On Ear Wax
It is burnt amber in color, with the consistency of moist hashish. There are occasional yellow streaks, the color of mucous or a snail’s viscera spread out on the street. I saw mine because days and days of swimming over the summer loosened it up enough to slide down my ear canal [...]
On A Painting Falling Off the Wall
It happened again: a splash of glass somewhere in the house. It was a loud, strangely metallic sound, like the crash of a wave hurling sunken cutlery against a tin cliff. But we couldn’t locate the noise. Was it upstairs or down? Did it come from the next room or some more obscure corner of [...]
On A Painting Falling Off the Wall
It happened again: a splash of glass somewhere in the house. It was a loud, strangely metallic sound, like the crash of a wave hurling sunken cutlery against a tin cliff. But we couldn’t locate the noise. Was it upstairs or down? Did it come from the next room or some more obscure corner of [...]
On Proverbs
Proverbs are not aphorisms. Or maybe I should call them fossilized aphorisms, since the only one of Geary’s Five Laws of the Aphorism that proverbs do not obey is: It Must Be Personal. Proverbs were personal when they were first coined, but that was so long ago that the identity of the author has long [...]
On One-Hit Wonders
I am up to my eyeballs in aphorisms. As part of the research for my next book, an encyclopedia of world aphorists that’s due out in November of 2007, I am going through every title in the British Library (every title, that is, that’s in a language I can read) that comes up under the [...]
On One-Hit Wonders
I am up to my eyeballs in aphorisms. As part of the research for my next book, an encyclopedia of world aphorists that’s due out in November of 2007, I am going through every title in the British Library (every title, that is, that’s in a language I can read) that comes up under the [...]