Well, it put my mind on chess enough that I installed a GNU chess program to my PDA.
But what about the big news – Richard Knerr, inventor of the hula hoop, founder of Wham-O, died yesterday.
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/01/17/obit.knerr.ap/index.html?eref=edition_us
I knew a fellow who lived downstairs from Fischer
and his mother in Brooklyn–where I grew up too.
Said Fischer and his mother were constantly
fighting. I reckon that plus the sort of mathematical/
logical genius that borders on madness, pretty
much explains what went wrong with his life.
Brooklyn in those years must have been
one of the craziest places on earth.
I think I know why he had so much hatred for the
Jewish people.
A much bigger loss, to my mind.
Redwolf
Yes it is a good one.
You know I’m always on your side. Even when I harrass you myself!
I believe the essay I read in the Washington Post mentioned that he had Jewish ancestry on both sides.
Also, that he rarely thought about anything other than chess. That was his interest. Period.
A genius in the chess world, but not a particularly functional human by any other measure, it seems.
But heck, so what? Long as you’re not hazardous to other people.
His mother was also a communist; Fischer was a so-called “red diaper baby”.
As an adult, he developed a fanatical hatred of communism, and it was part of the fire that drove his chess-playing: most of the grandmasters of the day–including Spassky–were russian or from nearby soviet states.
No one called him crazy for hating the Soviet Union or hating communism, but when the same drive turned on his mother’s religion (judaism) and citizenship (the US) that was taken as a sign of his insanity.
However, the impetus that drove his anti-communism was what drove his anti-semitism. Fischer’s hatred of Judaism and his hatred of communism aren’t two things; they’re the same thing.
The western world was all too ready to praise Fischer for his hatred of communism, and we were just as quick to dismiss him as a nutbar for his later opinions. It’s hypocritical of us, I think.
It seems that he was really revolting against his parents/mother all his life.
And who isn´t? Either that or trying to prove ourselves worthy of our parents love.
Woody Allen was also a product/casualty of the Brooklyn
of Fischer’s day. In one of his films his former wife,
played by Merrill Streep, has become a lesbian
and is raising their son in a lesbian relationship.
She says to Allen: ‘It isn’t so bad for a kid to
have two mothers!’
He responds:
‘I barely survived one.’
It’s hard to imagine how loony things were.
Just like Buddy Hackett said it wasn’t until he
was in the Army that he realized there’s food
that doesn’t give you heartburn,
I don’t think I met a sane person until I
was 23 or so.
The Philip Roth novel ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’
is about this.
Fischer is no surprise. I know where the anger
comes from.