1. e3 e5 2. d4 f6 3. Bf1b5 Nb8c6 4. f3 d5 5. h4 Bc8e6 6. e4 Qd8d7
7. exd5 Be6xd5 8. g3 O-O-O 9. a4 exd4 10. Qd1d2 Qd7e6 11. Ke1d1 Bf8b4
12. Qd2f4 Bb4d6 13. Qf4d2 Bd6xg3 14. Rh1h3 Bg3e5 15. a5 b6 16. axb6 cxb6
17. Ra1xa7 Nc6xa7 18. f4 Be5xf4 19. Rh3c3 Kc8b7 20. Rc3c7 Kb7xc7 21. c3 Na7xb5
22. cxd4 Bf4xd2 23. Bc1xd2 Ng8e7 24. Bd2f4 Kc7b7 25. h5 Qe6g4 26. Kd1c2 Qg4xg1
27. b4 Nb5xd4 28. Kc2b2 Qg1g2 29. Bf4d2 Nd4f3 30. Kb2a3 Rd8a8 31. Ka3b2 Nf3xd2
32. Nb1c3 Nd2c4 33. Kb2b3 Rh8c8 34. b5 Nc4d2 35. Kb3b2 Nd2e4 36. Kb2c1 Rc8xc3
37. Kc1b1 Rc3b3 38. Kb1c1 Ra8a1 0-1

How chess and mess define the meaning of life

Stephen Poole previews cultural studies titles in 2007

Saturday December 30, 2006
The Guardian

It’s always nice to see one’s pet theories confirmed by rigorous analysis, and a subject close to this writer’s heart is encapsulated in the title of A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, by Eric Abramson and David H Freedman (Weidenfeld, January). Looking at more than just my desk, the authors conclude that there is an ideal level of messiness that makes any system more robust and productive. The virtues of disorder are illustrated with examples from “business, parenting, cooking, the war on terrorism, retail and even the meteoric career of Arnold Schwarzenegger”, and the authors promise that their insights can be applied on a society-wide scale as well as to your kitchen. I would say more on the subject, but I seem to have lost my notes somewhere in the piles of detritus towering around me.Apparently averse to mess, on the other hand, is Phil Spector, legendary record producer and – it says here, rather unkindly – “demented control freak”. Are there well-balanced control freaks? Shouldn’t a record producer actually want to be in control? Spector gave his first interview in 25 years to journalist Mick Brown in late 2002. Two months later, the producer was arrested after an actress was shot dead in his Los Angeles castle. Thus prompted, Brown has written Tearing Down the Wall of Sound (Bloomsbury, April), recording his own “personal odyssey” into the bizarre story of the man with the golden ears who gave the world such acoustic palaces as “Unchained Melody” and “River Deep, Mountain High”. Spector’s long-delayed murder trial finally begins in January.Chess genius Garry Kasparov, whom no one would dare to call a “demented control freak” to his face, retired from competitive play in 2005, but has hardly been idle since, founding the Russian political party United Civil Front and continuing to write his history of chess, titled with no false modesty My Great Predecessors. Now, somewhat like a hirsute, modern Sun Tzu, he offers his general philosophy of strategy, How Life Imitates Chess (Heinemann, March). As he promised in a Wall Street Journal article last year, the book “examines the unique formulae people use in thinking and problem-solving. For example, the way hope and doubt affect how we process information, or the way we perform in a crisis. I hope it will also serve as a guide to improving these processes.” Can the ability to calculate a 20-move forced tactical sequence in chess help you navigate the shark-infested waters of office politics? We shall see.

Competing in the sage stakes is Terry Eagleton, the fun-loving literary critic who has lately taken to offering public lessons in theology to Richard Dawkins, probably not much to the latter’s enrichment. It will be interesting to see if this spat has any bearing on the content of Eagleton’s new book, breezily entitled The Meaning of Life (Oxford, February). (No doubt it’s only to me that this looks like a misprint for The Meaning of Liff.) Schopenhauer, Beckett and Shakespeare are wheeled on and off, and people are castigated for filling the void of meaning with Scientology or football. We are promised laughs along the way. “The meaning of life is a subject fit either for the crazed or the comic, and I hope I have fallen more into the latter camp than the former,” Eagleton writes. I hope so too; I really do.

It may not be clear where Paul Virilio fits in Eagleton’s curious schema of crazed or comic (to which there is no doubt more than mere alliteration), but the zestfully polemical French philosopher of speed no doubt hopes to ruffle a few complacent feathers with his Art As Far As the Eye Can See (Berg, July). Virilio loves to provoke with vast diagnoses. “The defining characteristic of mass culture today is cold panic,” according to his new book’s blurb. “The same panic which has used terrorism to derail democracy has hijacked the whole art enterprise. This panic is reliant on audio-visual technology to create a new all-seeing, panoptic politics. And the first casualty of this politics is the art of seeing … In the 21st century, the new battleground is art as light versus art as matter.” Is it true? What does it mean? It will be fun to find out.

More apparently traditional literary talk might be expected from Kevin Jackson’s The Book of Hours (Duckworth, March), which includes such curious facts as that dinner used to be taken at 10am and has gradually slipped ever later, and explanations of Linnaeus’s floral clock (which told the time using smell), or the system of bells on Royal Navy ships. In the hands of a lesser writer you might fear a merely twee temporal miscellany, but Jackson, author of the wonderful Invisible Forms (on the paratextual paraphernalia of books: indexes, acknowledgments, footnotes and so on), can be relied upon to make of it something fascinating. Meanwhile, a hush of anticipation should by rights attend the new book by Milan Kundera, whose The Curtain (Faber, March) is an essay on the novel. We each, he argues, have a preconceived notion of reality – “a magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world” – and the job of the novelist is to tear through it and reveal what lies on the other side. (A small wizard?) The maestro also promises to make more of translinguistic influence than is usually allowed in talk of “the English novel” or “the French novel”. We are lucky to have a great novelist who is also a great critic.

· Steven Poole’s Unspeak is published by Little, Brown

Merida, México, Dec 21, (P26).-Just as it was expected, Cuban Grand Master Lazaro Bruzon (2648), and Ukraine’s Vasily Ivanchuk (2741) will face each other today at final match of the international chess tournament Carlos Torre Repetto in Memorian, which is underway in this city since December 14.

Bruzon, who is the defending champion, won the ticket to the final round after defeating US GM GM Jaan Elhvest. For that purpose, it was necessary to play rapid games, as in the morning and afternoon games they drew in just 16 and 18 moves.

In the first of the two defining games, they also came to a quick Dra., after 23 moves, but in the second the Cuban youth played his usual aggressive game and with black pieces was able to surrender his opponent’s king.

For his part, Ivanchuk, defeated, after 60 moves, the other Cuban taking part in this phase of the competition: GM Frank de la Paz.