Bobby Fischer, He Dead

The Meezer seems to have gotten herself skunked. She will be eating outside for the forseeable future.

Reading Endgame, Frank Brady’s sad biography of Bobby Fischer, the ultimate latchkey kid. Fischer’s mother was very much in the Obama Mother mold: both strong, eccentric women who sucked their offspring in their wake until such time as said offspring grew strong enough to offer resistance. There are actually some rather interesting parallels between mad, doomed Bobby Fischer and the 44th POTUS.
I was a latchkey kid too so all this is very fascinating to me.

Suspect the secret to Fischer’s chess genius is that he anthropomorphized his chess pieces – imbued them with personalities and secret mythologies and such, so that chess games to him were not strategy sessions so much epic narratives.

Fischer was never an engaging child. He was always somewhat repulsive. When Fischer was eight, his mother became so worried by his obsessive fascination with chess that she took him to a psychiatrist for a psychological evaluation. Unfortunately, the evaluating psychiatrist was a chess player.

One assumes the rampant anti-Semitism at the end of Fischer's life was an externalized paranoiac self-loathing: Fischer himself was Jewish after all. However, it was a paranoia without psychosis. He wasn't delusional, he had no hallucinations. The Icelandic psychiatrist who befriended Fischer on Fischer's deathbed saw no signs of schitzophrenia.

Else? It’s gorgeous. The heat is gone. Rode my bike to the forsaken hamlet of Slaterville Springs yesterday before driving downtown to take RTT to start a bank account. I covet that outfit. Don’t you?