Chess, Haydn, and the Grimm Brothers
Chess
One of the things I like most is playing chess at chess.com, but it's a bit of a love hate relationship In fact, this became somewhat of an obsession, with me playing many hours a day. In fact, I decided to stop for a while, thinking I might be becoming a chess addict. But, in browsing psychology forums, I've convinced myself that you can't actually *be* a chess addict. After all a board game is not the equivalent of hard drugs! The consensus seems to be, "if you enjoy it, just do it, if you stop enjoying it then do something else." So I started playing again, and an not quite as obsessed as before, if probably playing a little too much. This results in other important activities not getting done, form housework to reading novels, which means I need to do some reflection on exactly how much chess I should be playing and how it can fit in with my others activities to give me a rounded, easy going, dilettante loafer lifestyle that provides me with maximum fun!
Haydn
Forcing my bleary eyes away from the online chess board, to partake of afternoon tea, I listened to Haydn's 43rd symphony on my CD of Haydn SYMPHONIES NOS. 43, 50,58 & 59 by Frans Bruggen and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, as Recorded at Blackheath Concert Halls, London in 1996. It's some years since I listened to this CD, and I'd forgotten what a wonderful sound this band of period instrument performers make. They have none of the harshness found in early works of the period instrument movement, and provide all the purity and clarity that original instruments can bring to a performance. I can't think of anything better than this to ease the chess-strained mind. This is a must for the dilettante classical music listener.
The Brothers Grimm
My best reading experience over the past few weeks has come from Grimm Tales: For Young and Old (Penguin Classics) by Philip Pullman. These are the fairy tales as collected by the Brothers Grimm in the early 19th century, and include many of the most loved classic tales, like Cinderella, Hansel & Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Rumpelstiltskin, and Rapunzel. Pullman provides a re-telling rather than a strict translation. As he points in out in his wonderful asides to each piece, there are many sources for most of these tales so there isn't really an original. Rather than trying to sound Victorian, he casts the stories in a modern voice, and as in his Dark Materials trilogy, this shows itself as a wonderfully lucid prose style that is well equipped to convey these tales to the modern dilettante reader. The dilettante doesn't want to struggle with scholarship for scholarship's sake, or hoch Deutsch paraphrases. They want something like this, something that is a pure joy to read, something not weighed down by dour observations and too-exact translations. It's also another great distraction from chess... and another great reason not to play chess *all* the time...
