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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

OGIC: Write a little

May 25, 2012 by ldemanski

Aphorisms are almost the opposite of the kind of writing that typically draws me in, writing that’s absorbed in the particular. But Aaron Haspel’s hard, bright aphorisms, which he recently brought together and called Everything, are abstract and generalizing, yet so precise as to share something of the quality of the gemlike details I swoon over in poems and fiction. They give a startle first that then gives way to recognition. Twitter, where I first read many of them, might have seemed their natural context in a way, but they gain force from being collected together and grouped by theme.
Here are several of my favorites:
No style guide can address the chief defect in writing, which is having nothing to say.
Good critics do not have good taste. They have articulate, consistent taste for which the reader can correct.
Read a lot: think some: write a little.
Influence is plagiarism spread thin.
The less a discipline resembles mathematics, the less likely a clever theory is to be true.
Few experiences are more salutary than losing an argument, but only if you notice.
The parable of the drunk looking for his keys under the street lamp, where the light is better, explains vast swaths of intellectual history.
Efficient search is serendipity’s implacable enemy.
The more you regard your life as a story the more you edit it.
The superstitions of a culture are easily discerned: they are the matters on which everyone agrees.
Low-down, thoroughgoing rottenness often has nice manners.
Your terrible secret is that you have no terrible secret.
Blaming an actor for being a narcissist is like blaming a tiger for being a carnivore.
To manage people effectively you must not only accept but praise work that you could have done better yourself.
A relentlessly cheerful, upbeat, can-do attitude is a highly effective form of bullying.
More successful enterprises have been created for spite than for money.
Humanity for the first time is burdened with a vast proletariat of literate, ambitious, and demanding people who can’t really do anything.
The joy of money lies less in what one does than in what one might do.
The people are flattered more obsequiously than the monarch ever was.
We reserve our warmest admiration, not for what is utterly beyond us, but for what we secretly believe we might have done ourselves on our very best day.
The future will marvel that we regarded “be yourself” as sound moral advice.
Better deceived than distrustful.
Nothing tastes quite like the hand that feeds you.
People will like you if you like them, which is too high a price.
To hate something properly you must have liked it once.
To make an epigram, invert a cliché.

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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