Archive: October 2007

Vesna Dencic is from Serbia, where she trained as a journalist and now writes poetry, literary essays, short stories and, of course, aphorisms. The Balkans is richly aphoristic, and these days Balkan aphorists have plenty of material to work with, given the region’s tumultuous recent political history. Dencic chronicles the Balkan aphoristic tradition on a number of Web sites, including Smeh do bola, which she describes as “aphorisms and everything about aphorisms.” She is also the founding editor of the satirical online magazine Etna. Her own aphorisms have a sharp satirical edge and, like Etna itself perhaps, harbor a molten core just below the surface. A selection:

We sold our soul to the devil. Now he’s coming to pick up the package.

Every time I turn on the TV I get lost in the dark.

I’m not afraid to say what I think. I’m afraid of thinking.

Every man of action needs woman of action—to clean up after him.

Vesna Dencic is from Serbia, where she trained as a journalist and now writes poetry, literary essays, short stories and, of course, aphorisms. The Balkans is richly aphoristic, and these days Balkan aphorists have plenty of material to work with, given the region’s tumultuous recent political history. Dencic chronicles the Balkan aphoristic tradition on a number of Web sites, including Smeh do bola, which she describes as “aphorisms and everything about aphorisms.” She is also the founding editor of the satirical online magazine Etna. Her own aphorisms have a sharp satirical edge and, like Etna itself perhaps, harbor a molten core just below the surface. A selection:

We sold our soul to the devil. Now he’s coming to pick up the package.

Every time I turn on the TV I get lost in the dark.

I’m not afraid to say what I think. I’m afraid of thinking.

Every man of action needs woman of action—to clean up after him.

As a college student, Lori Ellison dreamed of opening her own fortune cookie factory “with fortunes something like Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies and aphoristic writings but couched in the assured language of divination.” Fortunately, she’s kept that dream alive by writing her own oblique yet assured aphorisms. A painter, writer, and lifetime independent bookstore clerk (semi-retired), Ellison is also a voracious consumer of aphorists’ biographies, most recently of Mae West, Karl Kraus, and G.C. Lichtenberg. Her aphorisms have something of all three of these aphorists: West’s humor and Kraus and Lichtenberg’s smart, satirical sensibilities. Ellison wishes to be known, in memoriam, some of the valiant independent bookstores she used to work for that are no longer in existence: Cokesbury Books (Richmond, VA), the Book Gallery in Willow Lawn Shopping Center (Richmond, VA), Watson & Co. Books (Austin, TX), and Gotham Book Mart, Posman’s Books, and Hacker Art Books (all in New York City). A selection of her aphorisms:

Spirituality is in the Inner Eye of the beholder.

Too varnished a style makes the eyes glaze over.

The only way those we intensely dislike can surprise us is by suddenly becoming likeable.

The nuclear family is easy to atomize.

Postmodernism was modernism’s midlife crisis.

We are not responsible for the character of the two characters that conspired in our conception.

As a college student, Lori Ellison dreamed of opening her own fortune cookie factory “with fortunes something like Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies and aphoristic writings but couched in the assured language of divination.” Fortunately, she’s kept that dream alive by writing her own oblique yet assured aphorisms. A painter, writer, and lifetime independent bookstore clerk (semi-retired), Ellison is also a voracious consumer of aphorists’ biographies, most recently of Mae West, Karl Kraus, and G.C. Lichtenberg. Her aphorisms have something of all three of these aphorists: West’s humor and Kraus and Lichtenberg’s smart, satirical sensibilities. Ellison wishes to be known, in memoriam, some of the valiant independent bookstores she used to work for that are no longer in existence: Cokesbury Books (Richmond, VA), the Book Gallery in Willow Lawn Shopping Center (Richmond, VA), Watson & Co. Books (Austin, TX), and Gotham Book Mart, Posman’s Books, and Hacker Art Books (all in New York City). A selection of her aphorisms:

Spirituality is in the Inner Eye of the beholder.

Too varnished a style makes the eyes glaze over.

The only way those we intensely dislike can surprise us is by suddenly becoming likeable.

The nuclear family is easy to atomize.

Postmodernism was modernism’s midlife crisis.

We are not responsible for the character of the two characters that conspired in our conception.

Harry L.S. Knopf has been a practicing physician for over 30 years. As a comprehensive (general) ophthalmologist, he has treated babies, children, young adults, mature adults and the elderly. He is also part of a long and venerable tradition of medical aphorists that began with the main man himself, Hippocrates. The famous Greek physician composed hundreds of aphorisms, most of which were based on his experiences as a doctor and most of which were intended as teaching tools through which to educate young physicians. Many of Hippocrates’ aphorisms are medicine for the soul as much as for the body, and this is also the prescription that Harry Knopf fills. Most of his aphorisms, he says, are derived directly from interaction with patients. He often comes up with them while driving to and from the hospital where he practices. They are collected in Harry’s Homilies: Prescriptions for a Better Life, from which the following brief selection is made:

Life’s gifts are sometimes poorly wrapped.

Contentment comes from the realization of how much you already have.

There IS an answer for everything; you just have to make it up.

There are good days and bad days, happy days and sad days. The important thing to remember is that there are days.

An aphorism a day is my prescription for a happy, healthy mind. It is a prescription being filled with enormous verve and humor by guerrilla aphorists Nick Didkovsky and Charles O’Meara, at their quaintly titled but delightfully subversive site Aphorism of the Day. Didkovsky (a guitarist, composer, and software programmer) and O’Meara (a guitarist, drummer, composer, and registered nurse in psychiatry and behavioral health) have been friends since the late 1970s. Didkovsky founded the avant-rock septet Doctor Nerve and is the principle author of the computer music language Java Music Specification Language. O’Meara performs Irish traditional music and is presently working on an album with his instrumental jazz-rock band, Forever Einstein.

When they are not performing or recording music together, Didkovsky and O’Meara are composing brilliantly banal, profoundly pointless aphorisms. In the grand tradition of absurdist aphorists like Paul Eluard and Benjamin Peret (see 152 Proverbs Adapted to the Taste of the Day)

No one goes swimming in a deep forest.

and fictional 19th-century Russian aphorist Kozma Prutkov

I do not fully understand why many people call fate a turkey, and not some other bird more similar to fate.

Didkovsky and O’Meara are at work in the highly specialized field of aphoristic parody. Unlike other contemporary parodists, like Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, whose humor is primarily satirical, Didkovsky and O’Meara write in a more farcical vein. Every 24 hours, the Aphorism of the Day site sports a gauzy image of a sunset or a mist-laden field with a hyperbolically obtuse aphorism plastered across it. Today’s inspirational saying, for example, is:

The sound of the turning page is like a fool urinating on money.

The sayings skewer the feel-good platitudes and greeting-card wisdom that populate so many desk-top and appointment calendars. They are guaranteed to raise a laugh, and an eyebrow. Go to Aphorism of the Day for your daily dose. In the meantime, here are a few Didkovsky-O’Mearisms to tide you over…

Look over your shoulder. If you see clouds, you are a giant.

Laughter is not heard where the cheese has become inedible.

Keep your gun but give the bullets to your enemy.

One hand invites the other.

Freedom is like a sack full of chains.

An aphorism a day is my prescription for a happy, healthy mind. It is a prescription being filled with enormous verve and humor by guerrilla aphorists Nick Didkovsky and Charles O’Meara, at their quaintly titled but delightfully subversive site Aphorism of the Day. Didkovsky (a guitarist, composer, and software programmer) and O’Meara (a guitarist, drummer, composer, and registered nurse in psychiatry and behavioral health) have been friends since the late 1970s. Didkovsky founded the avant-rock septet Doctor Nerve and is the principle author of the computer music language Java Music Specification Language. O’Meara performs Irish traditional music and is presently working on an album with his instrumental jazz-rock band, Forever Einstein.

When they are not performing or recording music together, Didkovsky and O’Meara are composing brilliantly banal, profoundly pointless aphorisms. In the grand tradition of absurdist aphorists like Paul Eluard and Benjamin Peret (see152 Proverbs Adapted to the Taste of the Day)

No one goes swimming in a deep forest.

and fictional 19th-century Russian aphorist Kozma Prutkov

I do not fully understand why many people call fate a turkey, and not some other bird more similar to fate.

Didkovsky and O’Meara are at work in the highly specialized field of aphoristic parody. Unlike other contemporary parodists, like Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, whose humor is primarily satirical, Didkovsky and O’Meara write in a more farcical vein. Every 24 hours, the Aphorism of the Day site sports a gauzy image of a sunset or a mist-laden field with a hyperbolically obtuse aphorism plastered across it. Today’s inspirational saying, for example, is:

The sound of the turning page is like a fool urinating on money.

The sayings skewer the feel-good platitudes and greeting-card wisdom that populate so many desk-top and appointment calendars. They are guaranteed to raise a laugh, and an eyebrow. Go to Aphorism of the Day for your daily dose. In the meantime, here are a few Didkovsky-O’Mearisms to tide you over…

Look over your shoulder. If you see clouds, you are a giant.

Laughter is not heard where the cheese has become inedible.

Keep your gun but give the bullets to your enemy.

One hand invites the other.

Freedom is like a sack full of chains.

There is a what for everything?, I hear you ask. An aphorism, I say: a short, witty, philosophical saying. An aphorism for everything, and everything its aphorism; that’s my philosophy. Here are a couple of examples:

When I am shaving in the morning and I behold my rapidly receding hairline—a modest curl rushing towards the crown of my head like some follicular riptide—I think of Jean Cocteau and his quip:

Mirrors would do well to reflect a little more before sending back images.

Or take crowns, for instance. I live in the United Kingdom, where the head of state is a monarch who often wears a crown on festive occasions, which always makes me think of Michel de Montaigne’s great line:

Upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have to say up front that I have a vested interest in aphorisms. I’ve been obsessed by them since I was eight-years-old and have (so far) written two books on the subject. I’m so invested in aphorisms because they have invested so much in me. They are always popping into my head unbidden, and they always bring with them fresh insight or wisdom. Not in some pollyanna-ish way, like “Today is the first day of the rest of your life” or similar feel-goodisms. But in a much more provocative, challenging, and—for me, at least—rewarding way.

My 10-year-old son has been losing a lot of teeth recently. And, coincidentally, so have I. Over the past three months or so, he’s lost about a half dozen “baby teeth” and pocketed some $20 in the process. (The tooth fairy, just still barely in business with my son, is getting hammered by the pound-dollar exchange rate.) Over that same period, I have lost part of one molar (it broke off while I was eating) and had a root canal treatment on another. Total cost to me: some $1,500. I look at my son and see all the ways we are similar and different—we’re both kind of introverted, both of us love to read, but he’s a much better piano player and he makes money on his dental problems while I lose it—and I’m reminded of Magdalena Samozwaniec’s saying:

Age and youth have the same appetites but not the same teeth.

Aphorisms are food for thought—like sushi, they come in small portions that are both delicious and exquisitely formed. And, like sushi, I can never get enough.

This posting originally appeared on The Huffington Post.

On Sept. 11, I blogged about visiting the chateau of La Rochefoucauld in France, recalling how my first glimpse of a chateau-like building in Europe (the stadhuis in Delft) reminded me of Disneyland. My wife read that blog posting and pointed out that it was not me who compared the stadhuis to Disneyland; it was my brother, when he visited us in the Netherlands. And it was not, in fact, the Delft stadhuis that prompted this comparison, but the stadhuis in Gouda. I looked at a picture online and realized she was right: It was definitely Gouda and not Delft that I was thinking of, and so it must have been my brother and not me to whom the Disneyland comparison first occurred.

Memory is a strange, unreliable beast. Physiologically, memories are created and retained by an intricate and ever-shifting net of firing neurons and crackling synapses distributed throughout the brain. Memory is not, as was previously thought, some vast cerebral warehouse filled with rows and rows of neatly ordered filing cabinets. It is rather more like a labyrinth, the twistings and turnings of which rearrange themselves completely each time something is experienced and recalled.

So memories are always shifting around in the brain, being tossed and jostled about like luggage in the luggage compartment of a particularly bumpy train. Reaching into your brain for a memory can be like reaching into the back of your closet for a long-lost shoe. You may have one particular piece of footwear in mind but, because the closet is so messy, you end up pulling out a variety of things (discarded belts, orphaned socks, dust balls of various shapes and sizes) before you alight upon the shoe you wanted to find.

Plus, we all have a tendency to improve our memories with time. That is not to say that we get better at remembering things, but we get better at making the things we “remember” resemble whatever it is we would like to remember at any given time. I, for example, was in need of a nice Disneyland comparison to make a point in the blog entry on La Rochefoucauld’s chateau. It made a much better story if I made the Disneyland remark myself, so in my memory I made it so. My wife has a much more accurate memory then I do; if she had not pointed out my error to me, I would have gone on for the rest of my life thinking that my first thought upon seeing the Delft stadhuis was: “It looks just like Disneyland!” Now, I know that is not so.

As Benjamin Disraeli said:

Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

The difficulty is, learning to tell the difference between the two…