I'll Be Your Mirror

David Lazar is a professor of creative writing and English at Columbia College Chicago. He is the editor of the journal Hotel Amerika and the author of several books, including Who’s Afraid of Helen of Troy: An Essay on Love and Occasional Desire: Essays (Nebraska, 2013). Heather Frise is a filmmaker, educator, and visual artist. She recently worked on the National Film Board of Canada’s Emmy award–winning Highrise.

• Acknowledgments    Brigadoon BowlingAnn; Death and the Maiden    When I’m Awfully Low: On Singing    Lollipop Is Mine    Brushes with the Great and Not-So-Great    Brigadoon Bowling    Five Autobiographical Fragments, or She May Have Been a Witch    Pandora and the Naked Dead Woman    To the Reader, SincerelyTo the Reader, Sincerely    Being a Boy-Man    Hydra: I’ll Be Your Mirror    A Conversation with Robert Burton, Author of Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), vox es, praeterea nihil    Meet Montaigne! (with Patrick Madden)    The Typologies of John Earle    Voluptuously, Expansively, Historically, Contradictorily: Essaying the Interview with David Lazar and Mary Cappello    Rock, Paper, Scissors, God: aphorismics    Rock, Paper, Scissors, God    Mothers, Etc.    Source Credits

“Traditional aphorisms are stand-alone wisecracks, but David Lazar’s are more like stairs up into a strange isolation or down into the stranger isolation of our community with each other-‘The bliss of opening the door and finding no one there.’ They are an ultraviolet that illuminates without lightening; they are genially at home in the dark. Exhilarating and unpredictable reading.”-James Richardson, author of During and By the Numbers: Poems and Aphorisms “In David Lazar’s essays, the ostensible subjects become mindstream explorations in which music and memory dance to the intimate mysteries of human love and longing.”-Lawrence Sutin, author of A Postcard Memoir and Jack and Rochelle