Friday, November 26, 2004

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

November 25, 2004

The first time I saw waxed fruit I knew it was wrong. -- Fake fruit? Who, I thought, did Mrs. Craven think she was fooling? I was six, maybe seven, but I knew instinctively that I would never have fake fruit in my house.It was off. Its ugliness began to dominate the kitchen. From that very moment I knew that I was better than Brian and his mother. My innocence had been lost and I knew that I could never again trust appearances.That didn't, however, stop me from lusting after Brian's redheaded, slim and smiling mother. I didn't yet know why, but I wanted her. (A precursor, perhaps, of my future, far ahead, when I would lust after a nurse or maid hired by my children to look after me, but will have forgotten why, or what to do with them.)I would have regained that precious innocence, undeserved of course, because between that morning of the waxed fruit and my future years of decrepitude much will have happened.
But padding around the apartment or house in my robe and deerskin, fur-lined slippers (fake fur, now that I think of it) an harmless old man, grey headed, already partly ghost or spirit, I will be glad to pass through the warm dust-mote laden sunbeams that will float through the windows, and stripe the wall and carpet. I know that I will engage a faulty memory, confusing a nephew with a child, a teen-age romance with a French film seen in middle age, or perhaps a business failure with some one else's successful invasion of the perfume import market

Monday, November 15, 2004

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

memo to myself: Alfie, Lil Schnitman, Rene Taylor

Ray,

Being Julia
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

So much has been lost that any account of the Katz-Iverson saga will be of necessity mostly surmise and fictional. The reader is invited to gather around him/herself an aura of what might have been and what has formed the existing generation. There are some facts that we know and from them we will generate an history biased by hope, and conjured up in my mind and the minds of my father and mother and, much later, my sister.

My claim to truth is limited by lack of information. For the most part, my story is merely conjecture.
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Of my proud agnosticism:

In my life I have always distrusted those with provincial fixed opinion, and my faith in the "man who cannot say, 'I am,' who remains himself and another," remains unabated. I am a cosmopolitan, admittedly only half-educated, but still a person with a view of the world that encompasses all. My scale is often in balance, and when one side or another of any issue puts too heavy a thumb on the mechanism I become anxious, and my sense of justice becomes inflamed. I need to see both sides just as I need to have beauty in my life.

mek

Tuesday, November 09, 2004

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Oh, fond attempt to give a deathless lot
To names ignoble, born to be forgot!
In vain, recorded in historic page
They court the notice of a future age:
Those tiny twinkling lusters of the land
Drop one by one from Fame’s neglecting hand:
Lethaean gulphs receive them as they fall,
And dark oblivion soon absorbs them all.

William Cowper, “Observing Some Names of Little Note Recorded in the Biographia Brittanica”

Monday, November 08, 2004

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

The morning of the election results Gross asked what our shields should be:

my reply:

At last something to think about. What design on our shield?

The ostrich rampant, head buried in a pile of charoset. A tongue aiguisee. A finger pointed dexter and a second sinister. A wolf ravissant in shadow behind the ostrich. The shield to be transparent.


mek

Sunday, November 07, 2004

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

The election is over.

Depending on your point of view, this might have been the best imaginable outcome or the second-worst possible outcome.

The world still spins.

Saturday, November 06, 2004

Thursday, November 04, 2004

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

An interesting and perhaps telling difference between Gross and Katz is the method by which we mark our places in books. Gross boldly earmarks almost a quarter of the page, while I timidly turn a tiny piece of the page or use a piece of ribbon so as to leave the page pristine.

Gross' earmarking is much more than a bookmark, which only marks a place in a book; while the larger earmarking crease, being permanent is a display denoting ownership of the book's content.


mek

Wednesday, November 03, 2004

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Reading Edith Weisskopf-Joelson's Father, Have I Kept My Promise? Madness as Seen From Wthin.

She describes her escape from Austria, and her engagement with teaching.

Then, she quickly draws her introduction to Viktor Frankl, explaining that he believed that psychotherapy works because the therapist helps the patient develop a philosphophy of life that dares go beyond the the body and the psyche. Therapy should be through meaning, and make use of the resources of the human spirit, which, Frankl believed included a will to find meaning, to have goals and to make commitments. He saw the nature of his patients not only determined by their past, including trauma, but also determined by the by their future,--goals and tasks that pulled them forward.

Does this sound like Gross talking???