BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Other important matters: recently a book on boxing was written in England. Joyce Carol Oates reviewed it in the New York Review and she mentioned something similar. You may not be aware of this but Oates is an expert on boxing and a fan. I heard her several years ago, with supralapsarian Mike Tyson (also an authority on the history of boxing) and the Amazin' Mazur, a sports announcer with an encyclopedic memory. She fit right in. And Tyson was pretty good too!

This is Oates writing:

"The symbolism of boxing does not allow for ambiguity: it is as middleweight Albert Camus put it, 'utterly Manichean.' The rites of boxing 'simplify' everything. Good and evil, the winner and the loser. "

Later she writes,: Here's "a quote attributed to Sonny Liston: ' It's always the same story--the good guy verses the bad guy.' "

What strikes me here is not so much that Camus and Liston arrive at the same conclusion, but rather that Liston's expression is so perfect, so succinct. The simple use of the five cent word instead of the two dollar word.