a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The enjoyment itself is not in the thing we enjoy, but the idea of it.” Soren Kierkegaard[/b]

Among other things, I beg to differ.

“The more one thinks about it objectively, there is less.” Soren Kierkegaard

We’ll have to know what it is first of course.

“Every revolution has its corollary the massacre of the innocents.” Charles Baudelaire

Well, surely all the ones so far.

“To know oneself, one should assert oneself.” Albert Camus

If only to discover how others know you.

“One recognizes one’s course by discovering the paths that stray from it." Albert Camus

Wow, there must be hundreds of them that stray from mine. And that’s just here.

“You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.” Albert Camus

Come on, one way or another, you are either living or you’re not.

[b]Meg Wolitzer

You didn’t always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got the standing ovation. You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting.[/b]

Even if you never really were.

It’s funny how you can go for a long time in life not needing someone, and then you meet them and you suddenly need them all the time.

Hasn’t happened yet but point taken.

But now the world, he thought, had taken them. He knew that this could suddenly happen. One day you just woke up, and there was somewhere that you needed to be.

Hasn’t happened yet but point taken.

You know, I sometimes think that the most effective people in the world are introverts who taught themselves how to be extroverts.

Is that even possible?

…fawn face, the expression a deer makes not when it’s caught in headlights but when it catches a human looking at it in wonder. The deer looks back, acknowledging not only its own terror but its own grace, and it shows off for a moment in front of the human. It flirts.

I’ll just assume that this is made up.

You’re telling me that because of the Internet, and the availability of every experience, every whim, every tool, sudden everyone’s an artist? But here’s the thing: if everyone’s an artist, then no one is.

Or: You’re telling me that because of the Internet, and the availability of every experience, every whim, every tool, sudden everyone’s a philosopher? But here’s the thing: if everyone’s a philosopher, then no one is.

[b]Jim Carroll

Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.[/b]

You know, if we’re listening.

I’ll Die For Your Sins If You Live For mine.

Sounds like a dopey song lyric, doesn’t it?

That, I realized, is the great beauty of dreams: the devil may inevitably find a way to jerk you off, but you can always wake up before he makes you cum.

Never even came close in fact. But that’s just me.

You see, you just don’t know
I’m here to give you my heart
And you want some fashion show

What did he expect in the world today?

Violence is so terribly fast . . . the most perverse thing about the movies is the way they portray it in slow motion, allowing it to be something sensuous . . . the viewer’s lips slightly wet as the scene plays out. Violence is nothing like that. It is lightning fast, chaotic, and totally intangible.

As God meant it to be.

On a whim, he stopped and bought a watch from a sidewalk vendor. Normally, Billy could not abide keeping time, especially when it was attached to one’s body. Time was like a relentlessly needy lapdog one had to haul around. It barked too much and had no sense of loyalty.

Of course he’s just paraphrasing Stephen Hawkings

[b]tiny nietzsche

we should get together sometime and murder me[/b]

Or, sure, you.

me: existential dread
the future: hey

And getting heyer all the time.

me: I feel empty inside
doktor: have you tried tacos?

Better still: Tacos with heroin.

damn girl are you postmodernism because I doubt it

Sorry, she doubts it too.

thinking is what got me in to this mess

Don’t you just hate that?

just say no to guns

Or, in North Korea, nukes.

[b]Harvey Pekar

Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.[/b]

So, let’s make it pretty simple.

It makes you feel good to know that there’s other people afflicted like you.

Of course they feel the same way about us.

Comics are words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.

In other words, anything here being some things.

I think comics have far more potential than a lot of people realize.

In other words, aside from those godawful fucking super heroes.

There was a survey done a few years ago that affected me greatly. it was discovered that intelligent people either estimate their intelligence accurately or slightly underestimate themselves, but stupid people overestimate their intelligence and by huge margins.

Let’s poll all the stupid people here.

What kind of a day was it? A day like all others, that alters and illuminates our times. And you were there.

Right, rub it in.

[b]Tom Stoppard

You think human nature is a beast, that it must be put in a cage. But it’s the cage that makes the animal bad.[/b]

Come on, isn’t it really too close to call?

Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.

Sometimes though you have to shift theirs.

Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does.

0f course that narrows it down to anything.

Relax. Respond. That’s what people do. You can’t go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

I do question this though.

I should have the courage of my lack of convictions.

If need be, borrow some of mine.

Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over…Death is not anything…death is not…It’s the absence of presence, nothing more…the endless time of never coming back…a gap you can’t see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound…

We just can’t actually know this for sure.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

For even satire is a form of sympathy.[/b]

My guess: With clear exceptions.

She turned, and saw a great white moon looking at her over the hill. And her breast opened to it, she was cleaved like a transparent jewel to its light. She stood filled with the full moon, offering herself. Her two breasts opened to make way for it, her body opened wide like a quivering anemone, a soft, dilated invitation touched by the moon.

For some [back then] pornography.

If you admit a unison, you forfeit all the possibilities of chaos…Love is a direction which excludes all other directions. It is a freedom together, if you like.

Or, at any rate, the illusion of love.

You’ve got to lapse out before you can know what sensual reality is, lapse into unkowingness, and give up your volition…You’ve got to learn not-to-be before you can come into being.

So, can anyone here illustrate this particular text?

Humanity is a huge aggregate lie, and a huge lie is less than a small truth. Humanity is less, far less than the individual because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity is a tree of lies.

And right around the corner from that is “the people”. Or “society”.

He toasted his bacon on a fork and caught the drops of fat on his bread; then he put the rasher on his thick slice of bread, and cut off chunks with a clasp-knife, poured his tea into his saucer, and was happy.

You know, for a few hours.

You-'ve got to learn not to be before coming to be , and who are the exceptions ?

Those who mever been.

[b]so sad today

me: why do you want me dead?
my mind: it just seems so peaceful[/b]

True. But there’s all that other stuff.

can you feel my desperation through the internet

Or, to put it another way: How can you not?

when people say “love yourself” what the fuck, specifically, does that mean?

Or, come on, even generally.

it’s weird that some people aren’t constantly trying to escape themselves

And some aren’t even assholes.

my feelings are never not hurt

See if you can spot the double negative.

people’s natural beauty really hurts my feelings

Not only that but bellowing “fuck them!” doesn’t really help.

Thanks for the contribution. Sort of.

[b]Svetlana Alexievich

The body is a vessel for the soul. A home. According to Muslim custom, a body must be buried as quickly as possible, preferably the same day, as soon as Allah has taken the soul. In the house of the deceased, we hang a scrap of white cloth from a nail, and it stays there for forty days. At night, the soul flies home and perches on the cloth. It listens to familiar voices and feels glad. Then it flies back.[/b]

Who thinks this shit up?!

You’re going to say that you’re a tractor specialist, I said to Slyunkov, he’d been a director of a tractor factory, and that you didn’t understand what radiation could do, but I’m a physicist, I know what the consequences are. But from his point of view, what was this? Some professor, a bunch of physicists, were going to tell the Central Committee what to do? No, they weren’t a gang of criminals. It was more like a conspiracy of ignorance and obedience.

Of course here in America that sort of thing couldn’t possibly be true.

The mysterious Russian soul… Everyone wants to understand it. They read Dostoevsky: what’s behind that soul of theirs? Well, behind our soul there’s just more soul.

Does that sound like anyone’s soul here?

Our people need freedom like a monkey needs glasses. No one would know what to do with it.

Let’s run this by the monkeys first.

So…Well…Life went by. The only thing money can’t buy is time. Weep before God or not, you can’t buy it. That’s just the way it is.

Of course money can sure as shit prolong it. Just as a lack of money can sure as shit curtail it.

People always want to live, even during wartime. You’ll learn a lot from living through a war…There is no beast worse than man.

In other words [here and there] not unlike peacetime.

[b]Robert Musil

Slowed down by a sense of hopelessness in all his decisions and movements, he suffered from bitter sadness, and his incapacity solidified into a pain that often sat like a nosebleed behind his forehead the moment he tried to make up his mind to do something.[/b]

What folks like us call a normal day.

We sometimes have a flash of understanding that amounts to the insight of genius, and yet it slowly withers, even in our hands - like a flower. The form remains, but the colours and the fragrance are gone.

I get this, he thought. And in a way I suspect you never will.

For him morality was neither conformism nor philosophic wisdom, but living the infinite fullness of possibilities. He believed in morality’s capacity for intensification, in stages of moral experience, and not merely, as most people do, in stages of moral understanding, as if it were something cut-and-dried for which people were just not pure enough. He believed in morality without believing in any specific moral system. Morality is generally understood to be a sort of police regulations for keeping life in order, and since life does not obey even these, they come to look as if they were really impossible to live up to and accordingly, in this sorry way, not really an ideal either. But morality must not be reduced to this level. Morality is imagination.

Indeed, and what do you imagine it is?

People were always chasing after some leader or another, and stumbling from one superstition to the next, cheering His Majesty one day and giving the most disgusting incendiary speeches in Parliament the next, and none of it ever amounted to anything in the end!

On the contrary, it amounted to any number of completely contradictory things.

She liked to convey that she was well acquainted with the smartness and the manners of the stylish world, but that she had got beyond all that sort of thing. She was fond of declaring that she did not care a snap of the fingers for that, or for herself, or indeed for anything whatsoever. On this account, and in spite of her blowsiness, she enjoyed a certain degree of respect among the peasant lads of the neighbourhood. True, they spat when they spoke of her, and felt obliged to treat her with even more coarseness than other girls, but at bottom they were really mightily proud of this ‘damned slut’ who had issued from their own midst and who had so thoroughly seen through the veneer of the world.

As a damned slut myself, he thought, let’s see through it together.

Now I have something to tell you, her brother said. Every time I’ve had to take part in anything with other people, something of genuine social concern, I’ve been like a man who steps outside the theater before the final act for a breath of fresh air, sees the great dark void with all those stars, and walks away, abandoning hat, coat and play.

In other words, feeling only more or less ashamed.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” Albert Camus[/b]

Let’s actually pin this down.

“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Let’s actually pin this down.

“I have great faith in fools – self-confidence my friends will call it.” Edgar Allan Poe

With friends like this?

“We have art so that we shall not die of reality.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Doesn’t seem to keep folks from going mad though.

“There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Obviously: Including this one.

“The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.” Edmund Burke

That and the occasional dictator.

[b]Nora Ephron

In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind. [/b]

So, how kinky is that?

There’s a reason why forty, fifty, and sixty don’t look the way they used to, and it’s not because of feminism, or better living through exercise. It’s because of hair dye. In the 1950’s only 7 percent of American women dyed their hair; today there are parts of Manhattan and Los Angeles where there are no gray-haired women at all.

Let’s pin down the significance of this.

You realize of course that we could never be friends.
Why not?
What I’m saying is - and this is not a come-on in any way, shape or form - is that men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.
That’s not true. I have a number of men friends and there is no sex involved.
No you don’t.
Yes I do.
No you don’t.
Yes I do.
You only think you do.
You say I’m having sex with these men without my knowledge?
No, what I’m saying is they all want to have sex with you.
They do not.
Do too.
They do not.
Do too.
How do you know?
Because no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.
So, you’re saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive?
No. You pretty much want to nail 'em too.
What if they don’t want to have sex with you?
Doesn’t matter because the sex thing is already out there so the friendship is ultimately doomed and that is the end of the story.

This is still true, right?

The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee.

At least six.

When you’re attracted to someone, it just means that your subconscious is attracted to their subconscious, subconsciously. So what we think of as fate is just two neuroses knowing that they are a perfect match.

And that’s well before we get to the id.

…the amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.

Look, we all know there really are people like this. And not just Don Trump.

[b]Han Kang

Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn’t even realized was there.[/b]

Just once. Just one fucking time I would like to experience this myself.

I’m fighting alone, every day. I fight with the hell that I survived. I fight with the fact of my own humanity. I fight with the idea that death is the only way of escaping this fact.

And to think that some are actually able to declare themselves the victor.

A soul doesn’t have a body, so how can it be watching us?

A mere technicality, right?

Can only trust my breasts now. I like my breasts, nothing can be killed by them. Hand, foot, tongue, gaze, all weapons from which nothing is safe. But not my breasts. With my round breasts, I’m okay. Still okay. So why do they keep on shrinking? Not even round anymore. Why? Why am I changing like this? Why are my edges all sharpening–what am I going to gouge?

And the male equivalent of this is…?

I never let myself forget that every single person I meet is a member of this human race.

Indeed, and I never let myself forget that, to any one particular individual, this can mean practically anything.

As for women who were pretty, intelligent, strikingly sensual, the daughters of rich families—they would only have served to disrupt my carefully ordered existence.

Or this: As for men who were handsome, intelligent, strikingly sensual, the sons of rich families—they would only have served to disrupt my carefully ordered existence.
You know, if you let them.

Sad prose, yes…

[b]so sad today

spoiler: existential crisis[/b]

Spoiler: no shit.

i want to donate all my blood

Tried that twice myself.

if selling out is wrong, i don’t wanna be right

Like there’s even a difference.

bitch i’m famous

Not unlike what we’d all like to be. And not just here.

oops i didn’t mean to be born

On the other hand, now she’s famous.

you say potato, i say inevitable death

Not to confuse them of course.

On the other hand, how much of it [these days] is just a persona?

Yes, this question came up for me, again, just recently here.

Perhaps having to spot online faux personas is something we’ve newly developed as part of our survival toolset, but in this instance Iam, what made you question the validity of persona?