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MR. 2300+ ELO

To add to the point made by Sam Sloan re Taylor Kingston's
subject when stating without irony and quite straightforwardly that he
was 2300+ ELO, every reader can ask himself this question: when
someone tells you unadorned that he is 2300+ ELO, do you understand
his meaning to be a statement about his over-the-board playing
strength or do you, without any aside from the man making the
claim, say to yourself, "Oh yeah, he must be talkin' about his postal
chess."

Yes, he did confound those two a bit. OTOH! Other items in the Kingston
Files reveal he had a decent OTB tournament tpr of about 2050, which is
genuinely above that 1800, and in the 99th percentile of rated players. From
memory I think Curdo was in his group, who was then about 2400 - so, a fair
test.

Both his over-the-board rating and his correspondence rating have
never been above the 1800 level.

Be fair to your opponents and avoid the ratings trap, and other
envy-engines, which can be more to do with you than them. The constant
measure of chess is if you enjoy it, and all else is relative to other
players.

Sam Sloan

WHAT THE DICKENS!

Not very on topic, and tangential, is a previous topic I engaged here with
Mr. Parr, on the subject of 'placing' people by borrowing them into groups -
and we discussed how both Marxists did that with Dickens, and if indeed he
would profile as a modern liberal.

I have found an interesting and direct response from Jane Smiley's writing
[albeit, she cites Ackroyd rather much]

"Additionally, as Dickens grew more readical in his political views (and
more idiosyncratic - we should not interpret him as the sort of left liberal
we know today - he was rascist, imperialist, sometimes anti-Semitic, a
believer in harsh prison conditions, and distrustful of trade unions), he
divided himself more and more from his fellow novelists. How do we make of
sense of this?"

She then discussed the common social mixing of other Victorian writers, and
Dickens's voluntary isolation...

Now - the lesson is - that any description of that type would get an
author's books banned from high schools and libraries these days, nevermind
it was favorite reading of Freud.

People are changeable creatures, no motive springs from other than a
complexity of factors, themselves in dynamic relationship, and while
overselling one thing, another is undersold. And all the time the
commentator observing others needs be aware of their vicarious existence,
and those notions which emerge, ///as if/// it were their own.

Otherwise we have no compass to understand how we ourselves act, and in the
Dostoyevskyan sense, are 'possessed,' but not of any truth! Only lies and
deceptions.

It will be a brave man who writes here about their own self-deceiving
activity - and probably no man at all; it might take a woman writer to do
that.

Phil Innes