Chess, Beauty and Literature

Chess and literature are related in many ways, as several books - e.g. The Poetry of Chess (ed Andrew Waterman) and Masters of Technique will attest. I don't know of any top poets who are top chess-players, but I think (I might be wrong) that Carol Rumens was married to David Rumens (a good tournament player in my day) and Fiona Pitt-Kethley's married to James Plaskett, who was international standard - a grand master. I played a lot of chess when young - Hampshire U-16 champ; 3rd in the UK U-18 tournament (where I played Plaskett). Our school was the best on the country. In my class was Glenn Lambert who was much stronger than me. He started hearing voices in 1980 and was later diagnosed with Huntingdon's Chorea. His madness appears in several of my stories. Chess has continued to permeate my work and writing - my "8x8" (published in Horizon Review) is an example - see the video!

But I don't play nowadays, and I'm able to judge it without the distraction of hormones. Chess and literature both involve aesthetic considerations. On his blog George Szirtes writes that Form might be regarded in various ways, include game: "on the one hand, entertainment, and on the other the symbolic acting through of structured energies that might otherwise be employed in real conflict. Game depends on rule and surprise, pitting the fixed against an element of chance that may amuse or frustrate... on the symbolic level, the demands of form, serve as recognised sublimations of energy, much as in sport the beauty of the disciplined body in action enacts a desire". Chess is an ideal mental game in this respect, with few rules and a range of modes ranging from tournament play to the creation of interesting artificial positions ("chess problems") and the invention of new rules and pieces ("fairy chess").

To Nabokov, the "originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity" of creating a chess problem was similar to that in any other art. He published Poems and problems which contains poems and chess problems. I was never into problems, but I'm beginning to appreciate "chess studies" now - contrived but natural-looking positions.

It's perhaps easier to theorize about beauty in chess than beauty in literature. It may be instructive too. "Secrets of Spectacular Chess (2nd Edition)" by Levitt and Friedgood (Gloucester publishers, 2008) tries to categorize beauty in chess. It looks at chess games, studies and problems. These are compared to "Real Life", Stories and Poetry respectively. The authors use 4 main criteria, which suit poetry pretty well too

• Paradox (surprize)
• Depth (difficulty; a way to hide a surprise)
• Geometry (optical effects)
• Flow (narrative)

Economy and "tightness" also figure. For Chess Studies the artificiality of the problem matters. Some problem-creators strive for unity (maximising the shared elements amongst possible variations (aka interpretations?)). Truth matters too. In a section called "Beauty, Truth and the Computer" the book addresses the issue of whether refutation devalues the artistic merit, whether you can have Art for Art's Sake.

How low can you get?

Before worrying about plot there are other underlying layers of meaning that are often ignored by readers. Readers are aware that poets commonly exploit the visceral effect of sound but there are other conveyors of meaning too.

Colours - in the old days text was black on a white background. On the web there's no technical or financial reason to continue with this default - it's more a matter of choice. Web writers who choose black-on-white may want readers to think about the paper tradition, or obits?

Fonts - neglect them at your peril

• "I prefer to read the poems of Wallace Stevens in the Electra typeface that was used for the 1954 Collected Poems ... For me, the experience and the pleasure of reading Steven's poetry are not just intensified by this typeface, they are intimately part of it, so that reading Stevens in another font seems unusual and even disconcerting" (S.Matterson and D.Jones, "Studying Poetry")
• "Many of the older typefaces have historic contexts. Using a particular typeface can therefore add a subtle extra dimension to a book. The first edition of Edwin Morgan's Sonnets from Scotland for example was set in Scotch Roman ... Setting such a book in a distinctly English face, such as Caslon, for instance, would seem inappropriate unless you were doing it very deliberately to make an ironic point", (Gerry Cambridge)

Choice of Language - The language you choose to write in has implications. In Colonial countries, the implications are clear, but even in the UK, Welsh and Scottish writers have decisions to make. Don Paterson writes some poems in Scots (with a glossary). Others write dialogues in Glaswegian that can be hard for English people to understand. Even writers who have no choice of language might need to choose between using "colour" and "color" - is using the latter succumbing to US global domination?

Word play - Some word play draws attention to itself, but acrostics might lurk unnoticed for years. A relatively well-known one is by Nabokov - his short story "The Vane Sisters" has an acrostic final paragraph where the first letters of each word spell out a message from beyond the grave.

Whose Language is it anyway? - Within a language there are many styles. How much does adopting a style mean that the writer is also signing up to the consequences of that style? Is using "he" rather than "s/he" a vote for "Man-made language"? In the States some writers decided that Language wasn't at all neutral. Reagan, Feminism, Black Power, Multi-nationals, Colonialism etc, all get tangled up in this issue. It's clearest in poetry. In the USA especially, Forms came to be considered WASPish, right-wing, male. Even clarity became the oppressor's smooth-talking tongue.

• According to Susan Vanderborg, Olson's "narrators associate a flat, statistical style of documentation that forecloses interpretation with a bureaucratic pendant for dehumanizing persons as enemies or casualties".
• The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets went further, breaking sentences into disjointed phrases and breaking phrases into words in order to cleanse language of corruption and banality. Lyn Hejinian tells us that language poetry "invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierachies".
• N. NourbeSe Philip "saw the lyric voice as one of the tools used to further the ends of colonialism".

I sympathise with some of these views, but some of the later ones seem to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater (and throwing the bath out too).

The WWW and Literary Standards

In Acumen 24 (1995!) I wrote an article called Poetry, Technology and the Internet. Though the Web's growth has been explosive since then, it hasn't been matched by increased Quality Control. This article (an update from one in Acumen 63) looks at how such mechanisms might e-merge.

I hope I'm not oversimplifying the past too much by suggesting that once upon a time, hierarchies of periodicals, publishers and review placements established a scale of achievement. Further selection for school books, anthologies, awards, and interviews in non-literary media confirmed these indicators of quality. The people who made these choices generally did so as part of their job.

Several 20th century developments fractured this framework. In the US, many authors started working within academia, and with the growth of literary theory the poems to be studied were not always chosen for quality but for how usefully they illustrated a hypothesis. The avant-garde (particularly Modernism), sporadic popularity of performance poetry, and the influence of minority and international poetry popularised new aesthetics that sometimes diluted (or even disabled) mainstream opinion. This fragmentation of genres led to fragmentation in evaluation too. Meanwhile, the poetry book market contracted, so even less significance was attached to poetry's remaining mainstream practitioners and critics.

The Web accelerated and exaggerated these trends, and is increasingly becoming the predominant mode of distribution, but mechanisms of judgement are slower to make the switch. Prestigious web-sites have come into being mostly by prestige transfer - they're Web off-shoots of accredited print magazines or newspapers. Small press examples include Sphinx (Happenstance) and Envoi (Cinnamon), both of which have dozens of reviews online. Sites like www.reviewsofbooks have collected online book reviews which mostly come from sources originating from the paper world. The Web has produced native alternatives - sites like Ron Silliman's (whose authority depends on an individual) and Jacket (which has gained a reputation by the traditional virtues of quality and longevity). However, few web magazines have a reviews section (reviews tend to be in blogs) and there's no hierarchy of reviewing sites, no Web equivalent of "reviewed in the TLS".

As long as traditional paper bastions of canon-formation survive, the Web will have trouble establishing credentials. Prestige depends partly on longevity, which gives paper magazines an edge, and printed magazines because of cost are constrained by space which forces selectivity. If a paper magazines transfers to the WWW with the same editor and amount of material (Stride, for example) one might expect the quality and prestige to be unaffected, but the nature of readership and submissions is likely to change which in turn might have a detrimental effect. In practise, the online magazine is likely to be poorly funded and under new editorship (see the TriQuarterly story).

Each medium sometimes reviews works from the other, but the traffic's mostly one way; paper magazines might only be quarterly, and newspapers no longer have room for much poetry. As paper magazines disappear, the centre of gravity will shift towards the Web anyway but how can the migration of judgement mechanisms be managed and encouraged? Unless an effort is made to preserve informed opinion and debate, reviews will disappear, replaced by adverts or a poetry equivalent of "Richard and Judy". The respected arbiters of taste in the paper world could be singled out for assistance - they need to become visible and active on the Web, not just use e-mail and google. By committing themselves to the Web they'd enhance its authority. Pivotal institutions need encouragement to migrate web-wards in such a way that their influence isn't eroded, and grants could help key review-orientated publications to be put online.

However, the Web isn't a mirror image of the paper world. Some concepts won't translate well, and attitudes might have to change

• Popularism - The people who equate "popular" or "free" with "bad" in the paper world will need to adapt when they use the Web
• Quality - The whole notion of monolithic Quality Control is already an out-worn concept, and of course wasn't even true in the past. The Web is an excellent "word-of-mouth" medium, and there's no shortage of opinion on-line - each blog is a soapbox, and Amazon hosts thousands of opinions. This may not be a bad thing, some say - power will be snatched from the grip of a small clique - but how can consensus emerge?
• Changed Author/Reader relationship - The distance between authors and readers is reduced by social networking, thereby changing the nature of reviewing - it becomes more immediate and viral.
• Archiving - Who will archive? How will poets be rediscovered if by forgetting to renew their service-provider subscription their work disappears?
• Education - What will set-texts look like? How will copyright issues and loss of revenue be dealt with?
• Measuring success - Booksale figures will be replaced by download/hit-rates, and review-counts replaced by blog mentions, but what other criteria will be used?

Behind all this change is the issue of who pays the new "gatekeepers". I'll conclude by listing some possibilities

• Readers may have to pay for some Web publications. The TLS, PN Review and Contemporary Poetry Review already work this way to some extent, and many American magazines are available online to academics, at a price (Poetry is free but that's a special case).
• Perhaps the free-viewing/paying-for-submission model could be adopted - there's talk of using this in the academic world.
• Maybe editors could be bypassed, replaced by an online readers voting system (after all, the TLS poetry competition was run that way).

I think where paper has the advantage at the moment is the quality of the readership - people (often older people) in an influential position are likely to be paper-biased, but not for long.

Blindspots

I've been wondering whether the "I don't like it" vs "I don't get it" distinction is if not artificial then at least unknowable (to self and others). Or which predispositions and situations make people say one rather than the other, what the motives and consequences might be.

"I don't like it" vs "I don't get it"

Can the distinction be made? Sometimes surely, but it depends on the context.

• Social situation - In the tutor/pupil situation perhaps it's easier for the tutor to say "I don't like it" and the pupil to say "I don't get it". In judges' reports you might not often see lines quoted that the judge admits to not understanding. Of course contestants are happy to accept that judges have preferences, but if they have unadvertised biases it's more awkward. Perhaps judges should be more upfront about their blindspots beforehand, or return the entry fees of poems that they feel unqualified to judge :-). As a ploy they might be prepared to say that a particular poem is "good of its type" but then dismiss that type for reasons they don't explain.
• The Artist - it's easier to admit to blindspots about some artists than others. Stockhausen, Larkin, Prynne, and Olds are fair game. However a dislike or incomprehension of Neruda might be viewed with more suspicion. Perhaps there are poets for whom the only acceptable reason for disliking them is that you don't understand them - to know them is to love them, though they may be difficult to get to know. Shakespeare? Geoffrey Hill?

In practise the distinction might just be another way of saying something else - whether you'd bother re-reading the work, for example. Maybe "I don't get it" can mean "I don't like it but famous people do, so I'm inadequate".

There are some poets' work I find easy to like but hard to love (Glyn Maxwell maybe). There are poems I'd rather read about than read (Les Murray's maybe). If I understand and like a poem I may not agree with it (it may be a Political poem, for example) but that's a different matter.

Attitudes to Blindspots

I heard Philip Hensher (novelist and reviewer) being interviewed recently, saying that he didn't get Ian McEwan's work and hence didn't review it. I think he said he was happy to accept that people had blind spots - big ones even. But perhaps he doesn't really like McEwan's novels. Such meta-judgements are going to be error-prone though. I'm not keen on Olson. I'd go so far to say that I think he's more important than good, that I don't have a blindspot as far as he's concerned. Whereas I think there's more to Heaney than meets my eye.

Moreso than judges, magazine editors can afford to have blindspots - they're what give their magazines character. Practising writers perhaps have the most license. Even so there may be repercussions. Nabokov said - "[music] I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds". With the benefit of medical advances we'd tend to label this as a medical condition, a handicap. But Nabokov's admission didn't affect his work's reception. Larkin's dislike of modern jazz is treated more as a personality defect, though some people read aesthetic limitations into it. I prefer even "Frankie goes to Hollywood" to Mozart. Ok, so I like some JS Bach, Barber's Adagio, Bartok's quartets, but surely my statement exposes a lack of taste.

Career poets had better not advertise too many of their poetry blindspots if they want to judge competitions, or if they don't want to discourage people coming to their workshops.

How to fake it

Whether the blindspot's related to emotion, empathy or intellect there may be remedies. Firstly there may be an underlying perception problem - if you're totally colourblind you're not going to be able to respond to blue or even "blue". Readers won't see syllabics unless they count the syllables, and some readers don't listen to the sound of the words. Sometimes these perceptual deficits are due to inattention and can be remedied.

But the problems may lie deeper. Psychology tests nowadays can reveal all kinds of individual quirks in our visual and language processing. The effects show up in contrived laboratory conditions. In everyday life we manage to compensate for them - e.g. the face-blind pay more attention to gait, clothes, etc. It's not surprising that poetry would reveal individual differences in apprehension. I think my poetry appreciation is a patchwork of blindspots - from poem to poem or even from line to line. I approach texts with a mishmash of innate and learnt behaviours, but usually act as if the unevenness is all in the text.

How can one compensate? Give a computer enough examples of so-called good and bad art (in a limited field) and pattern-matching software can often judge future examples pretty well (though it may not be able to give explanations). You can train yourself in the same way - working by analogy and general principles. In poetry, where there's a wide range of tastes anyway, it's not too hard to bluff one's way through one genre or facet of poetry, especially if you've acquired credibility in other genres. Indeed, opinions by newcomers and outsiders might prove valuable. If I were to judge Mr World I might well make a less controversial decision than if I were judging Miss World - fewer hormones and idiosyncrasies get in the way, and I'd use more general principles and cliches/archetypes.

Can fakery be detected? It's not as simple as that. For a start, some people think that any use of the intellect rather than the heart is "faking it". Also one can begin by faking it then end up loving it. But if poets on R4's Saturday Review or BBC2's Review Night say that some Art Exhibition's "Extraordinary" (inarticulate gushing being a common enough strategy to cover ignorance) it would be interesting to see if they subsequently go to similar exhibitions. Maybe. Maybe eventually it's possible to reach the stage when one can say (as amateurs also do) "I like all sorts of poetry as long as it's good" and get away with it, but I don't see the point.