TITLE: Magazines, PDF Files, and a Lifetime of Memories
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: June 06, 2011 9:12 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
I remember the day I received my first issue of Chess
Life & Review magazine. It was the summer of 1979,
in late June or early July. I had won a membership in the
U.S. Chess Federation as part of a local goodwill tournament,
by virtue of beating my good buddy and only competition for
the junior prize. My victory entitled me to the membership
as $20 of loot, which includes a portable set I use to this
day and a notation book that records my games over a period
of five or ten years.
That first issue arrived while I was at summer school. The
cover heralded the upcoming U.S. Open championship, but inside
the story of Montreal 1979, a super-GM tournament, captivated
me with the games of familiar names (Karpov, Tal, Larsen, and
Spassky) and new heroes (Portisch, Huuml;bner, Hort, and
Ljubojevic). A feature article reviewed films of the 1940s
that featured chess and introduced me to Humphrey Bogart's
love of and skill at the game I loved to play. Bogart: the
man's man, the tough-guy leading man at whose feet women
swooned. Bogart! The authors of the magazine's regular
columns became my fast friends, and for years thereafter I
looked forward monthly to Andy Soltis's fun little stories,
which always seemed to teach me something, and Larry Evans's
Q-n-A column, which always seemed to entertain.
I was smitten, as perhaps only a young bookish kid can be.
Though I haven't played tournament chess regularly in three
decades, I have remained an occasional player, a
passionate programmer,
and a
lovestruck fan.
And I've maintained my membership in the USCF, which entitles
me to a monthly issue of Chess Life. Though life as
husband, father, and professor leave me little time for the
game I once played so much, every month I anticipate the
arrival of my new issue, replete with new names and new games,
tournament reports and feature articles, and regular columns
that include Andy Soltis's "Chess to Enjoy". Hurray!
... which is all prelude to my current dilemma, a psychological
condition that reveals me a man of my time and not a man of
the future, or even the present. It's time to renew my USCF
membership, and I am torn: do I opt for the membership that
provides on-line access only to Chess Life?
For the last few years, ever since we moved into a new house
and I cam face to face with just how much stuff I have, I've
been in the process of cutting back. Even before then, I have
made
some society membership choices
based in part on how little I need more piles of paper taking
up space in my house and attention in my mind. This is the
21st century, right? I am a computer scientist, who deals
daily in digital materials, who has disk space beyond his
wildest dreams, whose students have effortlessly grown into
a digital world that makes magazines seem like quaint
compendia of the past. Right?
Yet I waffle. I can save roughly $7 a year by going paperless,
which is a trifle, I know, but a prudent choice nonetheless.
Right?
Undoubtedly, my CL&R-turned-CL collection
takes up space. If I stem the tide of incoming issues, I
can circumscribe the space needed to store my archive and
devote future space to more worthy application. Perhaps I
could even convert some of the archive into digital form
and recoup space already spent?
This move would space, but if I am honest it does not free
up all my attention. My magazines will join my music
collection in the river of bits flowing into my future,
being copied along from storage device to storage device,
from medium to medium, and from software application to
software application. I've lived through several generations
of storage media, beginning in earnest with 5-1/4" floppies,
and I'm sure I'll live through several more.
And what of changing formats? The text files that have
followed me from college remain readable, for the most part,
but not everything survives. For every few files I've
converted from WordPerfect for DOS I have surely lost a file
or two. Occasionally I run across one and ask myself, is it
worth my time to try to open it and convert it to something
more modern? I am sad to say that too often the answer is,
well, no. This never happens to my books and magazines and
pamphlets from that time. I choose to keep or to discard,
and if I have it, I can read it. Where will PDF be in 50
years?
I am also just old enough that I somewhat cherish having a
life that is separate from my digital existence. When I
have the chance to play chess these days, I still prefer to
pull out a board and set up the pieces. The feel of the
ivory or plastic or wood in my hands is part of the experience
-- not essential to the experience, I suppose, in a cosmic
sense, but a huge ingredient to my personal experience. I
have been playing chess on computers since 1980 or so, which
isn't much later than I began playing the game in earnest as
in grade school, so I know that feeling, too. But feeling
the pieces in my hand, poring over
My 60 Memorable Games
(another lifelong treasure from the booty that first brought
me Chess Life) line by line in search of Bobby Fischer's
magic... these are a part of the game for me.
Ultimately, that's where my renewal dilemma lies, too. My
memories of checking the mailbox every day at that time of
the month, eager to find the next issue of the magazine. The
smell of the ink as I thumbed through the pages, peeking ahead
at the delights that awaited me. The feel of the pages as I
turned to the next column or article or advertisement. The
joy of picking out an old issue, grabbing that magnetic portable
set from 30-odd years ago, and settling into a comfortable chair
for an evening of reminiscence and future-making. All are a
part of what chess has been for me. A cache of PDF files, $22
over three years, and a little closet space hardly seem
sufficient consideration.
Alas, we are all creatures of our own times, I no less than
any man. Even though I
know better,
I find myself pulled backward in time just as much as Kurt
Vonnegut, who occasionally waxed poetic about the future of
printed book. Both Vonnegut and I realize that the future
may well exceed our imaginations, but our presents retain
the gifts of days past.
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