a thread for mundane ironists

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5141

[b]Haruki Murakami

It’s a dark, cool, quiet place. A basement in your soul. And that place can sometimes be dangerous to the human mind. I can open the door and enter that darkness, but I have to be very careful. I can find my story there. Then I bring that thing to the surface, into the real world. [/b]

Or, rather, what passes for the real world in each of us

[b]I find it hard to talk about myself. I’m always tripped up by the eternal who am I? paradox. Sure, no one knows as much pure data about me as me. But when I talk about myself, all sorts of other factors–values, standards, my own limitations as an observer–make me, the narrator, select and eliminate things about me, the narratee. I’ve always been disturbed by the thought that I’m not painting a very objective picture of myself.

This kind of thing doesn’t seem to bother most people. Given the chance, people are surprisingly frank when they talk about themselves. “I’m honest and open to a ridiculous degree,” they’ll say, or “I’m thin-skinned and not the type who gets along easily in the world.” Or “I am very good at sensing others’ true feelings.” But any number of times I’ve seen people who say they’ve easily hurt other people for no apparent reason. Self-styled honest and open people, without realizing what they’re doing, blithely use some self-serving excuse to get what they want. And those “good at sensing others’ true feelings” are duped by the most transparent flattery. It’s enough to make me ask the question: How well do we really know ourselves?

The more I think about it, the more I’d like to take a rain check on the topic of me. What I’d like to know more about is the objective reality of things outside myself. How important the world outside is to me, how I maintain a sense of equilibrium by coming to terms with it. That’s how I’d grasp a clearer sense of who I am.[/b]

Instrospection: Where to start, when to stop.

A giant octopus living way down deep at the bottom of the ocean. It has this tremendously powerful life force, a bunch of long, undulating legs, and it’s heading somewhere, moving through the darkness of the ocean… It takes on all kinds of different shapes—sometimes it’s ‘the nation,’ and sometimes it’s ‘the law,’ and sometimes it takes on shapes that are more difficult and dangerous than that. You can try cutting off its legs, but they just keep growing back. Nobody can kill it. It’s too strong, and it lives too far down in the ocean. Nobody knows where its heart is. What I felt then was a deep terror. And a kind of hopelessness, a feeling that I could never run away from this thing, no matter how far I went. And this creature, this thing doesn’t give a damn that I’m me or you’re you. In its presence, all human beings lose their names and their faces. We all turn into signs, into numbers.

Introspection: Where to start, when to stop.

I would never see her again, except in memory. She was here, and now she’s gone. There is no middle ground. Probably is a word that you may find south of the border. But never, ever west of the sun.

Or, sure, probably not.

All you have to do is wait, I explained. Sit tight and wait for the right moment. Not try to change anything by force, just watch the drift of things. Make an effort to cast a fair eye on everything. If you do that, you just naturally know what to do.

What on earth does that actually mean though?

It’s a question of attitude. If you really work at something you can do it up to a point. If you really work at being happy you can do it up to a point. But anything more than that you can’t. Anything more than that is luck.

On the other hand, as one or another among us has intimated, we make our own luck. Up to a point for example.

5142

[b]Sophocles

Death is not the worst evil, but rather when we wish to die and cannot.[/b]

Let’s file this one [hopefully] under, “where there’s a will there’s a way”.

Yet I pity the poor wretch, though he’s my enemy. He’s yoked to an evil delusion, but the same fate could be mine. I see clearly: we who live are all phantoms, fleeing shadows.

Haven’t I been saying that now for years?

It’s perfect justice: natures like yours are hardest on themselves.

Notice he says yours and not mine. When clearly the opposite is true.

They are dying, the old oracles sent to Laius, now our masters strike them off the rolls. Nowhere Apollo’s golden glory now – the gods, the gods go down.

Of course there will always be others. Your own for example.

To speak much is one thing; to speak to the point another!

In other words, his point.

Those swift to think are not always secure.

Or today: those swift to tweet.

5143

[b]George Bernard Shaw

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.[/b]

Obviously not a good idea for some.

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

Let’s exchange our close seconds.
Of course you already know mine.

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.

At the time however they actually believe that they can.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.

Right, like there aren’t thousands upon thousands of exceptions.

The liar’s punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

All the more incentive then to be better at it.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

Thank god we know better, right?

5144

[b]Gloria Steinem

…one of the simplest paths to deep change is for the less powerful to speak as much as they listen, and for the more powerful to listen as much as they speak.[/b]

Someone pass this on to Don.
And to the masses.

Decisions are best made by the people affected by them.

In other words, if that’s actually an option.

Having someone who looks like us but thinks like them is worse than having no one at all.

Ted Nugent leaps to mind. True story.

If you find yourself drawn to an event against all logic, go. The universe is telling you something.

I suppose that’s one explanation for why we choose to post here. Instead of there.
Yes, that there.

Law and justice are not always the same.

No shit, he thought.

Nobody cares about feminist academic writing. That’s careerism. These poor women in academia have to talk this silly language that nobody can understand in order to be accepted… But I recognize the fact that we have this ridiculous system of tenure, that the whole thrust of academia is one that values education, in my opinion, in inverse ratio to its usefulness—and what you write in inverse relationship to its understandability…Academics are forced to write in language no one can understand so that they get tenure. They have to say ‘discourse’, not ‘talk’. Knowledge that is not accessible is not helpful.

No, this really is true. Just ask Mr. Pedant.

5145

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.” Plato[/b]

Okay, let’s decide knowledgably if 1 = 0.999.

“An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.” Gustave Flaubert

Going all the way back [so far] to the Big Bang

“One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.” Gustave Flaubert

Okay, but what if what you do is what you feel?

"Truth is that which makes a people certain, clear, and strong.” Martin Heidegger

Of course he’s just paraphrasing Adolph Hitler.

“Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.” Martin Heidegger

And not just words like “dasein”.

“Any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists in his error.” Marcus Tullius Cicero

Now [of course] we call that the Don Trump Syndrome.

5146

[b]Jean Baudrillard

There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. Appearances, they are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism. This is where seduction begins.[/b]

So, does this appear to be true or not?

Each category is generalized to the greatest possible extent, so that it eventually loses all specificity and is reabsorbed by all the other categories. When everything is political, nothing is political anymore, the word itself is meaningless. When everything is sexual, nothing is sexual any more, and sex loses its determinants. When everything is aesthetic, nothing is beautiful or ugly any more, and art itself disappears.

Is everything more or less nothing more or less than nothing is more or less everything? Or, instead, is it always somewhere in between.

Today cinema can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what it itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein.

And just in time for the Summer blockbusters.

[b]Why did this Vietnam war, so hard, so long, so ferocious, vanish from one day to the next as if by magic?

Why did this American defeat (the largest reversal in the history of the USA) have no internal repercussions in America? If it had really signified the failure of the planetary strategy of the United States, it would necessarily have completely disrupted its internal balance and the American political system.[/b]

Who cares? Capitalism triumphed. And all the more so after Don Trump drains the swamp.

Everyone seeks their look. Since it is no longer possible to base any claim on one’s own existence, there is nothing for it but to perform an appearing act without concerning oneself with being - or even with being seen. So it is not: I exist, I am here! but rather: I am visible, I am an image…look! look! This is not even narcissism, merely an extraversion without depth, a sort of self-promot­ing ingenuousness whereby everyone becomes the manager of their own appearance.

Then you just pick the celebrity to base it on.

…deconstruction and other French theories was the gift of the French. They gave Americans a language they did not need. It was like the Statue of Liberty. Nobody needs French theory.

And nobody still needs it.

5147

[b]Tom Perrotta

Abstinence is perfectly reasonable in theory, Gregory said, It just doesn’t work in practice. It’s like dieting. You can go a day or two, maybe even a week. But eventually that pizza just smells too good.[/b]

On the other hand, sometimes [in practice] you don’t have much of a choice.

Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they’d ruined, got a little stale after a while.

Nope, none of mine have.

It’s like the human race has been programmed for misery.

Both genetically and memetically one suspects.

We’re agnostics, she used to tell her kids, back when they were little and needed a way to define themselves to their Catholic and Jewish and Unitarian friends. We don’t know if there’s a God, and nobody else does, either. They might say they do, but they really don’t.

This part always gets tricky.

Memory has a way of distorting the past, of making certain events seem larger and more significant in retrospect than they ever could have been at the time they occurred.

Including the memories you will have of today.

[b]But he thought about him a lot in the years that followed, whenever anyone made a fag joke or said that gay men deserved to get AIDS. Sometimes, if the circumstances were right, Tim would challenge the speaker, ask if he – in Tim´s experience, it was always a he – had any friends who were gay. Almost always the guy would say no.

Wait till you do Tim would tell him. That´s when you´ll realize what an asshole you used to be.[/b]

I know: That wouldn’t work with you.

5148

[b]Nein

Summer without a reading list. Like tragedy without farce.[/b]

You know, when you can tell them apart.

Friday. Casual Capitalism.

Begetting casual exploitation.

Discontent. It’s not just for winter anymore.

But, sure, mostly then.

Thank you for calling Jared Kushner.
For English, press 1.
For Spanish, 2.
For Russian, hang up, delete everything, and meet me in the park.

Or [for now] in the Oval Office.

First as tragedy. Then as covfefe.

Then as farce.

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was, at best, not yet the very worst of the very, very worst of times.

And not just for Don Trump.

5149

[b]Stieg Larsson

Don’t get politics mixed up in this. It’s all about money and it makes no difference if the Social Democrats or the moderates appoint the ministers.[/b]

No, really, it doesn’t.

He was a cocky devil. Lisbeth liked cocky devils, just as she detested pompous jerks. There was only a subtle difference.

So, which one am I?

Nobody can avoid falling in love, he said. They might want to deny it, but friendship is probably the most common form of love.

As you might well imagine I am bereft of both.

Bastards too have a right to their private lives.

Maybe, but how about sons of bitches?

I don’t like institutions that are beyond normal parliamentary scrutiny. It’s an invitation to abuse of power, no matter how noble the intentions.

Cue Robert Mueller.

Don’t get me wrong - I was not a Nazi, and in my eyes Hitler seemed like some absurd character in an operetta. But, it would have been almost impossible not to be infected by the optimism about the future, which was rife among ordinary people in Hamburg.

Could it really have been as simple as that?

5150

[b]Christopher Marlowe

Hell is just a frame of mind.[/b]

Not unlike Heaven.

Stay, Mephistopheles, and tell me, what good will my soul do thy lord?
Enlarge his kingdom.
Is that the reason he tempts us thus?
It is a comfort to the wretched to have companions in misery.

That’s logical enough for me.

Why should you love him whom the world hates so?
Because he loves me more than all the world.

That’s logical enough for me.

Fools that will laugh on earth, must weep in Hell.

When they’re not screaming in agony.

Money can’t buy love, but it improves your bargaining position.

And that’s still true, isn’t it? And getting truer all the time.

What nourishes me, destroys me

Along the lines of what brings death is birth.

5151

[b]Julia Kristeva

The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist.[/b]

In any event, this one is.

When the starry sky, a vista of open seas, or a stained-glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things I see, hear, or think, The “sublime” object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be.

There are folks who think like this, who feel like this. Meanwhile, I’ve never really even come close.

Today’s milestone is human madness. Politics is a part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts. Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human freedom is unfurled. The modern world, the world of world war, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city state. The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation.

He thought: Either that or heroin.

…the abject is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become alter ego, drops so that the “I” does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence.

Let’s decide if she’s talking about me.

Naming suffering, exalting it, dissecting it into its smallest components – that is doubtless a way to curb mourning.

Tried that once or twice myself. Just not anymore.

That faith be analyzable does not necessarily imply a method for getting by without it. . . .

Unless of course you don’t really have a choice. Or you can try to analyze that.

5152

[b]Aeschylus

His resolve is not to seem, but to be, the best.[/b]

He thought: Or, if you count me, not the worst.

It’s not the oath that makes us believe the man, but the man the oath.

Let’s hear the oath first.

Unanimous hatred is the greatest medicine for a human community.

I’ll bet [for some] that’s hard to swallow.

In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

Yeah, right.

Oh, it is easy for the one who stands outside the prison-wall of pain to exhort and teach the one who suffers.

Lot’s of things like that are easy.

There is no sickness worse for me than words that to be kind must lie.

Not only that but it’s always terminal.

5153

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

French lit: You can’t know the truth
German lit: You can’t handle the truth
American lit: The truth can’t be bothered with you[/b]

Me less than you though.

Logic: True or false
Ethics: Good or evil
Aesthetics: Beautiful or ugly
Politics: OMG! or WTF!

Still, don’t forget to vote.

[b]A Brief History of Philosophy

  1. Self
  2. Other
  3. The Self’s Other
  4. The Other’s Other Self
  5. God as other than Self or Other
  6. Selfie[/b]

Let’s call that the final synthesis.

[b]Sentences That Won’t End Well

  1. Where I disagree with Hegel is…
  2. As a post-postmodernist, I…
  3. I didn’t read it, but I think…[/b]

Come on, we can do better than that.

Aristotle: law of non-contradiction
Leibniz: principle of sufficient reason
Kant: unity of the manifold
Nietzsche: no pain, no gain

Which one does not fit?

Life is
Greek philosophy: next to nothing
French philosophy: less than nothing
German philosophy: good for nothing
US philosophy: expensive

That and cheap.

5154

[b]Jeanette Winterson

I don’t own my emotions unless I can think about them. I am not afraid of feeling but I am afraid of feeling unthinkingly.[/b]

Let’s just say that you can take it too far.

There are times when it will go so wrong that you will be barely alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else’s terms.

Most times though it will be too close to call.

Where you are born—what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own—stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

Besides, fuck the pundits.

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea.

Fortunately [so far] I’ve never been that curious.

She was a committed romantic and an anarcho-feminist. This was hard for her because it meant she couldn’t blow up beautiful buildings. She knew the Eiffel Tower was a hideous symbol of phallic oppression but when ordered by her commander to detonate the lift so that no-one should unthinkingly scale an erection, her mind filled with young romantics gazing over Paris and opening aerograms that said Je t’aime.

Let’s file this one under, “conflicting goods on steroids”.

I don’t know how to answer. I know what to think, but words in the head are like voices under water. They are distorted.

Distorted indeed. Though being under water has nothing to do with it.

5155

[b]Ernest Hemingway

Blood is thicker than water,
The young man said
As he knifed his friend
For a drooling old bitch
And a house full of lies.[/b]

Thicker for some, thinner for others.

Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.

That explains a lot, he thought. About, among other things, the Kids.

If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry. Worry never fixes anything.

What we need however is a pill for it. Especially one that actually works.

Work could cure almost anything.

His work maybe.

The only kind of writing is rewriting.

Or: The only kind of thinking is rethinking.
And then finally just giving up when necessary.

In Dostoevsky there were things unbelievable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev.

And they’re still there even to this day.

5156

[b]Existential Comics

If you aren’t a creative person: don’t worry. You can still go online and shit all over everyone else’s work.[/b]

But wouldn’t that make you a troll? Or a Kid?

[b]There are 3 kinds of jokes:

  1. Silliness
  2. Satire
  3. Humor subverting capitalist ideology in order to build proletariat class consciousness[/b]

What’s that make Don Trump’s tweets then?

[b]How to make philosophy popular:

  1. More bite sized wisdom.
  2. Say it is part of science.
  3. A movie where Scarlett Johansson plays Avicenna.[/b]

I smell a fatwa.

The most important step to becoming an intellectual is to simply understand where your own ideas have come from.

I think that’s where I come in. But, sure, maybe not.

A lot of people spend time reading books, but true wisdom is only found in a good social media strategy.

You know, to state the obvious.

It’s weird people think “Postmodernism” lead to Trump, and not the rapid anti-intellectualism that extends even to science popularizers.

Jesus, what if he’s right?!

5157

[b]Michael Lewis

They had stumbled either upon a serious flaw in modern financial markets or into a great gambling run. Characteristically, they were not sure which it was. As Charlie pointed out, It’s really hard to know when you’re lucky and when you’re smart.[/b]

Here of course we always know the difference. Well, if there is one.

The role had been spawned by the widespread belief that traders didn’t know how to talk to computer geeks and that computer geeks did not respond rationally to big, hairy traders hollering at them.

Still, somebody is making money there.

The old Soviet culture also left its former citizens oddly prepared for Wall Street in the early twenty-first century. The Soviet-controlled economy was horrible and complicated but riddled with loopholes. Everything was scarce; everything was also gettable, if you knew how to get it. We had this system for seventy years, said Constantine. People learn to work around the system. The more you cultivate a class of people who know how to work around the system, the more people you will have who know how to do it well. All of the Soviet Union for seventy years were people who are skilled at working around the system.

But soon of course Vladimir Putin will drain the swamp.

Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called hidden people—or, to put it more plainly, elves—in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free, but, as he put it, we couldn’t as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people.

Can anyone here confirm that this is a true story?

The trouble, Danny suspected, was that the understanding of numbers is so weak that they don’t communicate anything. Everyone feels that those probabilities are not real—that they are just something on somebody’s mind.

With philosophy of course it wasn’t numbers but words.

Once very smart people are paid huge sums of money to exploit the flaws in the financial system, they have the spectacularly destructive incentive to screw the system up further, or to remain silent as they watch it being screwed up by others. The cost, in the end, is a tangled-up financial system. Untangling it requires acts of commercial heroism—and even then the fix might not work. There was simply too much more easy money to be made by elites if the system worked badly than if it worked well. The whole culture had to want to change. We know how to cure this, as Brad had put it. It’s just a matter of whether the patient wants to be treated.

Not to worry. After Don Trump drains the swamp in Washington. he’ll be doing the same on Wall Street.

5158

[b]Neil Gaiman

Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.[/b]

True, but once about thirty years ago, I did come close.

I would like to see anyone, prophet, king or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time.

Or even two.

I am selfish, private and easily bored. Will this be a problem?

On some threads here, not at all.

All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.

Anyone here not found that out yet

Every hour wounds. The last one kills.

And you can take that to the grave.

You’ve a good heart. Sometimes that’s enough to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it’s not.

Anyone here have a good heart?
Is it worth it?

5159

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone.[/b]

Really, how the fuck does anyone manage to feel close to “everything in the universe”? Let alone at one with it.
No, seriously

One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second.

Or, at most, a minute.

We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God.

Let’s exchange our own rendition of that.

…he enclosed pieces of string that he used to measure out his body–his head, thigh, forearm, finger, neck, everything. He wanted me to sleep with them under my pillow. He said that when he came back, we would remeasure his body against the string as proof that he hadn’t changed.

He means the strings for the outside of course.

Abraham didn’t say, “What do you want?” He didn’t say, “Yes?” He answered with a statement: “Here I am.” Whatever God needs or wants, Abraham is wholly present for Him, without conditions or reservations or need for explanation.

To tell you the truth, I’d do the same if there was a God.

Which, then, brings us closer to what we want to communicate: saying what we intend, or trying to say the opposite?

Yes?

5160

[b]Haruki Murakami

Now all you can do is wait. It must be hard for you, but there is a right time for everything. Like the ebb and flow of tides. No one can do anything to change them. When it is time to wait, you must wait.[/b]

Fuck that. I say impeach him now!

History cannot be erased or altered. Because that would mean killing yourself.

Like most of us though, I decided to take that chance.

What if I’ve forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud? The thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow.

Mud today, dust tomorrow.

The world is full of ways and means to waste time.

Not what we do here though. Well, some of us.

If only I could fall sound asleep and wake up in my old reality!

He thought: I hear that.

It’s the first thing I always say at our new employee training seminars. I gaze around the room, pick one person, and have him stand up. And this is what I say: I have some good news for you, and some bad news. The bad news first. We’re going to have to rip off either your fingernails or your toenails with pliers. I’m sorry, but it’s already decided. It can’t be changed. I pull out a huge, scary pair of pliers from my briefcase and show them to everybody. Slowly, making sure everybody gets a good look. And then I say: Here’s the good news. You have the freedom to choose which it’s going to be—your fingernails, or your toenails. So, which will it be? You have ten seconds to make up your mind. If you’re unable to decide, we’ll rip off both your fingernails and your toenails. I start the count. At about eight seconds most people say, ‘The toes.’ Okay, I say, toenails it is. I’ll use these pliers to rip them off. But before I do, I’d like you to tell me something. Why did you choose your toes and not your fingers? The person usually says, ‘I don’t know. I think they probably hurt the same. But since I had to choose one, I went with the toes.’ I turn to him and warmly applaud him. And I say, Welcome to the real world.

There are of course other real worlds. But point taken.