On Fri, 5 May 2006, Doug Henwood wrote:
>> One is that top flight chess players are, on average, the most
>> antediluvianally sexist bastards you've ever seen. Marines are better.
>> This was something I never expected, and I have no idea where it comes
>> from, but it's undeniable.
>
> Because it's all about killing the king, no? Or is that too obvious?
Well that is the thesis of a weirdly delightful book on chess by Alexander Cockburn called _Idle Passion_. I say weirdly delightful because its Freudianism is so reductionist it's kind of like Diamat. (At one point he says that classical Freudianism our only scientific theory of human nature to match Marx's science of the economy, so we should accept it). But it's kind of like Bergman's _The Seventh Seal_: you can get a wonderful dramatic force out of beating people over the head with a crude allegory.
He goes all over place with chessic tangents, but on this one in particular he had two wonderful additions to add to the original argument (which was first made by Reuben Fine: world champion, the Webster of opening encyclopedias, and a practicing psycho-analyst. Except that he didn't think there was anything wrong with it :o)
The first deals with the fact that of course you're defending a King just as much as attacking one. So how to fit that into the idea of obsessively refighting the oedipal struggle? And he says: in your hands, your King represents your penis. And *this* is where the obsessive-compulsive rules about no touching come from. Which I think is hilarious.
And near the end, Alex opines that a much healthier and more adult game is bridge, which instead of endlessly replaying the oedipal struggle, continually play enacts adultery.
Michael