Bon Mots and Fine Images

I wonder if I had been given as an adolescent a copy with such a cover

would I have developed such a love for aphorisms.

I had long ago passed it along. But I came upon it years later and picked it up for the nostalgia factor and that it sported the same cover I remembered from my teens:

And found within the imaginative verve of illustrations providing narrative appeal to the aphorisms. Who knew that Voltaire's "Save me from my friends" would take the form of a duel about to unfold?

The title page truly describes this Hallmark Edition:
The French on Life and Love, Selected by Edward Lewis with frivolous illustrations in color by John Trotta.

And so for day 2393
02.07.2013

The Emergency of Breath

Finding that guilt is not a useful emotion, I learnt a long while ago to live by the mantra "No Blame No Shame" (or vice versa) as I neither wanted to be the cause of either in people I encountered nor carry either within myself. Imagine my delight in the listing offered in a poem by Roy Miki which rhymed in a very opposite direction signalling rantings that need to yield.

"No pain no gain." "No sin no grin." "No blame
no fame." The social goods are stacked. All bets
were off track as the announcer waived his voice
fee to expose his goods. You or i only wish the
rantings that blanket the public airwaves of
displeasure would yield the emergency of breath.

From Scoping (Also Pronounced Shopping) in Kits
in Open Text: Canadian Poetry and Poetics in the 21^st Century Vol. 2 edited by Roger Farr (North Vancouver: CUE, 2009).

And so for day 2379
18.06.2013

Changes of State - States of Change

Edward Bryne
From "Délires"
In Open Text Volume 2 Canadian Poetry and Poetics in the 21st Century

Even successful snowmen must melt.

Subtle alliterations.

And so for day 2374
13.06.2013

Three More Minute Pauses

Three more aphorisms lifted from their embedding in surreal non sequiturs.

Greg Evason
The Red Blind
Toronto: The Pink Dog Press, 1991

Swearing is justifiable when you are a walking dictionary.
[...]
A word like prostitution can confuse a lot of people.
[...]
Words are living breathing replicas.

Lexical commercials.

And so for day 2367
06.06.2013

on parting from the party

Sometimes an atheist can be holier than thou...

AN AFFECTATION IN PARTING. He who wishes to sever his connection with a party or a creed thinks it necessary for him to refute it. This is a most arrogant notion. The only thing necessary is that he should clearly see what tentacles hitherto held him to this party or creed and no longer hold him, what views impelled him to it and now impel him in some other directions. We have not joined the party or creed on strict grounds of knowledge. We should not affect this attitude on parting from it either.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Human, All-Too-Human

Disengage becomes a work of in/difference.

And so for day 2138
20.10.2012

Singular Praise of Reduplication

Nietzche from Human All Too Human

It is an excellent thing to express a thing consecutively in two ways, and thus provide it with a right and a left foot. Truth can stand indeed on one leg, but with two she will walk and complete her journey.

Does Truth ever crawl?

And so for day 2132
14.10.2012

Radish Pyrotechnics

Rhea Tregebov. "The fire under control" in no one we know.

This is a poem that begins with the collection and consumption of vegetables (such as peppers and rhubarb and of course radishes) and moves on to consider fire that is not to be dug up.

Radishes figure a peevish,
proletarian vegetable.
When you bite them, they bite back.

This seems likes a simple innocent remark about the pungent taste of radishes. However, by poem's end we are aware that the fire under control is radioactive — after Chernobyl. The burn burns deeper.

And so for day 1523
13.02.2011

SHORTS ON SHORTNESS OF LIFE

To judge a book by its cover, this one is an homage to Jenny Holzer. Holzer on screen and cityscape (from the days of Truisms) and George Murray in book work (Glimpse) trade in aphorisms.

One of my favourites from Murray:

The only reliable form of time travel is living.

And so by moving forward in our reading we turn to the past and open the book Jenny Holzer: The Venice Installations to Michael Auping's curatorial statement in which we read "Given the character of Holzer's texts, the quietude of Holzer's antechambers is decidedly unsettling." Consider the opening and closing of "LAMENTS 1987-89".

THE NEW DISEASE CAME.
I LEARN THAT TIME
DOES NOT HEAL.
EVERYTHING GETS
WORSE WITH DAYS.
I HAVE SPOTS
LIKE A DOG.

[...]

I WANT TO GO TO
THE FUTURE PLEASE.

As Murray writes, "We're already being studied by the future."

And so for day 1244
10.05.2010