Filed under: Exemplary Children of Divorce, Mentors, Raised by non-relatives, Uncategorized | Tags: Exemplary Children of Divorce
I’ve found my first openly outed Child of D from off the Guardian’s Top 100 Intellectuals (2005)! Honest to God, I was about to give up, this is so time consuming.
Clifford Geertz, anthropologist, Child of Divorce. Divorce didn’t phase him a bit. Attribute this either to good genes or to the fact that he was passed off at Age 3 to be raised by a 60-year old “Foster Mother” named “Nana. Early on he realized that he was highly intelligent and that this would be his ticket out. In High School Geertz wanted to become a writer. At Age 17 he joined the Navy in World War II. And then went directly to College where he found an inspiring teacher who helped him develop.
I know nothing about Anthropology (am having a major backspace dance with spell check trying to get the word spelled out correctly.) According to this obituary (unfortunately Mr. Geertz passed away in 2006) http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20061103/ai_n16824591. Geertz wrote the “Most famous single essay in anthropology which sounds a bit like a fore-runner to a Chuck Palachiuk novel. It’s called “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” This is supposed to be an excellent example of a concept developed by Geertz called “Thick understanding.”
Geertz was married twice and divorced once. He spent much of his life living in other cultures, most notably in Indonesia and Morocco.
Bobby Fischer, the first U.S. World Chess Champion has died in Reykjavik, Iceland. A Child Prodigy, Fischer became the U.S. Chess Champion at Age 14, Grandmaster at Age 15, and World Champion at Age 24. For the last 30 years of his life, Fischer became an eccentric recluse, moving from Country to Country. He was weird and paranoia but some of the stories about what he had to go through are the types of things that really can make a person paranoid. According to Wikipedia he was arrested once in Los Angeles for committing a bank robbery and then again arrested in Japan and held for nine months for defying rules about playing against Boris Spassky in 1992. What got to me was the part where he was anti-semitic, but Jewish. Born in the U.S. Fischer had his citizenship revoked. All this repeat loss/rejection of home makes me wonder if this is some sort of Fall Out from childhood issues. Fischer had one older sister. He was admitted to the Chess Club when he was 7 and found some solid male mentors there.
The obituary, of course, did not mention that Fischer was from a Divorced Family, just that he had been raised by his Mother and lived with her. So I’ll mention it here: Bobby Fischer was from a Divorced Family. There is some dispute about his Father. The man listed on the Birth Certificate was a German biophysicist. His Mother was married to the German and they divorced when Fischer was two. The Other Man may have been a Hungarian Physicist, a Jewish Guy which makes the anti-semitic remark(s) seem more logical.
Listed quote in the newspaper, gnarly Divorce type thinking for sure: “Chess is war on a board…the object is to crush the other man’s mind.”
