a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Tom Perrotta

I would probably have to say that reading fiction — those stories fill the space that other people might use religious stories for. The bulk of what I know about human life I’ve gotten from novels. And I think the thing about novels that make them important to the people who love them is that there’s always another perspective.[/b]

Novels once worked that way for me too. Now nothing does.

Because it was just too creepy to consider the alternative: nothing changing at all, everything shrinking into the sad belated recognition that the best days had come and gone without her even realizing it.

Worse: when you do.

Something had happened to him ove the past couple of years, something to do with being home with Aaron, sinking into the rhythm of a kid’s day. The little tasks, the small pleasures. The repetition that goes beyond boredom and becomes a kind of peace. You do it long enough, and the adult world starts to drift away. You can’t catch up with it, not even if you try.

Worse: when you do.

Back then, when everybody thought the world would last forever, nobody had time for anything.

Way, way, way back then, he thought.

When your words are futile, you’re better off keeping them to yourself, or never even thinking them in the first place.

I figure that’s what you think about me. No less so then I think it about you.

It’s a matter of dignity, the Chief explained. At a certain point, that’s all you have left.

Of course you have to actually have it first.

[b]Stieg Larsson

I would have to be totally insane to stop seeing you just because you’re going to leave one day.[/b]

Besides, she can always leave him first.

One more man who hates women, she muttered at last.

Lots of them here too. Indeed, they have a whole philosophy to back it up. Naturally as it were.

Mathematics was actually a logical puzzle with endless variations—riddles that could be solved. The trick was not to solve arithmetical problems. Five times five would always be twenty-five. The trick was to understand combinations of the various rules that made it possible to solve any mathematical problem whatsoever.

Well, except this one: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=190558

This is so much money that it scares the shit out of me. I don’t know how to handle it. I don’t know the purpose of the company besides making more money. What’s all the money going to be used for?

Let’s ask Putin.

The opportunity makes the thief.

For example, entrapment.

Take it all off. I don’t intend to fuck somebody in his underwear. And you have to use a condom. I know where I’ve been, but I don’t know where you’ve been.

On the other hand, in this day and age, no one really knows where they’ve been.

[b]Noël Coward

It’s discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.[/b]

Imagine then his reaction to Trumpworld.

My importance to the world is relatively small. On the other hand, my importance to myself is tremendous. I am all I have to work with, to play with, to suffer and to enjoy. It is not the eyes of others that I am wary of, but of my own. I do not intend to let myself down more than I can possibly help, and I find that the fewer illusions I have about myself or the world around me, the better company I am for myself.

Go ahead, stick yourself in there somewhere.

Thousands of people have talent. I might as well congratulate you for having eyes in your head. The one and only thing that counts is: Do you have staying power?

I’m embarassed to say that I did. If you know what I mean.

Strange how potent cheap music is.

Anyone here actually know what that is?

Work is more fun than fun.

Not many of us will ever get to say that.

I have a memory like an elephant. In fact, elephants often consult me.

Well, if you remind them.

[b]Liane Moriarty

Try not to saddle yourself with too distinct a personality too early in life. It might not suit you later on.[/b]

Of course back then that never occurs to you.

The sound of the children singing floating down from the second floor of the building always made her weep. She’d never believed in God, except when she heard children singing.

Believe it or not, that doesn’t work for me.

However, at the end of the night I saw Nick stomping out to the car park, obviously in a terrible mood. They take their lives so seriously, these young people. “Just appreciate the fact that you can stomp so energetically,” I wanted to say to him. I’d pay a million dollars to be Alice and Elisabeth’s age again for just one day. I’d dance like Olivia’s butterfly and bite into crisp green apples and run across hot sand into the surf, and I’d walk, as far as I wanted, wherever I wanted, in big loping, leaping strides, with my head held high and my lungs filling with air.

Let’s not go there, he thought.

But if the girls hadn’t got their knickers in a knot, and that might sound sexist but it’s not, it’s just a fact of life, ask any man, not some new age, artsy-fartsy, I-wear-moisturiser type, I mean a real man, ask a real man, then he’ll tell you that women are like the Olympic athletes of grudges.

And not just in prison.

But I feel ugly, because one man said it was so, and that made it so. It’s pathetic.

Yeah, I’d say so.

If her back had ever hurt like this when she was twenty she would have been hysterical, demanding painkillers and cups of tea in bed, but she has found that nobody is especially surprised to hear you’re in pain when you’re in your eighties. You might find it astonishing, but nobody else does.

On the other hand, in your eighties why would it astonish you?

[b]tiny nietzsche

I’m a post-fatalist.[/b]

Uh oh, he thought. What if I am too?!

…sets notifications to stun…

We need something like that here.

…when you’re dying, the whole world dies with you…

That’s probably not really true though.

gregorian: 14,119 dog
jewish: 40,439 dog
chinese: 32,991 ÷ 12 = year of the dog 2,749

A little help with this one please.

…well if you told me you were listening to phil collins, I would not lend a hand

[i]In other words , Phil Collins is to Peter Gabriel what Paul McCartney is to John Lennon.
Right?

me: explain postmodernism to me
doktor: I’m not sure
me: thank you

Thank him for me too.

[b]Aeschylus

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.[/b]

Depending of course on what you remember.

Zeus, first cause, prime mover; for what thing without Zeus is done among mortals?

You know, back then.

Rumours voiced by women come to nothing.

You know, back then.

They sent forth men to battle
But no such men return;
And home, to claim their welcome,
Come ashes in an urn

Let’s file this one under, “…and some things never change”.

I gave them hope, and so turned away their eyes from death.

Until, among other things, the hope runs out.

Call no man happy till he is dead.

And even then only for all of eternity.

[b]Jeanette Winterson

Happy endings are only a pause. There are three kinds of big endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness. Revenge and Tragedy often happen together. Forgiveness redeems the past. Forgiveness unblocks the future.[/b]

Theoretically as it were.

Capacity for love in its higher forms seems to be peculiarly human although even in humans it is still peculiar.

Obviously: Higher than what?

What can I tell you about the choices we make? Fate reads like the polar opposite of decision, and so much of life reads like fate.

I’ve never been able to tell them apart myself.

And the world goes on regardless of joy or despair or one woman’s fortune or one man’s loss. And we can’t know the lives of others. And we can’t know our own lives beyond the details we can manage. And the things that change us forever happen without us knowing they would happen. And the moment that looks like the rest is the one where hearts are broken or healed. And time that runs so steady and sure runs wild outside the clocks. It takes so little time to change a lifetime and it takes a lifetime to understand the change.

You still don’t understand this part, do you?

Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way.

That’s why God created dogs.

…only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world.

Either that or [in this world] a banker.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

You’re my religion. You’re all I’ve got.[/b]

Two things:
1] I never said that to anyone
2] No one ever said that to me

If you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life.

Or not as the case may be.

We all take a beating every day, you know, one way or another.

I know: What if that was really true.

I have a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends.

Or just picture them taking a shit.

No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things.

In other words, not just the right things.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

You first, okay?

[b]Michael Lewis

Because the lenders sold many—though not all—of the loans they made to other investors, in the form of mortgage bonds, the industry was also fraught with moral hazard. “It was a fast-buck business,” says Jacobs. “Any business where you can sell a product and make money without having to worry how the product performs is going to attract sleazy people.” [/b]

On the other hand, what could possibly be more all-American than that?

After the meeting, RBC conducted a study, never released publicly, in which they found that more than two hundred SEC staffers since 2007 had left their government jobs to work for high-frequency trading firms or the firms that lobbied Washington.

On the other hand, what could possibly be more all-American than that?

When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret.

Though sometimes [if your lucky] you can’t really tell them apart.

It was like a broken slot machine in the casino that pays off every time. It would keep paying off until someone said something about it; but no one who played the slot machine had any interest in pointing out that it was broken.

Just out of curiosity, would you?

It’s taboo, he said. When they ask you why you want to be an investment banker, you’re supposed to talk about the challenges, and the thrill of doing deals, and the excitement of working with such high-calibre people, but never, ever mention money.

Except in the Oval Office.

We tried to trademark proximity, but you can’t because it’s a word.

Time to take this one to the Supreme Court.

[b]Neil Gaiman

In a perfect world, you could fuck people without giving them a piece of your heart. And every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you’ll never see again.[/b]

He thought: Not all that different from an imperfect world.

You’re always you, and that don’t change, and you’re always changing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

I did something about it. But now it’s back.

What’s your name, Coraline asked the cat. Look, I’m Coraline. Okay?
Cats don’t have names, it said.
No? said Coraline.
No, said the cat. Now you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need names.

Even more true for dogs no doubt.

It’s like the people who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn’t work that way.

Of course we all know that it can work that way.

Hey, said Shadow. Huginn or Muninn, or whoever you are.
The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side, and it stared at him with bright eyes.
Say ‘Nevermore,’ said Shadow.
Fuck you, said the raven.

Cue Mr. Wednesday.

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.

He means “human, all too human”.

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

It is as if after surviving so much, there was no longer reason to survive.[/b]

Fortunately, I’ve always been able to find one.

He couldn’t bear to live, but he couldn’t bear to die. He couldn’t bear the thought of he making love to someone else, but neither could he bear the absence of the thought. And as for the note, he couldn’t bear to keep it, but he couldn’t bear to destroy it either.

And all we can do is hope to hell it doesn’t happen to us. Again for example.

Our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.

On the other hand, maybe it’s time to move on.

Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.

Hmm, I’ll have to get back to you on that one.

Our stories are so fundamental to us that it’s easy to forget that we choose them.

It’s best not to think about this too long. After all, look what happened to me.

A lot of the time I’d get that feeling like I was in the middle of a huge black ocean, or in deep space, but not in the fascinating way. It’s just that everything was incredibly far away from me. It was worst at night. I started inventing things, and then I couldn’t stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it’s because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn’t constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That’s how my brain was.

Let’s get back to the beavers.
Is that actually true?

[b]so sad today

this too shall pass and come back in a repressed passive aggressive way[/b]

More to the point, we never really know if it will or not.

can’t believe this giant disgusting thing is just a feeling

Indeed, and it’s not even mine.

i miss the things that destroyed my life before they destroyed my life

I’m wondering if that includes philosophy.

i’m tired of being strong and i’m not even strong

Let’s explain why this is [or is not] a good thing.

maybe if i buy this shit i don’t need i’ll be a whole person

That’s why God created Ad Men.

i want to sleep through everything except when it’s time to sleep and then i want to be online

I think that’s an actual psychological syndrome now.

[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.

[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.

[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?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.