a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

“The madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king, but also a king who thinks he is a king.” Lacan[/b]

On the other hand, he’s mad so what’s the difference.

You’re so vain, you probably think your selfie is about you.

Wow, how vain is that?!

Sophocles: Not to have been born is best.
Schopenhauer: It would be better if there were nothing.
Heidegger: Trembling, Dasein holds itself out into the nothing.
Žižek: My speaker’s fee? I’ll tell you one thing: it’s not nothing!

Hating Žižek. It must be the “thing” these days.

Camus: All I know about morality and the obligations of men, I owe to football.
Sartre: And your conclusion?
Camus: Humanity is vile and life is meaningless.

What’s that got to do with football, he thought.

When someone praises Kant’s theory of experience, it’s all I can do not to
Hegel: cry
Kierkegaard: laugh
Nietzsche: laugh out loud
Benjamin: assemble 1000 pages of stray notes about it

Not Benjamin surely.

The best football match
Parmenides: never begins or ends
Hegel: has always already become what it is not
Heidegger: doesn’t leave the Black Forest
Beckett: promises misery but delivers only despair

Except in France of course.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

Oh build your ship of death, oh build it in time and build it lovingly, and put it between the hands of your soul.[/b]

How soothing does that sound?

Had you noticed them before? he asked.
No, never before, she replied.
And now you will always see them, he said.

Is that maddening or not?

But a woman could yield to a man without yielding her inner, free self. That the poets and talkers about sex did not seem to have taken sufficiently into account. A woman could take a man without really giving herself away. Certainly she could take him without giving herself into his power. Rather she could use this sex thing to have power over him.

He wondered, Is that still going on?
But not for long, right?

Why are we all only like mortal pieces of furniture? Why is nothing important?

1] Death
2] No God

So long as life’s full, it doesn’t matter whether it’s happy or not. I’m afraid your happiness would bore me.

The second part surely. But the first part?

But she would wake in the morning one day and feel her blood running, feel herself lying open like a flower unsheathed in the sun, insistent and potent with demand.

Just not for you.

[b]Edward St. Aubyn

Most people wait for their parents to die with a mixture of tremendous sadness and plans for a new swimming pool.[/b]

The new normal.

Every paradise demands a serpent.

Let’s think of one that doesn’t.

There’s a blast of palpable stupidity that comes from our host, like opening the door of a sauna. The best way to contradict him is to let him speak.

Of course here we let the Kids post.

People think they are individuals because they use the word “I” so often, Patrick commented.

As in, “I do what everyone else does”.

In the Dodge City of romantic love, crowded with betrayal, abandonment and rejection, it was better to fire first than to take the risk of being gunned down.

Time after time after time after time.

In England, art was much less likely to be mentioned in polite society than sexual perversions or methods of torture.

We’ll need some confirmation of course.

[b]Tom Stoppard

Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.[/b]

Of course it almost goes without saying: our words, not theirs.

I have three copies of the first edition, which sold in double figures, speaking loosely; there was a moment when Blond’s ‘Lord Malquist and Mr Moon’ sold 67 copies, or some such number, in Venezuela - a mystery I never solved. I have never been to Venezuela. I remember going into Foyles’ bookshop in 1966 and being gratified to see a stack of Malquist-and-Moons on the New Fiction table. I counted them; there were twelve. A week or two later I went in again; there they were. I counted them again; there were thirteen! I saw at once what was happening. People were leaving my book at bookshops.

Would that I could have been so perplexed.

The days of the digital watch are numbered.

Hell the days themselves are numbered for, say, all of us.

It’s to do with knowing and being known. I remember how it stopped seeming odd that in biblical Greek, knowing was used for making love. Whosit knew so-and-so. Carnal knowledge. It’s what lovers trust each other with. Knowledge of each other, not of the flesh but through the flesh, knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face. Every other version of oneself is on offer to the public. We share our vivacity, grief, sulks, anger, joy… we hand it out to anybody who happens to be standing around, to friends and family with a momentary sense of indecency perhaps, to strangers without hesitation. Our lovers share us with the passing trade. But in pairs we insist that we give ourselves to each other. What selves? What’s left? What else is there that hasn’t been dealt out like a deck of cards? Carnal knowledge. Personal, final, uncompromised. Knowing, being known. I revere that. Having that is being rich, you can be generous about what’s shared — she walks, she talks, she laughs, she lends a sympathetic ear, she kicks off her shoes and dances on the tables, she’s everybody’s and it don’t mean a thing, let them eat cake; knowledge is something else, the undealt card, and while it’s held it makes you free-and-easy and nice to know, and when it’s gone everything is pain. Every single thing. Every object that meets the eye, a pencil, a tangerine, a travel poster. As if the physical world has been wired up to pass a current back to the part of your brain where imagination glows like a filament in a lobe no bigger than a torch bulb. Pain.

Or surely something as approximately true as this.

What’s the first thing you remember?
No, it’s no good. It was a long time ago.
No, you don’t take my meaning. What’s the first thing you remember after all the things you’ve forgotten?
Oh, I see…I’ve forgotten the question.

Let’s see him come back from that.

The Plastic People of the Universe played ‘Venus in Furs’ from Velvet Underground, and I knew everything was basically okay.

So, sure, I Googled it: youtu.be/ydgw2QJIQk4
Is this them?

[b]Existential Comics

The damn atheists ruined atheism![/b]

Of course we all ruin something.

So pathetic how many Democrats are obviously thrilled about Trump, because now all they have to do is say “Trump is BAD! Russian INTERFERENCE!!!” and everyone loves it. Meanwhile they don’t have to propose a single policy that would harm the bottom line of their corporate donors.

Hey, we don’t call it crony capitalism for nothing.

People who are obsessed with logical fallacies suffer from the most severe fallacy: that disagreements are easily resolved. As though everyone secretly agrees, but half the population made a simple logical misstep and arrived at the wrong conclusion.

Okay, admittedly, not just the objectivists.

Republicans are outraged that Trump might be a traitor to the American people, when he was only suppose to be a traitor to the American working class.

And not just the ones in Congress.

I like that slogan “freedom isn’t free”, because it’s extremely true, but not just in that you have to fight for freedom. Freedom literally costs money. Ever try going to a city with no money? You’ll find your only freedom is to sleep in the street and beg for food.

Still, as we all know, it’s their own damn fault.

That phrase “the birds and the bees” is weird as hell, if you are teaching your kids about sex, you probably shouldn’t bring up bees. The Queen Bee has one giant orgy at the start of her life, rips all the male bee’s dicks off, killing them, and stores all their sperm for life.

Bees, the first feminists.

[b]Anthony Bourdain

…your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.[/b]

In other words, if it lets you.

Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans … are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.

Oh please!

Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom…is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.

Sure, suicide fits in there somewhere.

Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don’t have.

Of course [like everyone else] he gets to say what that is.

They’re professionals at this in Russia, so no matter how many Jell-O shots or Jager shooters you might have downed at college mixers, no matter how good a drinker you might think you are, don’t forget that the Russians - any Russian - can drink you under the table.

Same with their hackers.

We know, for instance, that there is a direct, inverse relationship between frequency of family meals and social problems. Bluntly stated, members of families who eat together regularly are statistically less likely to stick up liquor stores, blow up meth labs, give birth to crack babies, commit suicide, or make donkey porn.

Even if they eat together at McDonalds?

[b]tiny nietzsche

me: I don’t trust anything
postmodernism: same[/b]

Same meaning different.

it’s my funeral and I’ll die if I want to

Now all we need is Leslie Gore.

I hate tourists almost as much as I hate locals.

My advice: move.

I used to think being human was a given. Now I’m not so sure.

Just out of curiosity, what the hell does that even mean?

I got my phd at Fuck U

Me? I got my associate degree at Fuck U community college.

my horoscope says I did it in the kitchen with the lead pipe

Time to get a new birthday.

[b]Meg Wolitzer

It was exhausting being a schizophrenic.[/b]

Even more exhausting: figuring out if you actually were.

Everything you do, it’ll all feel really slow for a long time. But looking back, much later, it will have seemed like it was fast.

You know, in the shadow of, among other things, the abyss.

He’d had a real talent, but what was talent without confidence, self-possession, “ownership,” as people said, pompously but maybe accurately.

How’s that different [for some] from having no talent?

My job does not define me.

Not so sure about your own job are you?

The way Susannah sings ‘The Wind Will Carry Us’ is so sad, he murmured.
Yeah, it really is.
It makes me think of the way people devote their lives to each other, and then one of them just leaves, or even dies.
I hadn’t thought of it that way, said Jules, who had never understood those lyrics, in particular how a single wind could carry two people apart. I know this sounds picky, but wouldn’t the wind carry them together? she asked. It’s one breeze. It just blows one way, not two.
Huh. Let me think about it. He thought briefly. You’re right. It doesn’t make sense. But still, it’s very melancholy.

Lots of lyrics like that though.

All that reading took. It became as basic as any other need. To be lost in a novel meant you were not lost in your own life, the drafty, disorganized, lumbering bus of a house, the disinterested parents.

You know, back when novels actually accomplished this.

[b]Ambrose Bierce

Happiness: an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.[/b]

Schadenfreude, dummy.

Infidel, n. In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does.

The same fucking God!

Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

But only until Mueller drains the swamp. Or, sure, maybe not even then.

Nihilist, n. A Russian who denies the existence of anything but Tolstoi. The leader of the school is Tolstoi.

Not even close, right?

War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.

Remember when that was actually true?

Twice – Once too often.

Or, sometimes, twice too often.

[b]so sad today

yeah no shit i’m trying too hard[/b]

Any chance that I am?

one time i was optimistic and it did not go well

Don’t tell me about it.

the emptiness has arrived

Again in other words.

being an adult sounds really bad

And not for no reason.

weekend plans:
regret past
fear future

Or, sure, 24/7

sorry i tried to use you as an antidepressant

Sorry I made it worse.

[b]May Sarton

Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.[/b]

At fifteen I might have read one or two.

At some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth.

Provided of course this doesn’t get you a beating. Or killed.

Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and once deeply engraved in a child’s mind, they are not easily eradicated.

So much more to the point, their words.

I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, ‘won’t go,’ or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person’s face.

Of course they may feel the same way around you.

Routine is not a prison, but the way to freedom from time.

Though, sure, for some, it is a fucking prison.

A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.

My guess: for some more than others.

[b]Dorothy Parker

I hate writing, I love having written.[/b]

That’s quite common, I would imagine.

Don’t look at me in that tone of voice.

We all know that tone of course.

Tell him I was too fucking busy–or vice versa.

Or, sure, the other way around.

What fresh hell is this?

On the other hand, for some, it’s probably good practice.

They sicken of the calm who know the storm.

How ass backwards is that? But point taken.

That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.

Anyone know what’s actually on it? Or, sure, is that it?

[b]Nora Ephron

I live in my neighborhood. My neighborhood consists of the dry cleaner, the subway stop, the pharmacist, the supermarket, the cash machine, the deli, the beauty salon, the nail place, the newsstand, and the place where I go for lunch. All this is within two blocks of my house. Which is another thing I love about life in New York: Everything is right there. If you forgot to buy parsley, it takes only a couple of minutes to run out and get it. This is good, because I often forget to buy parsley.[/b]

Can you say the same about your own neighborhood?
Actually, I almost can about mine.

Every so often I contemplate suicide merely to remind myself of my complete lack of interest in it as a solution to anything at all.

In other words, she was one of the lucky ones.

In a socialist country you can get rich by providing necessities, while in a capitalist country you can get rich by providing luxuries.

Let’s imagine this in, say, Pyongyang.

On some level, my life has been wasted on me. After all, if I can’t remember it, who can?
The past is slipping away and the present is a constant affront. I can’t possibly keep up.

Of course now she doesn’t have to.

I have spent a great deal of my life discovering that my ambitions and fantasies - which I once thought of as totally unique - turn out to be clichés.

What’s that say about our ambitions and fantasies then?

I think the hardest thing about writing is writing.

Damn, it would have to that, wouldn’t it.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.” W.H. Auden[/b]

Let’s file this one under, “fair is fair”.

“The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.” W.H. Auden

The mystery of music. That never goes away.

“The universe is a machine for the making of Gods.” Henri Bergson

Having first of course created the flocks of sheep.

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.” Henri Bergson

Of course folks like me take this much too far.

“Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.” Voltaire

On the other hand, how certain can we be about this?

“I hope nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” Nikos Kazantzakis

That’s close but not quite meaningless.

[b]Erica Jong

The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton’s first law of jealousy.[/b]

Well, perhaps not an actual law here.

You don’t have to beat a woman if you can make her feel guilty.

Maybe, but how about a man?

Rendall’s first law of jealousy: jealousy does the cock harder and pussy wetter.

Any particular Rendall?

Yet a man assumes that a woman’s refusal is just part of a game. Or, at any rate, a lot of men assume that. When a man says no, it’s no. When a woman says no, it’s yes, or at least maybe. There is even a joke to that effect. And little by little, women begin to believe in this view of themselves. Finally, after centuries of living under the shadow of such assumptions, they no longer know what they want and can never make up their minds about anything. And men, of course, compound the problem by mocking them for their indecisiveness and blaming it on biology, hormones, premenstrual tension.

Let’s pin down the percentages here: genes more or less than memes?

I quickly learned that a book carefully arranged before your face was a bulletproof shield, an asbestos wall, a cloak of invisibility. I learned to take refuge behind books, to become, as my mother and father called me, ‘the absentminded professor-’ They screamed at me, but I couldn’t hear. I was reading. I was writing. I was safe.

Trust me: Don’t expect this to always work.

No wonder the word ‘feminism’ was feared. It had been much too narrowly defined. I define a feminist as a self-empowering woman who wishes the same for her sisters. I do not think the term implies a certain sexual orientation, a certain style of dress or membership in a certain political party. A feminist is merely a woman who refuses to accept the notion that women’s power must come through men.

Not counting Mr. Reasonable of course. :wink:

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.” Thomas Carlyle[/b]

Not unlike weak minds.

“For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Really, think about that.

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” Aristotle

Let’s pin down the difference.

“Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.” Socrates

In other words, among other things, we get old. And the more beautiful you are, the grimmer that must be.

“Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.” Albert Camus

Still, none perhaps will ever top mine.

“It is man’s natural sickness to believe that he possesses the truth.” Blaise Pascal

So, do you believe that this is true?

[b]John Fowles, The Magus

The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed.
I suppose one could say that Hitler didn’t betray his self.
You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.[/b]

See how simple it all is?

To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.

Right, like they’re actually the same thing.

The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.

Sure, if you want to call them answers.

You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.

Nope, haven’t smiled yet.

The dead live.
How do they live?
By love.

First, let’s run that by the dead.

I acquired expensive habits and affected manners. I got a third-class degree and a first-class illusion: that I was a poet. But nothing could have been less poetic that my seeing-through-all boredom with life in general and with making a living in particular. I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope—an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all. But I did absorb a small dose of one permanently useful thing, Oxford’s greatest gift to civilized life: Socratic honesty. It showed me, very intermittently, that it is not enough to revolt against one’s past. One day I was outrageously bitter among some friends about the Army; back in my own rooms later it suddenly struck me that just because I said with impunity things that would have apoplexed my dead father, I was still no less under his influence. The truth was I was not a cynic by nature, only by revolt. I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn’t found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love. Handsomely equipped to fail, I went out into the world.

Though probably true, I am myself still no less a hardcore cynic. It is simply the only point of view that makes sense.

[b]Seneca

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.[/b]

Tell us about it?

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

Or sometimes all it is is luck.

All cruelty springs from weakness.

Like something like this can actually be known.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.

Here of course the rest really is history.

Non est ad astra mollis e terris via - There is no easy way from the earth to the stars.

That’s certainly still true.

You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.

Not counting the times you get confused.

[b]Nein

Grammar, syntax, and cynicism walk into a bar. Bartender: what wouldn’t it be?[/b]

Just out of curiosity, where is this bar?

We regret to inform you that capitalism hired a few temps to dig its own grave. Then flipped it as a luxury time-share.

Let’s file this one under, “it doesn’t surprise me”.

A gentle reminder that history can now skip the tragedy. And go directly to farce.

Cue the Oval Office.

I was told there’d be better lies.

Or: I was told there’d be better fake news.

It was the summer of our disbelief.

Next up: the autumn of our disbelief.

If we’re going to live in a dystopia, it’d be nice to at least have one we could take somewhat seriously.

Has it really gotten that bad?

[b]Günter Grass

Grownups have it in them to be creative, and sometimes, with the help of ambition, hard work, and a bit of luck they actually are, but being grownups, they have no sooner created some epoch-making invention than they become a slave to it.[/b]

Not counting us of course.

But every time I shunned books, as scholars sometimes do, cursed them as verbal graveyards, and tried to make contact with the common folk, I ran up against the kids in our building and felt fortunate, after a few brushes with those little cannibals, to return to my reading in one piece.

Tell me that hasn’t only gotten more relevant. And here we have the Kids too.

An entire gullible nation believed faithfully in Santa Claus. But Santa Claus was really the Gasman.

Of course here [for some] he’s the President.

And Oskar was kneeling at the left side-altar, trying to teach the boy Jesus how to drum, but the rascal wouldn’t drum, offered no miracle. Oskar had sworn back then and swore again outside the locked church door: I’ll teach him to drum yet. Sooner or later.

That’ll be a miracle.

The grim portrait of Beethoven hanging over the piano . . . was removed from its nail, and an equally grim portrait of Hitler was hung on the same nail. . . . Mama . . . insisted that Beethoven be placed, if not over the sofa, at least over the sideboard. This resulted in the grimmest of confrontations: Hitler and the genius hung opposite each other, stared at each other, saw through each other, yet found no joy in what they saw.

And now of course they’re both long dead and gone.

Or you can start by declaring that novels can no longer be written, and then, behind your own back as it were, produce a mighty blockbuster that establishes you as the last of the great novelists.

On the other hand, is it possible that this does make sense?