Thursday, August 13, 2009

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Here's something from the Paris Review, Summer 2009. #107:

Gay Talese on infidelity.

"Here's what people don't get. Sex is not that important. It isn't the most important thing in any relationship. Marriage is never about sex, and yet in American fiction so many stories and novels present a sexual dalliance ans an unpardonable sin. (In real life) I never thought that should be true. Marriage is the main event. These other relationships bring me into worlds I would otherwise not know. These relationships have helped our marriage. ..I think of all these people who get divorced over minor matters...I don't see how people can live in conventional marriages. "

Gay Talese has a fifty year marriage with a very accomplished,independent and fiscally successful wife.
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

E.L. Doctorow, Homer & Langley to be published in September

"And so do people pass out of one's life and all you can remember of them is their humanity, a poor fitful thing of no dominion, like your own."

This novel is unlike anything Doctorow has written before, it uses to the Collyer brothers to draw us through the twentieth century in America as seen by a blind man and his eccentric pack rat brother whose bodies were found in a Fifth Avenue mansion after their deaths.

"Homer Lusk Collyer (November 6, 1881 – March 21, 1947) and Langley Collyer (October 3, 1885 – March 1947) were two American brothers who became famous because of their snobbish nature, filth in their homes, and compulsive hoarding.

The brothers are often cited as an example of compulsive hoarding associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), as well as disposophobia or 'Collyer brothers syndrome', a fear of throwing anything away. For decades, neighborhood rumors swirled around the rarely-seen, unemployed men and their home at 2078 Fifth Avenue (at the corner of 128th Street), in Manhattan, where they obsessively collected newspapers, books, furniture, musical instruments, and many other items, with booby traps set up in corridors and doorways to protect against intruders.

Both were eventually found dead in the Harlem brownstone where they had lived as hermits, surrounded by over 100 tons of rubbish that they had amassed over several decades." Wikipedia