Aphorisms by Lori Ellison
Posted on October 24, 2007
Filed Under Aphorisms |
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.
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In “The nuclear family is easy to atomize” Lori Ellison sets off an impressive explosion.
Mae West said of one of her suitors that he was so tenacious that the only way a woman could get rid of him was to marry him.
Lori knows where Modernism is after Midlife!
I hope it is not expected that we write an aphorism as a response to an aphorism? Lori, these these are smart, true, and funny insights.
I hope your aphorisms are also titles for paintings; and I hope your paintings are also titles for aphorisms. Your words want to be painted!!!
[...] may remember Lori Ellison from a previous posting of her aphorisms here, in October of 2007. In addition to being an aphorist, she is an artist, voracious consumer of [...]