BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

REGARDING THE FILM, "EVENING"

I think it was last year--maybe a few months ago, that you told me to see "Shadows." As I try to take most of your advice, although not as in a timely a manner as you might expect, I did see it.

I saw it tonight with great appreciation for its painterly quality and for its final wrap-up-scene-and-summing up-theme which was that there are really no mistakes, that we each do what we must, that all is for the good, and that what seems to matter doesn't really matter.

As you will remember it takes place in the home on the Newport shore in which we all should have been brought up and in which we all should have lived out our lives, but the writer of the film points out that it wouldn't have made any difference; that the noble thing was to marry the wrong person for that was the right thing to do, and have children who are brought into the world to make the same mistakes (which don't matter in the end) that we did.

When you are very young and hotly in love it is better to choose a star for your lover than to write a note in philosophy class asking. "what's for lunch" --anticipating a coming lesson on Nietzsche (or was it my Grandfather? well, it was one of them) who said, "Food first, then Philosophy." -- No, it was my Grandfather, and he said it every year during the endless Passover productions that my Aunt Sylvia would put on. He also liked to shout out, while banging his fist on the table, "Too much food, not enough Vodka!" Poor Aunt Sylvia.

It was this Grandfather who taught me the only dictim I know, "Hate the bosses, love the Workers" and who had Patti, and my cousins hold onto our belt buckles while pledging to "Never cross a picket line,"

Another lesson from the movie: If you have two children then one can live the wrong life, the one you would have liked to have led, while the other can live the right life, the one you chose, but which was really the wrong life for you.

Whoops, was it "Shadows" or was it "Evening" that you recommended? But then did it matter?

mek

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

"These are illusions of popular history which a successful religion must promote: Evil men never prosper; only the brave deserve the fair; honesty is the best policy; actions speak louder than words; virtue always triumphs; a good deed is its own reward; any bad human can be reformed; religious talismans protect one from demon possession; only females understand the ancient mysteries; the rich are doomed to unhappiness"*.

"If you believe certain words, you believe their hidden arguments. When you believe something is right or wrong, true of false, you believe the assumptions in the words which express the arguments. Such assumptions are often full of holes, but remain most precious to the convinced"*.


* quotes from Frank Herbert's Dune series.

buster stronghart

Create your own visitor map!

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Existentialism

Someone died, said Camus' grandmother, "Well, he'll fart no more."

But that was it. It was not a matter of ignorance. She had seen many die around her, two of her children, her husband, all her nephews in the war. But that was just it: she was as familiar with Death as she was of work or poverty. She did not think about it as much as she lived it.

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

There's nothing so bad that years down the road you won't be able to laugh at it.


mek

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Where am I now?

O, the money I didn't make,
The girls I didn't take,
The land I didn't buy,
The women I failed to try...

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

"Memory is the place where things happen for the second time."
.........................Paul Auster

The Testosterone Years

The Whiskey Times

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.

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become. Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell them.
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809 - 1894), The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 1858

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

What's more important, Quality or Quantity? Answer: Quality -- but only if you have enough of it.

..........Soviet - Russian military dictum.

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Some friends have lost their childhoods, like a bottle in the sea. Mine is with me always.

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Where do I go when I need to think?

To the old oak tree half way into the woods, on the trail that's hard to find. I sit under it, in the almost dark, its branches are huge and weighted down with leaves, only a little sunlight finds its way down there, below the spreading branches, and it is cool, and the air filed with a mossy, earthy smell.

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BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Without you I would have been somebody else.

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

We tend to think that our real lives begin tomorrow. We disregard today. We save ourselves up for something.

This is only a way of letting life pass us by.

mek

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Love has a bitter taste. Oscar Wilde, Salome

Some people rock the boat, others row the boat. Unknown

The public business must be carried on by someone; if wise men decline it then others will take it. John Adams

No distinction can be made between the erotic and the esthetic. Picasso

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Pictures must not be too expressive. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Three things needed for success in painting: To see beauty when young and accustom ones self to it, to work hard, and to obtain good advice. Gialorenzo Bernini

Have no fear of perfection. You'll never reach it. Salvatore Dali

The rule in the art world is that you cater to the masses or you kowtow to the elite. You can;t do both. Ben Hecht
.

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Life is not a vending machine where one puts in virtue and takes out happiness. auth. unknown

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. Picasso

I go to work as other men rush to see their mistresses. Eugene Delacroix

Who am I beyond the skin I'm in? Kara Walker

Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal instead of the victim. Bertrand Russell.

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, and soft music. Vladimir Nabokov

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

You may already know these things, but you may not have thought about them
recently.

I knew Spencer's mother; Gross' mother and father, I have a fading memory of his
grandfather ; Randelman's mother and father; and even the couple , Sally &
Irwin, who worked for his parents; Malkin's mother, father and sister, I did not
ever meet Danny's parents; I knew Manny and Grace Schultz better than most;-even
Patti knew them; I knew both of Schupf's parents, although I never met his
sisters; I never met Aaronson's parents. 

I think that one of the reasons that we have stuck together is that we are a
little smarter than most--though, I understand that doesn't apply as much to SS,
Bob, and Gross because you are in professions to which intelligent people
occasionally gravitate,.

I knew each of Gross' wives, I met Bob's first wife, I don't remember Nancy
Cypress but I am sure that I met her; of course I know Mary, I know Kathy, but
don't remember either of SS's other wives but I do recall meeting one their husbands, a librarian with a cane named Ben Ch--and I liked him very much. Who was
the redhead?

You have all met Maria in both of her incarnations,  I think you have all met my
sons;  I have met all of Gross' children, and grandchildren--that's four 
generations!-- but none of Bob's; nor his grandchildren; I might have met or
seen Craig and Nicole, Hal's son & daughter, but only at a funeral; I met Max
once but I am not really clear on him. Anthony is a total mystery to me, as he
is a pataphysicist.

I think that if each of us made a graph or chart showing these amazing
connections we could

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

A, for unknown, unexpressed reasons, has an irrational and violent disdain for B. When I discovered that B lived in the same building and on the very floor that A lived, he, A, insisted that we not invite him (B) to any of our dinners, nor even for the cocktails, shrimp and vegetable pate we often shared at the A apartment, separated only by a thin partition from poor, lonely B's room. Not even a glass of water!

In addition, B knows a piece of goods when he sees it and wears sport jackets in the mode of the ones George Saunders wore when he played Arthur in Rebecca.

I do not begrudge A his personal likes or dislikes, and as you know B occupies the highest shelf in my mental storeroom of friendship, regard and respect. A's hostmanship is well-known, and appreciated by all who have come into his wide and spreading umbra. But, his attitude towards B bewilders me.

I inform you of these facts only because I know of your deep sense of discretion.

B, too, asked for the recipe.

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Frenzies, possessions, mania, melancholy, nerves, tics, passionate loves and hates, melancholy, nerves, delusions, aberrant acts, dramatic tics, visual and auditory hallucinations, fears, phobias, and fantasies, disturbances of sleep, disassociations, communion with spirits and imaginary friends, addictions, self-harm, self-starvation an depression.