Feb 122012
 

Here is a taste of the latest of my epigrams at Global Brief just published.

dg

Cooperation is local, competition is pandemic. It has always been this way. We live in a churning cauldron of competitive vectors, of drags and accelerants. We compete for money, jobs, love, space and power. We compete, and we are competed for (for our votes, for our consumer dollars, for our admiration – desire desires desire). What goes for thinking these days is mostly competition; what goes for information is mostly shill and exhortation. The media world is a vast infomercial – competing for the mind of the reader, the e-reader or the (TV) e-watcher.

Conversation is a competition to have one’s voice heard; to have one’s ideas prevail. Languages compete and extend their reach or disappear. The world is a chessboard of international gamesmanship. In space, we are all competing for the higher ground. And, willy-nilly, the whirling, pulsing interactions of competition seem only to grow faster and denser as the world goes digital, and as connectivity multiplies arenas of contention. The individual human being wins and loses a thousand times a day – mostly without even knowing it, as the virtual and invisible electronic tickers mark the rise and fall of prices, currency and interest rates. Being alive, we compete.

via The Future is Red in Tooth and Claw : Global Brief.

Apr 122010
 

The People waiting to vote in the aphorism contest



The People have spoken, but the result was a tie on very thin voting. This is what you get when you ask the People for an opinion. I discounted the “blue dog” aphorism because, despite all the proxy votes Gary emailed in, it’s not an aphorism. Pretty dog though.

dg

The co-winners are:

For Bard: An Aphorism”

Forsake not my love for suspect art
For ’tis less vain by far,
To leave the flames of fame unfanned
Than be left alone with self in hand.

Michele Irwin

AND

Donne was wrong: every man is an island, and without that saving strand of water between us we would all go mad.

Steven Axelrod

Apr 122010
 




The following is an email sent to dg from the anonymous contest judge who is in hiding, with his entire family and pets, somewhere in Argentina.

This was a tough go over the weekend for an indecisive judge. All the finalists were extremely good, very witty. In fact, the whole contest was a pleasant surprise–for the commentary as well as the entries. I loved Nina’s very short aphorism “A mapped world is always small” for its terseness; when you unpack it, the idea is huge–the unknown is always greater than the known. Steven Axelrod is a very witty man playing on glass houses, green houses and the greenhouse effect. (If there had been a prize for most prolific, he would have won; had their been a prize for the under-21 age group, Madeleine would have won.) C. M. Mayo’s entry grew and grew on me. I think I didn’t take it seriously at first because she was clearly just having fun with the contest, but she did an amazing little thing turning the idea of procrastination upside down (making it a pleasure instead of something to inspire guilt) with the egg and yolk idea. Gwen Mullins three-word line may not even be an aphorism precisely, but I liked the verbal play: fuck to effing to the letter f to the word “ineffable.” Natasha Sarkissian’s face entry was also a sleeper. It just kept staying in the mix as I found reasons to cut others out. It’s very clever: losing face, saving face, face lift, plastic surgery. Kit Hathaway is the old pro, the ringer. His aphorism worked as a rhyming couplet, but it also worked as a complex idea starting with the leap of putting Zoloft next to Nietzsche and coming up with the idea that they have a lot in common; Zoloft evens out the emotional peaks and valleys while Nietzsche delivered us from guilt and judgment (“neither bad nor good” plays off the title of Nietzsche’s book Beyond Good and Evil).

So I tried various criteria. Everyone was about equal on wit and verbal play. But when I asked myself about the profundity of the ideas behind the aphorisms, then Nina and Kit came out in front. Not that aphorisms have to be profound, but I was looking for some reason to separate the entries. Then I also tried to factor in syntactic and semantic complexity. I thought Kit had a slight edge there. But when it came to arrogance, Kit had a definite edge.

So by incremental calculations of relative value–even more Byzantine than hinted at here–I came to the conclusion that the winner is William Hathaway for his aphorism:

Zoloft does more than Nietzsche could
to make you feel neither bad nor good.

This is a preliminary announcement only. Press releases have gone out to major media. The winner was notified this morning by telephone and pronounced himself  “over the moon.” The actual award, along with a considerable financial emolument, will be presented in Stockholm to coincide with the lesser known, yet no doubt estimable in its own right, Nobel Prize for Literature.

The judge will remain anonymous. Any attempt to contact him will be reported to the police. The cat in the earlier post is not the judge’s cat; it was a professional model posing as the judge’s cat. Contractual arrangements outlined in the entry form protect the magazine, dg, his family and staff from civil actions pertaining to the contest. Entry fees were clearly stated to be non-refundable.

dg

Apr 102010
 

The judge's cat, clearly suffering from intense Aphorism Contest anxiety

Yes, the death threats, the bribes, and blackmail have begun. The pressure on the judge is incredible at this point. How do you decide between one great entry and another? The judge is drinking vodka neat morning til night; he’s taken up smoking; he’s found a bottle of painkillers from his knee surgery (or possibly they are antibiotics for the dog). Nothing helps. He is thinking of just taking all the entry fees and prize money and flying to Mexico til this blows over.

I should add that the People’s Choice contest is a complete mess at this point with a three-way tie. Could someone please go to the post and break the tie?

dg

The Finalists



A loss of face requires more than plastic surgery to fix.
Natalia Sarkissian
——————
Zoloft does more than Nietzsche could
to make you feel neither bad nor good.
William Hathaway
—————–
In the egg of procrastination, there is the yolk of fun.
C.M. Mayo
————-
People who live in glass houses understand the greenhouse effect.
Steven Axelrod
——————-
A mapped world is always small.
Nina Alvarez
—————-
Fuck the ineffable.
Gwen Mullins


Apr 082010
 

Here is the first cut, the best, to my mind, of the entries. Some had to be eliminated, inevitably, despite all the wit and enthusiasm they exhibited. Nonetheless, I expect death threats. That’s why the judge’s name has been withheld.

dg

The most curious cat has no interest in the price of dog food.
Steven Axelrod
———————–
Essays are fictions in which writers efface themselves, pretending they are not there, perhaps even believing it. Ideas are an essay’s themes, used to produce the illusion of substance; facts are the details the story teller selects to give the impression of reality. Its plot is the progression of its argument, which, as in fiction, moves to the consummation of some desire, or the destruction of another.
Gary Garvin
——————–
Beware the aphorism: a leading cause of spontaneous aneurysm.
Jacob Glover
—————–
Aph or isms – take your pick.
Julie Larios
—————–
A loss of face requires more than plastic surgery to fix.
Natalia Sarkissian
——————

Read the rest!

Mar 302010
 

I’ve culled through the original contest post for legitimate entries. By “legitimate,” I mean not quotations from other writers or lines stolen from Jonah. I also, regretfully, eliminated my own entries. Here is the list so far (let me know if anyone feels unjustly left off). Entries are now officially closed. But some of you voted before some of the latest entries came in. See below or check entries and comments on the original contest post.

Please feel free to cast votes for your favourite in the comments section (no secret ballot); I’ve decided there will be two winners, one chosen by the judges, and one chosen by readers. Read the entries carefully; some of them are actually multiple entries. Anyone who cares to can vote; this isn’t restricted to students or former students.

Some rules of the road: 1) Don’t vote more than once. You can enter more than once, but you can’t vote more than once. 2) Check to make sure you know what an aphorism is before your vote. (I know, I know–I’m a pedant.) 3) You can change your vote as long as you make it clear that this is what you’re doing. 4) You can add supporting commentary to your vote. 5) Make sure you are clear in your comment/ballot which aphorism you are voting for.

Here’s a running tabulation of results as of 5pm, April 8

Lucy! (my dog) An aphorism is 2 votes (a third vote, from Gary’s son, is in dispute because he didn’t actually vote himself; also Gary wrote [somehow channeling my dog, I guess] the aphorism and voted for himself–not necessarily against the rules; also Robin, who voted for it, is uncertain if it is an aphorism–as usual the People are a fractured and disputatious lot)

Michele Irwin For Bard 2 votes

Axelrod  Donne… 2 votes

Axelrod When you wish 1 vote

Axelrod There is nothing quite 1 vote

Lucy! (my dog) An aphorism is 1 vote

dg

———————————–

Talk is cheap — because supply exceeds demand.

Steven Axelrod

March 15, 2010 at 4:05 pm Edit
———————

Read the rest…

Mar 212010
 

Last night I watched a movie called A Good Woman adapted from Oscar Wilde’s play Lady Windermere’s Fan. Very witty, packed with aphorisms. But it was also fun to look at the play and the script (this is not a movie script but a transcript just to give you an idea). The movie doesn’t seem to have gotten such good reviews, but the side dialogue crackled on occasion. Take a look at it if you get the chance.

Here are a few aphorisms I lifted from the play this morning:

I can resist everything except temptation.

Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.

Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones.

But my experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don’t know anything at all.

…nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion.

dg

Mar 192010
 

Dog

An aphorism is a rhetorical structure that more often than not functions as a balanced antithesis. This against that. There are many sub-varieties. Wit is introduced through surprising twists or juxtapositions, puns, and homophones.

E.g. “Obliquity of style leads straight to the Purgatory of vagueness.” (This I wrote in a student packet letter.)

“Separation gives one a chance to be a new person, but the new person has to take this huge, mangy, bloody, limping, rabid, mongrel dog on a leash everywhere he goes — this dog is the old person.” (This was a fugitive autobiographical thought.)

Here is one model exemplified by the Marquis de Sade. “There are two positions available to us–either crime which renders us happy, or the noose, which prevents us from being unhappy.”

And here is one of my own written after de Sade’s example. I wrote it to a student in a packet letter not so long ago. “There are two kinds of readers–the adventurers who glory in the breathtaking audacity and risk of a well-turned aphorism and the weenies who, lacking courage themselves, find it affront in others.”

Here is a Lawrence Durrell variant from his novel Clea: “‘There are only three things to be done with a woman,’ said Clea once. ‘You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.'”

And here is one of mine using the model: “Three people become famous as a result of any new artistic movement: the one who invents it, the one who does it best, and the one who parodies it.”

Here is an aphorism by Montaigne: “The world is but a school of inquiry.”

And this is one of mine using the same model. It’s from my story “Bad News of the Heart.” “Love is an erotic accident prolonged to disaster.”

This is from “The Indonesian Client.” “All sex is the manipulation of guilt for pleasure.”

Here is another from my story “Woman Gored by Bison Lives.” “Life is always better under the influence of mild intoxicants.”

There are many more variants of the form. Finding them and identifying them is a little like bird watching.

dg

See Numéro Cinq‘s First Ever Aphorism Contest below.

Mar 152010
 

THE FIRST EVER NUMÉRO CINQ APHORISM CONTEST

Submissions March 15-31, 2010

Submit by commenting on this post

Submissions must be no more than 150 words in length

Do not enter a submission unless you have figured out what an aphorism is first

Wit and arrogance appreciated

Contest open to everyone including employees of Numéro Cinq, their significant others, children, and small pets

First Prize — Instant Worldwide (e)Publication w/ commentary

Plus honours & laurels