Of Chess and Love

Have you ever thought that you were smarter for being able to play chess?  More cultured?  Grander, somehow?

What if you were interested in a man or woman and that person played chess much better than you?  Would you feel inferior?

Or if he/she played much worse?  Would you feel superior?

These and other questions are subtly--but no less insistently--raised by an early Thomas Hardy novel: A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873).  Such questions were, in turn, the inspiration for a talk I'm going to be giving at the Culture Matters Conference at the University of California (3-28-12 until 3-31-12).

I previously wrote about this talk in my blog post "How Chess can Help you with your Cursed Monkey's Paw" and wondered why nobody commented on that message board (except me).

But everyone has been in love, or at least, had a crush.  Let me know what you think.