a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Dave Eggers

Think too much and you know you are nothing. Think just enough and you know you are small, but important to some. That’s the best you can do.[/b]

Me, I was willing to settle for a lot less.

Morning comes like a scream through a pinhole.

Does that make any sense at all?
Still, I like it.

You will die, and when you die, you will know a profound lack of dignity. It’s never dignified, always brutal. What’s dignified about dying? It’s never dignified. And in obscurity? Offensive. Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves. And it’s fleeting and incredibly mercurial. And subjective. So fuck it.

Okay, but, sooner or later, there it is.

I lost someone very close to me and afterward I believed I could have saved him had I been a better friend to him. But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.

Actually, everyone disappears period.

Maybe he was more than the sum of his broken parts.

On the other hand, the parts stay broken.

They were so in love with the world, and so disappointed in every aspect of it.

That almost doesn’t make sense.

[b]so sad today

it’s not that everything is meaningless but…[/b]

…but it might be.

a positive feeling can fuck you up forever

I’ll let you know if I ever have one.

my most endearing quality is not talking to anyone

Next up: not listening to anyone.

sorry but the password must contain the euphoric moment before you cum and the depressing moment after

And [of course] no more than six characters.

things i fear:
the unknown
the known

Me too. But it’s the other way around.

recovering from being alone by being alone

Is there any other way?

[b]Robert Cormier

The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.[/b]

On the other hand, with writing what does it really mean to get it right the first time?

It’s amazing that the heart makes no noise when it cracks.

Not unlike all the other organs, right?

He hated to think of his own life stretching ahead of him that way, a long succession of days and nights that were fine - not good, not bad, not great, not lousy, not exciting, not anything.

Beats not fine though.

He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page.

“Impeach” for example.

The possibility that hope comes out of hopelessness and that the opposite of things carry the seeds of birth - love out of hate, good out of evil. Didn’t flowers grow out of dirt?

That and fertilizer.

Cities fell. Earth opened. Planets tilted. Stars plummeted. And the awful silence.

The deafening silence as some prefer.

[b]David Hockney

Perspective is a law of optics. The Chinese did not have a system like it. Indeed, it is said they rejected the idea of the vanishing point in the eleventh century, because it meant the viewer was not there, indeed, had no movement, therefore was not alive.[/b]

An Eastern thing apparently.

With chemical film, it was possible to alter photographs, but you had to be an expert. That’s not true any more. The LA Times fired a photographer at the beginning of the Iraq War for editing two shots together. Photography is crumbling. Certainly it is for the newspapers a bit now, isn’t it? There will be painting again, absolutely!

Nope, not yet.

People tend to forget that play is serious.

On the other hand, there’s probably a good reason for that.

I believe that the problem of how you depict something is a formal problem. It’s an interesting one and it’s a permanent one; there’s no solution to it. There are a thousand and one ways you can go about it. There’s no set rule.

On the other hand, how formal is that?

I have always believed that art should be a deep pleasure. I think there is a contradiction in an art of total despair, because the very fact that the art is made seems to contradict despair.

Not counting mine of course.

There’s a hierarchy. Why do I pick out that thing, that thing, that thing?

Well, it’s either you or the immutable laws of matter.

[b]Werner Twertzog

Money and power do not bring happiness. Nothing brings happiness.[/b]

Let’s file this one [clearly] under “one man’s opinion”.

Death is the new 60.

Uh-oh.

No, I shall not “call Saul.”

And, with any luck, that will snowball into a revolution.

Your novel is stupid; your painting is banal; your obscurity is well deserved.

Of course that could be anyone of us.

I begin every day as if it is a day on which I shall be shot.

Or a day on which I shall shoot someone else instead.

Ladies, find a man who looks at you the way a deranged penguin looks at the open water and the feeding grounds, then decides to walk a thousand miles towards the mountains, facing certain death.

Why, the ladies might ask.

[b]Russell Banks

The received truth of history is shot through and falsified by unknown secrets carried to the grave.[/b]

I know I’ll take my share.

We are the planet, fully as much as water, earth, fire and air are the planet, and if the planet survives, it will only be through heroism. Not occasional heroism, a remarkable instance of it here and there, but constant heroism, systematic heroism, heroism as governing principle.

How ridiculous is this, he asked.

They were totally alone, those kids, like each had been accidentally sent to earth from a distant planet to live among adult humans and be dependent on them for everything because compared to the adult humans they were extremely fragile creatures and didn’t know the language or how anything here worked and hadn’t arrived with any money. And because they were like forbidden by the humans to use their old language they’d forgotten it so they couldn’t be much company or help to each other either. They couldn’t even talk about the old days and so pretty soon they forgot there ever were any old days and all there was now was life on earth with adult humans who called them children and acted toward them like they owned them and like they were objects not living creatures with souls.

Not to be confused with Kids of course.

Public libraries are the sole community centers left in America. The degree to which a branch of the local library is connected to the larger culture is a reflection of the degree to which the community itself is connected to the larger culture.

I can’t help but wonder if he has ever actually been in a public library. In the ones around here folks seem no less isolated from each other.

When you have never done a thing before and that thing is not simply and clearly right or wrong, you frequently do not know if it is a cruel thing, you just go ahead and do it. Maybe later you’ll be able to determine whether you acted cruelly. Too late, of course, but at least you’ll know.

Tell me about yours, I’ll tell you about mine.

Let the truth take care of itself, I decided. It’s done all right on its own so far.

For some though not unlike the lies.

[b]David Sedaris

After the trial, I watched as another female pathologist collected maggots from a spinal column found in the desert. There was a decomposed head, too, and before leaving work she planned to simmer it and study the exposed cranium for contusions. I was asked to pass this information along to the chief medical examiner, and, looking back, I perhaps should have chosen my words more carefully. ‘Fire up the kettle,’ I told him. ‘Ol’-fashioned skull boil at five p.m.'[/b]

Some folks have all the luck.

Einstein wrote that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. That said, is it crazier to repeatedly throw yourself against a window, or to repeatedly open that window, believing the creatures that are throwing themselves against it might come into your house, take a look around, and leave with no hard feelings?

Now that’s a tough one.

I’ve always had a way with the little people, making it a point to humor them without looking down my nose at their wasted empty lives.

And we appreciate it, don’t we?

She said, “I’m going to have you fired.” I had two people say that to me today, “I’m going to have you fired.” Go ahead, be my guest. I’m wearing a green velvet costume; it doesn’t get any worse than this. Who do these people think they are? "I’m going to have you fired!” and I wanted to lean over and say, “I’m going to have you killed.”

A common occurence for some of us.

I had to wrestle daily with both my inadequacy and my uncontrollable jealousy. I didn’t want to kill her, but hoped someone else might do the job for me.

And then they all end up on Dateline or 48 Hours.

I can’t seem to fathom that the things important to me are not important to other people as well, and so I come off sounding like a missionary, someone whose job it is to convert rather than listen.

Me here, right?

[b]Existential Comics

The funny thing about people who smugly tell everyone that “nothing matters” is that they quite obviously value their own smugness.[/b]

I know that I do.

If you can’t trust faceless corporations who exist solely to enrich the shareholders to do what’s best for society, then who can you trust?

How about their enablers in Washington?

Postmodernism is the worst. One time when I was twelve postmodernism stole my bike and then laughed at me for thinking the word “bike” picked out a concrete object in the world.

Probably not a true story.

What philosophers dreamed of accomplishing:
500 BC: understanding everything
300: understanding virtue.
1100: understanding God.
1700: understanding even a single thing.
1950: understanding just how to say something that makes sense.
2018: I don’t know, to get my article published?

Impeach Trump?

Crony capitalism is when politicians work with rich capitalists to suppress dissent among the workers. Regular capitalism is when the police just beat up the dissenters directly.

Then back and forth they go.

What is philosophy? It’s when you think about something so much that you actually end up understanding it less.

Not that you’ll ever admit it.

[b]Dylan Thomas

And now, gentlemen, like your manners, I must leave you.[/b]

Wit. Sometimes it’s all you need.

Poetry is not the most important thing in life… I’d much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.

Good god, imagine thinking that way about philosophy.

Some people react physically to the magic of poetry, to the moments, that is, of authentic revelation, of the communication, the sharing, at its highest level…A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.

A good poem. That’s always the catch of course.

Our discreditable secret is that we don’t know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don’t care that we don’t.

No one really knows if this is true however.

I hold a beast, an angel and a madman in me.

Either that or they hold me.

Youth calls to age across the tired years: What have you found, he cries, what have you sought?
What have you found, age answers through his tears, What have you sought.

And then it’s turtles all the way down.

[b]Elena Ferrante

Words: with them you can do and undo as you please.[/b]

Up in the clouds for example.

The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.

Not unlike the circle of a full day.

…she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.

He thought: That’s what I miss the most.

Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.

Provided of course you have that option.

Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.

Provided of course they have that option.

At that moment I knew what the plebs were, much more clearly than when, years earlier, she had asked me. The plebs were us. The plebs were that fight for food and wine, that quarrel over who should be served first and better, that dirty floor on which the waiters clattered back and forth, those increasingly vulgar toasts. The plebs were my mother, who had drunk wine and now was leaning against my father’s shoulder, while he, serious, laughed, his mouth gaping, at the sexual allusions of the metal dealer. They were all laughing, even Lila, with the expression of one who has a role and will play it to the utmost.

And now this: Plebs For Trump!

[b]Sad Socrates

It’s not time we have been setting back each year, it’s progress.[/b]

Our progress in particular.

I won’t remember me in the morning.

With any luck he means.

Doubt is the foundation of doing.

Just not up until now.

I was the low point of my day.

He means “I” of course.

Those who are happiest are least interested in themselves.

Fortunately, for folks like me, there are exceptions.

It’s a bad time to be anything.

And, yes, that includes everything else.

[b]José Saramago

I don’t quite grasp your meaning.
Just as I don’t quite understand what I am saying. But back to the point….[/b]

Unless of course that is the point.

I have yet to hear a single idea that was worth considering for longer than it took us to listen to it.

Seriously, why do people say such preposterous things?

…don’t ask me what good and what evil are, we knew what it was each time we had to act when blindness was an exception, what is right and what is wrong are simply different ways of understanding our relationships with the others, not that which we have with ourselves, one should not trust the latter…

Trust is often problematic here. With ourselves no less than with others.

…we know that it is the search that gives meaning to any find and that one often has to travel a long way in order to arrive at what is near.

The search sometimes being all there is.

God will save you.
Surely you’re forgetting that God saves souls rather than bodies.

Let’s pin down the difference.

Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt. Some say that the main cause of this very serious difficulty lies in the fact that human beings are basically made of clay, which, as the encyclopedias helpfully explain, is a detrital sedimentary rock made up of tiny mineral fragments measuring one two hundred and fifty-sixths of a millimeter. Until now, despite long linguistic study, no one has managed to come up with a name for this.

Let’s explain why this cannot be explained.

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

The truth needs so little rehearsal.[/b]

Maybe, but why take chances?

It’s frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.

People in particular.

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who’d just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which is at home at the moment.

One suspects that’s the whole point of it.

Every one of us is called upon, perhaps many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job. And onward full-tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another–that is surely the basic instinct. Crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.

Come on, has that ever happened to you?

How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.

Best not to dwell on it I suppose.

Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.

Well, we are, after all made in God’s image.

[b]Lidia Yuknavitch,

We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power. Our existence makes my eyes hurt.[/b]

Still, what’s that [nowadays] next to what is going to happen.

Because in loving his darkness I found my own.

Anyone here interested in loving mine?

This man was gorgeous. I’m mentioning this because women live their lives secretly waiting for their lives to become movies. We act like men are the ones shallow enough to desire an unending stream of beautiful women but really, if a charismatic narcissist beautiful bad boy man actually desires us, seems to choose us, we go to pieces. We suddenly feel like we are finally in that movie rather than a life. Just what we always wanted. To be chosen by the best looking man in the room. Rhett Butler. Even though we are of course smarter and more mature and more together than to ever want that. Or admit it.

Lots of things like that we don’t admit to. Right?

Little tragedies are difficult to keep straight.

Let alone address.

Everybody uses everybody until we’re all just a bunch of used up shit sacks waiting to go to dirt.

She means almost everybody of course.

Two things have always ruptured up and through hegemony: art and bodies.

Or hegemony up and through them.

[b]tiny nietzsche

2028: first horse elected president
2048: first robot elected president
2088: first gelatinous mass elected president[/b]

All still an improvement on what we have now.

doktor: are you taking your pills?
me: as many as i can

In other words, over and under the counter.

your nostalgia is killing you

For some though, what else is there?

twitter 2009: skateboard
twitter 2012: bicycle
twitter 2014: automobile
twitter 2018: still a car, but heavily damaged and always on the verge of catching fire

Next up: demolition derby.

I would never belong to a conspiracy that would have me as a member

They’d never invite me.

one theory: trump drinks his own piss

Of course Putin has it on tape.

[b]Lillian Hellman

Nowadays people write English as if a rat were caught in the typewriter and they were trying to hit the keys which wouldn’t disturb it. [/b]

We see examples of that everyday here, right Kids?

But success and failure are not true opposites, and they’re not even in the same class. I mean, they’re not even a couch and a chair.

My Guess: It’s gotten much, much worse.

some people are democrats by choice, and some by necessity

I hear that.

…the convictions of Hollywood and television are made of boiled money.

And even that is mostly special effects.

France may be the only country in the world where the rich are sometimes brilliant.

We’ve probably got one or two here though.

Fear comes with middle age.

And then [eventually] segues into sheer terror.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Millions saw the apple fall but Newton was the one who asked why.” Bernard Baruch[/b]

Let’s top that.

“One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.” David Foster Wallace

Or, sure, more comforting.

“Everywhere do I percieve a certain conspiracy of rich men seeking their own advantage under that name and pretext of commonwealth.” Thomas More

If only all the way to the bank.

“One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated.” Thomas More

For our time, triple it at least.

“Appearances are a glimpse of the unseen.” Anaxagoras

And how far can that be from the unknown.

“Avoid doing what you would blame others for doing.” Thales

Unless of course [in today’s world] you are absolutely certain to get away with it.

[b]Vanessa Redgrave

You can’t be striving to please; you must be striving to get to the heart of the matter.[/b]

Whether there is one or not.

Ask the right questions if you’re going to find the right answers.

Whether there are any or not.

The people I admire most are those who struggle for everyone.

Boy, he thought, does that take me back.

The great writers like Chekhov know that tragedy and laughter are just a few steps from each other … but it took me a long time as an actress to learn that. Actually Arthur Miller taught me in the Seventies. We were making a CBS TV drama of his play Playing for Time about Auschwitz but the characters were laughing. It was a big insight for me to realise that that was what’s called gallows humour, in this case worse than the gallows, that humans need to laugh and make jokes in order to survive.

Or, as Lester put it, “Comedy is tragedy plus time!”

I’ve opened my mouth on a lot of subjects. And I thought the more prestige you get, I’d have the power to do what I like. It’s not true.

Just ask Jane Fonda.

As a mother you have got to have a view for now and a view for the future.

Explain that to your kids though.

[b]John Fowles from The Collector

You know what you do? You know how rain takes the colour out of everything? That’s what you do to the English language. You blur it every time you open your mouth.[/b]

Either that or [as we all know here] mangle it.

Stop thinking about class, she’d say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking about money.

Besides, we all know the fate of Richard Cory.

The only thing that really matters is feeling and living what you believe — so long as it’s something more than belief in your own comfort.

Not that you can’t start there.

It’s despair that so few of us care. It’s despair that there’s so much brutality and callousness in the world. It’s despair that perfectly normal young men can be made vicious and evil because they’ve won a lot of money. And then do what you’ve done to me.

It’s despair that, in the end, it is all essentially meaningless.

I’m not really sorry. But I’m not absolutely unsorry.

And who hasn’t felt that? Here for example.

He said, one has to learn that painting well - in the academic and technical sense - comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you’ve got that ability. So have thousands.

Let’s decide what comes at the top of the list.

[b]so sad today

no therapist can prepare you for your family[/b]

And no therapist could have prepared my family for me.

it’s important to give up on everything first thing in the morning

And then every hour on the hour.

i don’t want to die but i want the part after

You’ll either get this or you won’t.

trying to break up with myself

Imagine me trying to do that!!!

in space no one can hear your dumb opinion

Except God of course.

when you see the emptiness in everything i’ll be here for you

She’ll at least double it.