny Lane”:

As a solo artist, McCartney continued to produce great work. Yes, some of it is terrible. But as a solo artist, he didn’t put out nearly as much dreck as the other three former Beatles. And some of it holds up as well as anything he did with the Beatles. Finally, I hate to continue year after year pointing this out, but his tribute song to John Lennon was far better than anyone else’s. It also happens to be a great song in its own right. It’s a great example of how a piece of art can be deeply personal and yet universal.

Happy birthday Paul McCartney!

Nathan Hale’s One Life

Posted on 06 Jun 2014 by Frank Moraes

Nathan Hale You may remember back a couple of years that Eric Cantor celebrated Labor Day by tweeting out, “Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.” It really was a shocking thing, but it tells you everything you need to know about the modern Republican Party: they just hate workers. They are the royalist party, if you will. John Adams would be so pleased. Bearing this in mind, it is Cantor’s birthday, so let me just say: today, we celebrate those who have taken an intellectual risk, worked hard, did something important with their lives, and earned their own success rather than being born into the upper class like Eric Cantor.

On this day in 1755, the American soldier and spy Nathan Hale was born. In September of 1776, shortly after the Continental Congress finally got around to declaring war, Hale volunteered to go into New York, behind enemy lines to find out what the Brits were up to. Within a week, he was captured by the British because someone ratted him out. I’m most fond of the story of him being tricked by a British soldier into revealing himself. Hale was, after all, only 21. And one of the hardest lessons that I learned in life is that you really can’t trust people who you don’t have a very long history with. People will use the smallest advantage against you; and sometimes they will harm you when it does them no good at all. So it’s a cautionary tell, young readers: a week after his capture, Hale was hanged by the British.

He is best remembered for his comportment before his hanging. It is now widely claimed that he said, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” A British officer wrote at the time, “He behaved with great composure and resolution, saying he thought it the duty of every good Officer, to obey any orders given him by his Commander-in-Chief; and desired the Spectators to be at all times prepared to meet death in whatever shape it might appear.” That is interesting, given that his assignment was not an order; he volunteered for the job.

But there is something I don’t especially like about that comment: the idea that any order ought to be obeyed. It’s not surprising that the Nazis used this same excuse for many of the terrible things that they did. But the truth is that this is more or less what all soldiers are expected to do. I know they are now given certain exceptions that they shouldn’t commit war crimes and such, but none of that would stop them from being court-martialed for not following orders. Chelsea Manning, famously tried to work inside the military system and was ignored. And now she is doing 35 years in prison.

It has been suggested that Hale actually quoted Joseph Addison’s play, Cato:

How beautiful is death, when earn’d by virtue!
Who would not be that youth? What pity is it
That we can die but once to serve our country.

That strikes me as very much like Horace, “Dulce et decorum est propatria mori.” Still, I’m not going to fault any young man who goes to his death with such dignity. Even if his death was, as a practical matter, pointless.

Happy birthday Nathan Hale!

Traitor Jefferson Davis

Posted on 03 Jun 2014 by Frank Moraes

Traitor Jefferson Davis It is such a difficult choice for birthdays today. Last year I wrote about Allen Ginsberg. It’s Memphis Minnie’s birthday, but I’m planning to write about Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley later today. I was seriously considering Chuck Barris who is 85 today. He is such a genius and yet also responsible for so much cultural decay. Then he wrote a really interesting “unauthorized” autobiography in which he added a second life as a CIA assassin, that for some reason, otherwise serious people insist upon pointing out is not true. And then he wrote a very candid book about his troubled daughter who died over an overdose at 36. He is a really interesting man. But I said no to all these fine people and went with a traitor.

On this day in 1808, the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis was born. I am not a vindictive man. Slavery and the Civil War are two great tragedies of our history. But he was a traitor to his country. Even if you accept that the government trying to take away what he considered property (which were even at the time widely considered human beings), and that this indicated that the government had become tyrannical, the government was in fact not taking away his “property” and his treasonous acts were a totally unjustified preemptive strike.

Here’s something you may not know. Today, seven different states celebrate the traitor Davis’ birthday: Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas. These people are celebrating a traitor. They seem to have forgotten that they are part of the United States of America, not the Confederate States of America, which has not existed for a century and a half. What’s more, in addition to everything else, his mismanagement of the Confederate States caused the starvation of many people he was supposedly serving. So even if you look back fondly on the Civil War as the “war of northern aggression,” he was no hero of the people.

By the start of the Civil War, he owned 113 slaves. And while in the Senate (before becoming a traitor), he was an outspoken advocate for slavery in the US Senate. Even after the Civil War, he never changed his views, although he was quiet publicly—probably because he was afraid of being thrown back in jail. And his vision of the new south was very much what it became: segregation where whites could do just about anything they wanted to blacks, along with prison work camps for blacks that were just slavery by another name.

Most of all, after the Civil War and Davis’ two years in jail—far less than many today get for minor drug “crimes”—he went on to have a very good life filled with acclaim and money. And he lived to be an old man: 81 years. Rich white men can never be allowed to suffer in this country. They are the “right” kind of people. All that silliness about the Civil War and all the death and destruction it caused, well anyone could have made that mistake. Even at the very end, Davis thought the move was constitutional. So he didn’t even have to live with the thought that just maybe he was wrong.

Happy birthday traitor Jefferson Davis!

Maya Angelou and My Education

Posted on 28 May 2014 by Frank Moraes

I just found out that Maya Angelou has died. I was never a big fan of her poetry, but she was a great narrative writer. I loved I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings when I read it in high school. And there was one part that I especially liked. It was in Chapter 5. The two children have been sent to live with their grandmother—Momma—because their parents’ marriage was ending. And she describes this incident where these poor white girls come by each morning to taunt Momma. They are the lowest of the low, but they think because they are white, they are above the blacks. But they must know this is not true, based upon their behavior.

When Momma sees them coming, she sends the children inside. But she will not let these white girls affect her. Here is most of the passage, but I will warn you, this passage is one of the reasons why the book is often removed from schools. To me, it is one of the most profound things I’ve ever read:

Before the girls got to the porch, I heard their laughter crackling and popping like pine logs in a cooking stove. I suppose my lifelong paranoia was born in those cold, molasses-slow minutes. They came finally to stand on the ground in front of Momma. At first they pretended seriousness. Then one of them wrapped her right arm in the crook of her left, pushed out her mouth, and started to hum. I realized that she was aping my grandmother. Another said, “Naw, Helen, you ain’t standing like her. This here’s it.” Then she lifted her chest, folded her arms and mocked that strange carriage that was Annie Henderson. Another laughed, “Naw, you can’t do it. Your mouth ain’t pooched out enough. It’s like this.”

I thought about the rifle behind the door, but I knew I’d never be able to hold it straight, and the .410, our sawed-off shotgun, which stayed loaded and was fired every New Year’s night, was locked in the trunk and Uncle Willie had the key on his chain. Through the fly-specked screen door, I could see that the arms of Momma’s apron jiggled from the vibrations of her humming. But her knees seemed to have locked as if they would never bend again.

She sang on. No louder than before, but no softer either. No slower or faster.

The dirt of the girls’ cotton dresses continued on their legs, feet, arms, and faces to make them all of a piece. Their greasy uncolored hair hung down, uncombed, with a grim finality. I knelt to see them better, to remember them for all time. The tears that had slipped down my dress left unsurprising dark spots and made the front yard blurry and even more unreal. The world had taken a deep breath and was having doubts about continuing to revolve.

The girls had tired of mocking Momma and turned to other means of agitation. One crossed her eyes, stuck her thumbs in both sides of her mouth, and said, “Look here, Annie.” Grandmother hummed on and the apron strings trembled. I wanted to throw a handful of black pepper in their faces, to throw lye on them, to scream that they were dirty, scummy peckerwoods, but I knew I was as clearly imprisoned behind the scene as the actors outside were confined to their roles.

One of the smaller girls did a kind of puppet dance while her fellow clowns laughed at her. But the tall one, who was almost a woman, said something very quietly, which I couldn’t hear. They all moved backward from the porch, still watching Momma. For an awful second I thought they were going to throw a rock at Momma, who seemed (except for the apron strings) to have turned into stone herself. But the big girl turned her back, bent down, and put her hands flat on the ground—she didn’t pick up anything. She simply shifted her weight and did a handstand.

Her dirty bare feet and long legs went straight for the sky. Her dress fell down around her shoulders, and she had on no drawers. The slick pubic hair made a brown triangle where her legs came together. She hung in the vacuum of that lifeless morning for only a few seconds, then wavered and tumbled. The other girls clapped her on the back and slapped their hands.

Momma changed her song to “Bread of Heaven, bread of Heaven, feed me till I want no more.”

I found that I was praying too. How long could Momma hold out? What new indignity would they think of to subject her to? Would I be able to stay out of it? What would Momma really like me to do?

Then they were moving out of the yard, on their way to town. They bobbed their heads and shook their slack behinds and turned, one at a time:

“‘Bye, Annie.”

Momma never turned her head or unfolded her arms, but she stopped singing and said, “‘Bye, Miz Helen, ‘bye, Miz Ruth, ‘bye, Miz Eloise.”

Note the girls call the older woman by her familiar name, and she replies respectfully to each of them. I felt then as I feel now, like the young Angelou: I want to kill those girls. But Momma was right. Momma is an extremely strong woman. And a better person than I.

Maya Angelou was 86 years old. She will be missed.

Charity of Bruce Cockburn

Posted on 27 May 2014 by Frank Moraes

The great singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn is 69 today. I actually know him because he and my wife were once a thing. I think she was with him during at least part of the Stealing Fire tour, which is interesting because I actually saw him on that tour. That was a hugely influential album to me. I still think “Nicaragua” is one of the great songs. At this point, I have seen Cockburn far more than any sane man should have to. He’s an excellent live performer, but I’m not that fond of live performances. Mostly, it is the crowds. When there was a backstage where we could watch, that was much better.

But by far the worst thing about the concerts were the fans. It is such a group of pasty white upper-middle class liberals who I just want to slap. And after the concerts, it was almost impossible to get away. Because Cockburn backs just about every cause in the world, people see him a lot the way that they see Noam Chomsky. So whereas other musicians had to sign autographs and hear about how great they were, Cockburn had to listen to much wringing of hands about this or that. And it would go on for an hour or more.

For his part Cockburn was great. He has the patience of a saint. And in my experience, he was a very nice guy. Although you can tell, he’s kind of lost in his own head. He is certainly a shy guy. At this point, I’m really curious about his position regarding Christianity. He was always at least nominally a Christian. That’s what his song “Wondering Where the Lions Are” is all about. But unfortunately, talking to him would require that I get back in touch with my wife. And that isn’t going to happen.

Here’s two songs of Stealing Fire:

And here’s “Each One Lost” off his newest album, Small Source of Comfort:

Happy birthday Bruce Cockburn!

Depression, War, and Dorothea Lange

Posted on 26 May 2014 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1895, the great photographer Dorothea Lange was born. She is generally known for her photographs of the Great Depression and World War II America. She is best known for her iconic photograph, Migrant Mother. As I wrote last year, the photo is great just based upon the aesthetics. “But there is also something about its primary subject—Florence Owens Thompson—who embodies both strength and pain that makes it particularly compelling. Add to that its social context and you have a classic. Thompson’s migrant farming family broke down in the pea-picker’s camp on Nipomo Mesa, where a couple of thousand other migrant workers had become stuck after a bad freeze had ruined the crop. The people there were starving and the publicity from the photo caused the government to step in and help the people.”

But it isn’t exactly reality. Originally, Thompson’s left hand was grasping the tent pole. Her thumb seemed to ruin the look of the photo, so Lange retouched the photo to remove it. Photographers are more like painters than we often know. It’s remarkable to me that Thompson was only 32 years old in this photo. Compare her face to Lange’s above, when she was forty.

This next photo breaks my heart. I don’t have a name for it, but it is of Japanese-American children in 1942. They are pledging allegiance as we all did as children. And then their families had their property taken from them and they were put into internment camps. One of our national shames:

Japanese Americans Children Pledging Allegiance 1942 - Lange

I wanted to end with a happy picture, but that isn’t really what Lange was all about. The following picture is really interesting. It is the storefront of an Asian Market. Wanto is an uncommon Japanese name. The picture tells a detailed story. Here is an immigrant who has been forced to sell (probably more or less gave away) his market. It was “Sold by White & Pollard.” And unlike that old “unauthentic” American Wanto, the new owner is a “true” American. The sign proudly proclaims, “I am an American,” as if Wanto was not. Remember the next time you hear Sarah Palin or some other conservative talking about the “real America,” this is what they’re talking about: white America—an America with minority groups know their place. Check out that old General Motors’ LaSalle, a most American car, sitting in front of the store—probably the new owner’s. The other two photo are poignant; this one just makes me angry:

Happy birthday Dorothea Lange!

To see more of her work, check out Inspiration Hut, World Famous—The Photography Portfolio of Dorothea Lange. For one thing, you will be able to see Thompson’s thumb. And for another, you will get to see a few kind of happy photos. Oh, and that’s Lange herself sitting on top of that car!

Wilhelm Steinitz and Paul Bishop

Posted on 17 May 2014 by Frank Moraes

Wilhelm Steinitz A couple of days ago, someone by the name of Alekhine’s Cat followed me on Twitter. It was weird because this person had no followers. That alone intrigued me, but not as much as the reference to Alexander Alekhine, the great chess world champion who beat Capablanca. You see, I was trying to decide if I was going to follow this strange person since I now have a new theory that I’ll follow pretty much anyone, at least until they annoy me. But the guy had zero followers and that seemed strange.

A single tweet to him resulted in a series of tweets back that mostly confused me. He said, for example, that Alekhine’s cat was named Math, although as far as I can tell it was named Chess. (Note: both are terrible names for cats; they would be hard to distinguish; I would go with something like “chess piece.”) He also said that Alekhine was killed because he was suspected of being a Nazi sympathizer. That doesn’t appear to be true, but many people want to think it. Finally, he tweeted, “I am two degrees of separation from playing Alekhine over the board and you are three.” I told him he lost me, so he tweeted, “I’ve played someone who’s played Alekhine over the chess board and you’ve played me.”

There was an interesting mystery. I’d only every played two chess players who were really good. One was a master and the other may be one by now. So I figured it had to have been one of them. In order to know that you had played someone who played Alekhine, you would have to be a club player. That ruled out most of the good players I’d played against. So I went into his twitter feed to see who he was following and other than bizarre people like Carrot Top (who I’m willing to admit is wrongly vilified), I found that he was following David Luoto. That narrowed it down to Bob Portlock and Paul Bishop. I don’t know Bob to play chess, but the conversation was so bizarre, you’ve always got to include him. But it has been so many years that I’d talked to Paul, I’d forgotten just how bizarre he is.

Paul is an interesting guy. But in terms of chess, he is exactly the kind of person that makes me rarely play the game with humans. To me, it is a fascinating game of problem solving that opens your mind to creative thinking. To most players, it is about destroying the opponent. That was definitely the case with Paul. And I’ll admit, I’m not above that. When I really started to take chess seriously in graduate school, it was very rewarding when I started to beat people who previously mocked my playing. Now I find playing chess with a computer rather fun because I can force certain games to be played, although admittedly, the computer never really surprises me. Also, I find teaching children to play quite rewarding. In general, chess education is horrible.

Of course, I would love to play chess with Paul, as long as he was willing to approach it as a game rather than a contest of manhood. I’m very out of practice, but even at my best: my opening game was sloppy, the middle game was pretty tight and aggressive (it’s the best part of the game as far as I’m concerned), and as with most amateurs, my end game was pathetic. It’s strange, but I’ve often found that I could hold my own up to the end game against a strong player, but in the end game, that’s where they destroy you in short order.

All of this is a prelude to pointing out that on this day in 1836, the great chess player Wilhelm Steinitz was born. Let me just quote from what I wrote last year:

He pretty much single-handedly changed chess into what it is today. What I mean by that is that it used to be all about clever combinations. But after him, it became a game of position. That isn’t to say that clever combinations weren’t still important. But the focus of the game became controlling the board.

This is something that annoys me to this day about the way that I was taught to play chess. The idea that you can teach a child the moves and just expect them to figure out the rest is madness. It is like telling a child you are going to teach them how to play the piano and then only show them that this key is a C, this key is a C-sharp… No one would consider that a music education and yet that is the extent of most chess education. In fact, it’s even worse. There is a kind of social Darwinian aspect to it. Step one: teach the moves. Step two: see if anyone figures out the game. Step three: properly teach the game to the survivors.

It was only in graduate school that I learned to play chess. And I did it by studying master games. By trying to understand why they moved this way rather than that, I finally figured out the nature of the game. At that point I got so that I could beat people who previously had trounced me. All that was missing between my being a hopeless player and being all right, was an understanding of the game that I think I could teach a child in a short period of time. What’s key is that without this knowledge, you end up in games that are extremely frustrating. After a few moves you are in a position were even your best moves are bad.

Combine the lack of proper elementary chess instruction with the hyper-aggressive style that is encouraged and you end up with a game that very few people enjoy. Although I enjoy the game, I don’t much like the people I’ve played against. I’m not an aggressive person. My interest in chess is more academic. In a sense, reading those master games was perfect for me. It can be as thrilling to analyze a game as it is to listen to a symphony. Thus, I have no interest in destroying my opponent. My desire in playing is to have a good game. As a result, I commonly have opponents redo bad moves. I don’t ever recall anyone reciprocating. This seems to be because of this aggressive chess mentality that teaches that the purpose of chess is to crush the opponent. I recall one time allowing an opponent to take five moves back before eventually beating me. He was very full of himself after the game. And that’s fine with me because I think he’s pathetic.

Anyway, the point of all this is that understanding positional play and the overall theory of the game makes it fun to play. It also makes it beautiful and even artistic. And we largely have Wilhelm Steinitz to thank for that. Of course, this style of play would have come along eventually. But the fact is that he is the one who did it. Unfortunately, over the last 50 years, this has been taken to extreme to the point where serious players spend much of their time studying openings that can go up to 40 moves or more. This more than anything is the reason that computers are now the best “players” in the world. That’s why I think we need to move on to something like Chess960. But for the average player, chess is still a great and fun game, and that is largely thanks to Steinitz.

Happy birthday Wilhelm Steinitz!

Peter Benchley Loved Sharks

Posted on 08 May 2014 by Frank Moraes

On this day in 1940, the novelist Peter Benchley was born. He has much to teach young writers. This is because he is such a mediocre writer and yet hugely successful. I’m no expert, of course. I’ve only read two of his novels, but I think that’s enough.

The first novel of his I read was one of his later ones, Rummies. It tells the story of Scott Preston, an upper-middle class drunk who works in the publishing industry (of course). There is an intervention by his family and boss who send him off to a remote drug clinic. Once there, lots of 12-step powerlessness garbage is dispensed. Then, as Preston is joining in and “beginning his recovery” the book turns into a thriller where he uncovers clinic malfeasance. If it weren’t for the cliched premise, the stereotyped characters, and the predictable plot, it would be a perfectly reasonable but undistinguished novel.

The second novel I read was Jaws. You know how novels are always better than the movies that are made from them? That’s not true. But to a large extent, the movie is better than the book because after millions of books sold, everyone knew what people cared about in the book: the shark. So that’s forgivable. But Jaws is a surprisingly boring novel. It doesn’t end so much as stop. The shark finally just dies of its wounds.

It is filled with weak subplots that seem like something you would see in a television drama from that time. The mayor owes money to the mob. Mrs Brody is unhappy because she married well beneath her social class, so she has a creepy affair with Hooper. Mr Brody and Hooper fight through half the novel about the former’s suspicion that the latter “knew” his wife. Quint is just the vilest of characters. No one is likable.

What is amazing is just how successful the book was. I’m not a fan of Stephen King, but the man can write; he’s an incredible talent. Benchley just meanders through his books with no style, peppering them with stock characters doing obvious things. But I will give him this: he makes me feel much better about my own writing. But that is more than made up for by the fact that he shows that there is little correlation between quality and success.

One good thing about Benchley is that after the success of Jaws, he began feeling very bad about the negative PR his book had been for sharks. He spent most of the last part of his life campaigning for and writing about sharks. This is very cool for two reasons. First, it shows the man had a heart. Second, sharks are super cool! And as Benchley himself noted, “[T]he shark in an updated Jaws could not be the villain; it would have to be written as the victim; for, worldwide, sharks are much more the oppressed than the oppressors.” Indeed.

Happy birthday Peter Benchley!

See also: My Odd Love of Great White Sharks. I have Benchley to thank for that.

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