Coronavirus diary: Chess, my brain and my son

Since the pandemic began, my son and I have played a regular -- not quite daily -- game of chess.

I am the furthest thing from a grandmaster. My skills really haven't advanced much since I was in sixth grade and learned the game anew, playing against friends in study hall. T, honestly, has more experience than I do in recent years -- but he's a kid, so he has a bit less patience for how the game develops.

One thing that frustrates me about myself, though, is that I'm not great at doing the thing you need to do in chess, which is plan several moves ahead, to see the game unfold before it unfolds. I win a lot against T, but it's not like I'm great at planning victory. Often, it just seems to happen. But the result is that chess is an area where I'm unable to hide behind the Dunning-Kruger effect -- I can see, with some precision, what my limitations are. And they make me wonder about the makeup of how I think in other endeavors, if I'm similarly limited. Indeed, I've also had a chance to read a lot more during the pandemic, and I while I'm a competent enough writer -- I mean, I get paid to do it, right? -- I can see how my writing and the thinking that underlies it probably misses a dimension accomplished by people I admire and respect. I'm not sure how, or if, I can acquire that dimension. Those limitations bump up against my ambitions and pretentions, and that's very goddamn frustrating.

The solace I take, though, is that the more often T and I play chess, the more I can start to see a move or two ahead. It takes practice. That gives me hope the same is true for my writing and thinking, but who the hell knows?

One thing I do, though, is I try to make the game more than about wins or losses. In the last couple of months, my son has gone from being overtly frustrated when he loses to calm and willingness to learn from a loss. That's a big gain. And when I win, I try to explain to him what it is I did to win -- my strategy, such as it is, so that he can think about ways to create his own counterstrategy. I'm trying to help him learn to think about these things. And I'm trying to get better at my own thinking.

Terry Teachout, Matt Zoller Seitz, and grief

Terry Teachout and Matt Zoller Seitz hail from different spots on the ideological spectrum, I gather, but otherwise they share some striking similarities. Both are accomplished critics: Teachout, among his many accomplishments, writes about theater for the Wall Street Journal, while Seitz is one of the best movie and television critics of his generation.

They have also been recently widowed -- Seitz, unfathomably and horribly, for the second time. And Seitz's father appears to be in the end stages of cancer.

What I appreciate about both men is that they have been willing to share their grief, both through tweets and blog posts. Which seems timely -- there is so much for Americans, and the world, to grieve right now. But we're uncomfortable with grief, uncomfortable with showing it, uncomfortable with seeing it. We want it to fit into a neat process -- the "stages" of grieving -- but in truth, grieving isn't necessarily a linear process. And in a lot of cases, that process never becomes complete. We just learn to live with it.

Here's Teachout in a recent blog post:

And how am I feeling now that I’m back in New York? That’s hard to say. I think I’m starting to find my way out of the bewildering maze of sorrow, for I no longer miss Hilary with the same around-the-clock intensity that came perilously close to sinking me in April. At the same time, though, her memory is never far from my mind, and I’m still as lonely as I ever was. And while I’ve kept myself busy writing about theater webcasts for The Wall Street Journal, I miss going to the theater in something not wholly unlike the way in which I miss my life’s companion.

For my own part, I don’t know how I’ve managed to survive the simultaneous losses of my beloved spouse and the art form to which I have devoted more than a decade and a half of my life. But I’m still here, and if Hilary’s death and the closing of America’s theaters didn’t kill me, then I figure I’m in it for the long haul. I hope you are, too.

And here is a recent Twitter thread from Seitz:

This weekend marks the seventh anniversary of my mother's death. I still find that grief visits me suddenly and out of the blue, though I don't live with it as a constant low-level thrum like I used to. The really unexpected thing that's happened, though, is that she's gone -- but my relationship with her isn't. I still find myself wrestling with her life and how it affected mine, the love and the conflicts, in just about every interaction I have with my own child.

Anyway, I'm grateful to Teachout and Seitz for their willingness to grieve publicly. I suspect their acts will help others find comfort. We all grieve, sooner or later. You can't prepare for it, really. But maybe you can take solace in knowing you're not alone.

Movie night: THE FAREWELL

Three thoughts about THE FAREWELL, coming up...

* There's a bittersweet pain these days to watching certain movies from the before times. I'm not talking about MCU movies or anything blockbusterish -- I'm talking about films like this one, that don't invent new worlds but take a close look at one small corner of reality. To see people living life together, arguing, celebrating, being passive aggressive, even drinking in close proximity to each other ... to experience that for real is something I miss dearly. And it makes a movie like this a bit more intense for me than it might've been before the pandemic.

* A lot of the coverage of the film, when it came out, was about having Asian representation in the movies -- both onscreen and behind the camera. This is very specifically a Chinese-American movie; the whole plot, inasmuch as there is one, hinges on very specific cultural difference between the two countries. Yet this is also a profoundly human (and utterly lovely) piece about the way we are with our families that is recognizable to anybody who has actually lived in a family -- the conflicts, the lies we use to grease those conflicts, the love that underlies our frustrations with each other. So beautiful.

* Alex Weston's score is memorable and beautiful. 

Trump, America and history

I keep thinking about Donald Trump's most recent interview with Fox News, in which he was asked what message he would send to Black Americans whose ancestors were held as slaves. His response:

My message is that we have a great country, we have the greatest country on Earth. We have a heritage, we have a history and we should learn from the history, and if you don’t understand your history, you will go back to it again. You will go right back to it. You have to learn. Think of it, you take away that whole era and you’re going to go back to it sometime. People won’t know about it. They’re going to forget about it. It’s okay.

Now this is a lot of nothing masquerading as something. We know that Trump's knowledge of history is limited, and I've argued that he doesn't really have a sense of history -- if he could think beyond today's news cycle, this hour's tweet, he might take very different actions with an understanding that history's eye is on him.

I've come to suspect, though, that Trump sees and tells American history like he tells his own -- it's a narrative, one in which inconvenient facts are omitted or glossed over, so that the story is one of ever-greater triumphs, never mind all those bankruptcies and unpaid workers along the way. The end of the story is now, and the end of the story is that he's rich, so he must have won, right? It is history as PR.

A fundamental dividing line in this country is between those who want history to be public relations, and those who have a more tragic sense of how events have proceeded. It is probably easier to get elected if you hold the former view. But the people with the latter view, in my estimation, probably have a more realistic understanding of the country we live in.

Movie night: 'A Face in the Crowd'

Three thoughts about A FACE IN THE CROWD:

* Criterion: "A Face in the Crowd chronicles the rise and fall of Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes (Andy Griffith), a boisterous entertainer discovered in an Arkansas drunk tank by Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal), a local radio producer with ambitions of her own. His charisma and cunning soon shoot him to the heights of television stardom and political demagoguery, forcing Marcia to grapple with the manipulative, reactionary monster she has created."

So. You Know. Fiction.

* Patricia Neal's face during the movie's climax reminds me of the terror you usually see in horror movies.

* In fact, if I ran a film festival, I'd put this together with CITIZEN KANE, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE -- and, I think, the Boris Karloff version of FRANKENSTEIN.

Can K-State boot Jaden McNeil and still honor the First Amendment?

KC Star: 

A select group of student-athletes at Kansas State have begun circulating a letter on social media that states they will not play in games or participate in any donor or recruiting events for the Wildcats until the university makes changes that address racism on its campus.

The letter demands that K-State administrators create a policy that will expel any student who openly displays racism on any platform, such as social media or at school or athletic events.

Another demand: The university must deliver “strong consequences” to K-State student Jaden McNeil, who founded the white-supremacist group America First Students in Manhattan and posted an insensitive tweet about George Floyd that sparked a mushroom cloud of outrage from the Wildcats’ Black student-athletes on Friday.

I share the rage that K-State students feel about McNeil. I don't know, though, how K-State accommodates their demands without running afoul of the First Amendment. I don't even know if it should.

The law on this seems pretty clear:

In case after case, courts across the country have unequivocally and uniformly held speech codes at public universities to be unconstitutional. Public institutions of higher learning attempting to regulate the content of speech on campus are held to the most exacting level of judicial scrutiny. Typically, courts find speech codes to violate the First Amendment because they are vague and/or overbroad. This means that because the speech code is written in a way that (a) insufficiently specifies what type of speech is prohibited or (b) would prohibit constitutionally protected speech, it cannot be reconciled with the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech.

That's the "can" part. How about the "should?"

I've written before why I think restricting speech might be harmful to folks like the angry K-State student-athletes, from a purely utilitarian standpoint.

If American governance and culture are indeed soaked in hundreds of years of white supremacy, and:

If the ACLU protects the rights of anybody to speak, no matter how unpopular the stance or against the grain of government or public opinion, then:

Organizations like Black Lives Matter that are seeking racial justice are probably the prime beneficiaries of the ACLU's work and an expansive application of the First Amendment. After all, protests by minority activists — no matter how justified — are rarely popular.

The ground has shifted since I first wrote that. The BLM movement is relatively popular now, and that's a good thing! But activists had to endure a few years of Trumpism and a cultural default to honoring police officers before that was the case. They were able to make that case because of their right to free speech. The First Amendment protects dissenters and scoundrels. The main defense I can offer for the "defending scoundrels" part is that they are part of the price for "defending dissenters." And the right to dissent is elemental to democracy. 

My heart sides with K-State's minority students. But kicking Jaden McNeil out of school breaks down the protections that allow Black Lives Matter activists to have a voice and be effective with it. I'm not sure the conflict can be resolved.

Coronavirus diary: What I've learned about me...

...is how boring I am.

My routine in lockdown -- or semi-lockdown, as the case seems to be at this point -- is to read, write, watch movies, do a little housecleaning, and, well, that's it.

Which is pretty close to what I was doing before. But now I'm really tired of it.

The horrifying thing to me about my life is how little of it I have given up in lockdown. I don't have any real hobbies. I don't make stuff. I don't go places. I worked at home before, I work at home now, and that's it. Mostly, I miss going to the coffee shop now and again to see people.

I hope it's not too late for me to find a real and more active, more interesting life on the other side of this thing.