a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Thornton Wilder

But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.[/b]

Will the love have been enough?
Yes.
No.
Maybe.

Being employed is like being loved: you know that somebody’s thinking about you the whole time.

Unless of course you’re an expendable wage slave.

Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer’s day, and some say, to the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.

So, would you like to know what I say?

Money is like manure; it’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around encouraging young things to grow.

I know: Let’s bring this to the attention of Don Trump.

Yes, now you know. Now you know! That’s what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those…of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know — that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.

Remember when that used to be the American Dream?

Dona Maria saw that the people of this world moved about in an armor of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, athirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that befell their closest friends, in dread of all appeals that might interrupt their long communion with their own desires.

Probably in all the other worlds too.

[b]Robert Penn Warren

Dirt’s a funny thing,’ the Boss said. 'Come to think of it, there ain’t a thing but dirt on this green God’s globe except what’s under water, and that’s dirt too. It’s dirt makes the grass grow. A diamond ain’t a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-a-Mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind blessed in faculty and apprehension. It all depends on what you do with the dirt. [/b]

Dirt? Sounds about right.

I longed to know the world’s name.

Really, imagine trying to sum it all up in one word.

The law is like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There ain’t ever enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and somebody is always going to nigh catch pneumonia. Hell, the law is like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shankbone’s to the breeze. The law is always too short and too tight for growing humankind.

The law? You get what you pay for. On K Street for example…

Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.

Let alone that it only gets worse.

It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me (to Me who was what Jack Burden, the student of history, had grown up to be) There is always something.
And I said, Maybe not on the Judge.
And he said, Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.

And that would certainly include Don Trump.

The poem is a little myth of man’s capacity of making life meaningful.

If not always intelligibly.

[b]Karl Popper

What a monument of human smallness is this idea of the philosopher king. What a contrast between it and the simplicity of humaneness of Socrates, who warned the statesmen against the danger of being dazzled by his own power, excellence, and wisdom, and who tried to teach him what matters most — that we are all frail human beings.[/b]

On the other hand, you tell me: Where does Socrates end and Plato begin?

…if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

You might even say that this is applicable here too. You know, if it ever actually is.

But are there philosophical problems? The present position of English philosophy - my point of departure - originates, I believe, in the late Professor Ludwig Wittgenstein’s doctrine that there are none; that all genuine problems are scientific problems; that the alleged propositions or theories of philosophy are pseudo-propositions or pseudo-theories; that they are not false (if they were false, their negations would be true propositions or theories) but strictly meaningless combinations of words, no more meaningful than the incoherent babbling of a child who has not yet learned to speak properly.

Imagine if, one day, we are able to resolve this.

It is often asserted that discussion is only possible between people who have a common language and accept common basic assumptions. I think that this is a mistake. All that is needed is a readiness to learn from one’s partner in the discussion, which includes a genuine wish to understand what he intends to say. If this readiness is there, the discussion will be the more fruitful the more the partner’s backgrounds differ.

Theoretically as it were.

…the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

If not the other way around.

It is wrong to think that belief in freedom always leads to victory; we must always be prepared for it to lead to defeat. If we choose freedom, then we must be prepared to perish along with it.

Like here for example. After all, the Kids are free to take over.

[b]Charles Darwin

Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy.[/b]

Nope, not this time.

One day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand. Then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.

Sure, it might be a true story.

I think it inevitably follows, that as new species in the course of time are formed through natural selection, others will become rarer and rarer, and finally extinct. The forms which stand in closest competition with those undergoing modification and improvement will naturally suffer most.

You can’t help but wonder if, some day, it will be our turn.

But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.

Just as God intended it to be.

One hand has surely worked throughout the universe.

In other words, whatever that means.

It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nature.

Up to and including us as. Well, some of us.

[b]The Dead Author

Cynicism: You can’t change the world.
Skepticism: You can’t change the world?
Sarcasm: You can change the world.[/b]

Nihilism: All of the above.
[size=50][mine anyway][/size]

Those were the days when the most influential Russian nihilist was Bakunin and not Trump.

Hmm, so much for pinning that down.

What is love?
Ovid: Art.
Shakespeare: Blind.
Hegel: Unity.
Freud: Narcissism.
Kierkegaard: Good.
Žižek: Evil.
Nietzsche: Beyond good & evil.

No, really, what is love?

History usually repeats itself not because people don’t remember the past, but because they can’t forget it.

So, they just drag it along.

People are never as simple as they may seem and never as complex as they may think of themselves.

Unless, of course, they are.

Republicans are facing the tough choice of whether to be more afraid of Mexicans or of Russians.

On the other hand, perhaps it is all just…politics? I mean, that’s possible, right?

[b]Thomas Hobbes

Hell is truth seen too late.[/b]

Or [sometimes] when it is seen at all.

The condition of man . . . is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.

Of course some things are better left unsaid.

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry… no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Well, until we all decided one day to become civilized.

Leisure is the mother of Philosophy.

Let’s figure out who the father is.

Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.

And, as often as not, on both sides.

Words are the counters of wise men, and the money of fools.

Let’s translate that into trumpspeak.

A great leap in the dark

Unfortunately, some land here.

[b]Jean Baudrillard

We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.[/b]

Why? We’re just lucky, I guess.

Smile and others will smile back. Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out spontaneously in your smile.

Believe it or not, this takes practice. Unless that’s just me.

Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.

And the whiter the better.

The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters—there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void… That’s why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of the presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window.

Not including us of course.

The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.

Well, if only in theory.

There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.

Unless, perhaps, you’re just in the bathroom taking a piss.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Greek tragedy: You tried but you’re doomed
French tragedy: You mostly tried but you’re doomed
German tragedy: You’re doomed but it’s funny[/b]

American tragedy: We’re doomed but don’t forget to vote!

French philosophy: I can
German philosophy: I can’t
Russian philosophy: I can’t even

American philosophy: I cant.

[b]Basic Laws of Academia

  1. Inquiry is sacred
  2. Knowledge is sacred
  3. Relationships with other intellectuals are sacred
  4. Nothing is sacred[/b]

See if you can spot the irony here.

[b]A Brief History of Disappointing Ideals

  1. Freedom
  2. Economic justice
  3. No-fault divorce
  4. All-you-can-eat buffets
  5. The most votes wins[/b]

And that’s before you get to immortality and everlasting salvation.

[b]A Brief History of Poetry

  1. Beauty
  2. beauty
  3. BEAUTY
  4. “Beauty”
  5. ytuaeb
  6. b-e-a-u-t-y
  7. $$$[/b]

On the other hand, nowadays money is the root of all beauty. But it will cost you to find out why.

Time is
Aristotle: an ever-vanishing now
Kant: an a priori form of inner sense
Heidegger: the condition of possibility of care
Žižek: money

Of course it’s money to everyone now.

[b]Shirley Jackson

Far and away the greatest menace to the writer—any writer, beginning or otherwise—is the reader.[/b]

And here that would be me and you.

I disliked having a fork pointed at me and I disliked the sound of the voice never stopping; I wished he would put food on the fork and put it into his mouth and strangle himself.

Or, sure, you can help him along.

People who are all alone have every right to be friends with one another.

You know, like we are.

I was thinking, I could turn him into a fly and drop him into a spider’s web and watch him tangled and helpless and struggling, shut into the body of a dying buzzing fly; I could wish him dead until he died. I could fasten him to a tree and keep him there until he grew into the trunk and bark grew over his mouth. if he was under the ground I could walk over him stamping my feet.

Clearly, we all have our own rendition of this.

We have grown to trust blindly in our senses of balance and reason, and I can see where the mind might fight wildly to preserve its own familiar stable patterns against all evidence that it was leaning sideways.

If not entirely upside down.

People, the doctor said sadly, are always so anxious to get things out into the open where they can put a name to them, even a meaningless name, so long as it has something of a scientific ring.

Or, if they’re particularly desperate, a philosophical ring.

[b]Stieg Larsson

Salander was the woman who hated men who hate women.[/b]

Just ask Nils Bjurman.

Always retain the ability to walk away, without sentimentality, from a situation that felt unmanageable. That was a basic rule of survival. Don’t lift a finger for a lost cause.

On the other hand, what if the cause can be won? Back again to taking or not taking a leap.

To exact revenge for yourself or your friends is not only a right, it’s an absolute duty.

You know, if you can actually pull it off.

There were not so many physical threats that could not be countered with a decent hammer.

Preferably one with a claw.

She had stared at him for a whole minute and decided that she did not have a grain of feeling left, because it would have been the same as bleeding to death. Fuck You.

Some have stared at me for a whole second.

We need to have a talk on the subject of what’s yours and what’s mine.

And then the next thing you know, they’re fucking.

[b]Stephen Fry

My real dissatisfaction is with my dissatisfaction. How dare I be so discontent? How dare I? Or being discontent why cannot I shut up about it?[/b]

Hell, he’s only human, right?

Animals have this in common with one another: unlike humans they appear to spend every minute of every hour of every day of their lives being themselves.

Instinctively as it were.

Just as it is the love of money that is the root of all evil, it is the belief in shamefulness that is the root of all misery.

Let’s pin down where they overlap, and where they don’t.

Straight people are encouraged by culture and society to believe that their sexual impulses are the norm, and therefore when their affairs of the heart and loins go wrong (as they certainly will), when they are flummoxed, distraught and defeated by love, they are forced to believe that it must be their fault. We gay people at least have the advantage of being brought up to expect the world of love to be imponderably and unmanageably difficult, for we are perverted freaks and sick aberrations of nature. They - poor normal lambs - naturally find it harder to understand why, in Lysander’s words, ‘the course of true love never did run smooth’.

On the other hand, as I suspect, sexual orientation has got nothing to do with it.

You think homosexuality is disgusting? Then, it follows, it follows as the night the day, that you find sex disgusting, for there is nothing done between two men or two women that is, by any objective standard, different from that which is done between a man and a woman.

Holes, after all, are holes.

…people who can change and change again are so much more reliable and happier than those who can’t.

Let’s just say there are clearly some exceptions.

[b]Carson McCullers

To me it is the irony of fate, she said. The way they come here. Those moths could fly anywhere. Yet they keep hanging around the windows of this house.[/b]

On the other hand, they probably don’t give it much thought.

You have a name and one thing after another happens to you, and you behave in various ways and do things, so that soon the name begins to have a meaning. Things have accumulated around your name.

More to the point, you only have so much control over it.

But say a man does know. He sees the world as it is and he looks back thousands of years to see how it all came about. He watches the slow agglutination of capital and power and he sees its pinnacle today. He sees America as a crazy house. He sees how men have to rob their brothers in order to live. He sees children starving and women working sixty hours a week to get to eat. He sees a whole damn army of unemployed and billions of dollars and thousands of miles of land wasted. He sees war coming. He sees when people suffer just so much they get mean and ugly and something dies in them. But the main thing he sees is that the whole system of the world is built on a lie. And although it’s as plain as the shining sun - the don’t-knows have lived with that lie so long they just can’t see it.

And now they’ve done gone and elected Don Trump.

It was almost three o’clock, the most stagnant hour in the day or night.

Actually, anywhere between 2 and 4.

They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax. Can you wonder why it is so miserable?

Modern love: for better or for better still.

I expect he done read more books than any white man in this town. He done read more books and he done worried about more things. He full of books and worrying. He done lost God and turned his back to religion. All his troubles come down just to that.

Of course we’ll need to hear his side too.

[b]Liane Moriarty

If she packaged the perfect Facebook life, maybe she would start to believe it herself.[/b]

More to the point, who cares, as long as everyone else does.

They could fall in love with fresh, new people, or they could have the courage and humility to tear off some essential layer of themselves and reveal to each other a whole new level of otherness, a level far beyond what sort of music they liked. It seemed to her everyone had too much self-protective pride to truly strip down to their souls in front of their long-term partners. It was easier to pretend there was nothing more to know, to fall into an easygoing companionship.

Probably, but then there are people like me.

But every time she tried yoga she found herself silently chanting her own mantra: I’m so boooored, I’m so boooored.

She neglected the “spiritual” part, didn’t she?

Her goodness had limits. She could have easily gone her whole life without knowing those limits, but now she knew exactly where they lay.

But not you, right?

Bonnie and her mum are both members of Amnesty International, said Abigail.
Of course they are, murmured Madeline. This must be how Jennifer Aniston feels, thought Madeline, whenever she hears about Angelina and Brad adopting another orphan or two.

Of course, that was then, wasn’t it?

When someone you loved was depending on your lie, it was perfectly easy.

In other words, fuck Kant.

[b]Nikos Kazantzakis

How could I, who loved life so intensely, have let myself be entangled for so long in that balderdash of books and paper blackened with ink![/b]

If the shoe fits, right? And I suspect it fits quite comfortably here.

The human soul is heavy, clumsy, held in the mud of the flesh. Its perceptions are still coarse and brutish. It can divine nothing clearly, nothing with certainty.

Well, aside from this perhaps.

Is he good? Or is he bad? That’s the only thing I ask nowadays. And as I grow older—I’d swear this on the last crust I eat—I feel I shan’t even go on asking that! Whether a man’s good or bad, I’m sorry for him, for all of 'em. The sight of a man just rends my insides, even if I act as though I don’t care a damn! There he is, poor devil, I think, he also eats and drinks and makes love and is frightened, whoever he is: he has his God and his devil just the same, and he’ll peg out and lie as stiff as a board beneath the ground and be food for worms, just the same. Poor devil! We’re all brothers! All worm-meat!

Of course nowadays the worms never make it into the coffins. But point taken.

You were saying you wanted to open the people’s eyes. All right, you just go and open old uncle Anagnosti’s eyes for him! You saw how his wife had to behave before him, waiting for his orders, like a dog begging. Just go now and teach them that women have equal rights with men, and that it’s cruel to eat a piece of the pig while the pig’s still raw and groaning in front of you, and that it’s simple lunacy to give thanks to God because he’s got everything while you’re starving to death!..Let people be, boss: don’t open their eyes. And supposing you did, what’d they see? Their misery! Leave their eyes closed, boss, and let them go on dreaming!

And then one day it dawns on you: he’s right.
Not that he actually is, of course.

Once, I saw a bee drown in honey, and I understood.

More to the point, how is this applicable to us?

Life’s true face is the skull.

One at a time as it were.

[b]Nein

If you need me, I’ll be pivoting. From impotent rage to quiet desperation.[/b]

Unless they actually do impeach him.

It’s not you. It’s your moral relativism. Which, yes, is just as bad as mine.

Of course I wrote the book on that. Or, rather, I was intending to.

Signifying nothing. It’s harder than it looks.

Really? Then try signifying less than nothing.

Theory. Still my favorite conspiracy.

If not for all practical purposes.

1. Understand world.
2. Change world.
3. Try hitting undo.

Repeat as necessary.

Sorry. I don’t do Praxis.

Not even theoretically?

[b]Jeanette Winterson

A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.[/b]

Sure, as long as it’s stuff that we like.

By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else’s.

That’ll do it.

…every moment you steal from the present is a moment you have lost for ever. There’s only now.

Right, like knowing this helps.

Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties: that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that our inward lives are governed by something much less regular-an imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the universe and whatever it does or does not contain.

I know: If only this could actually make sense.

No. Take the heart first. Then you don’t feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there’s no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It’s the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It’s the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It’s the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days.

True. Or false. If you don’t take it literally.

Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

Let’s file this one [obviously] under, “deep, man”.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

Religion is the opium of the poor.[/b]

In other words, them especially.

Now I am depressed myself, I said. That’s why I never think about these things. I never think and yet when I begin to talk I say the things I have found out in my mind without thinking.

Don’t try to pin this down.

Once in camp I put a log on a fire and it was full of ants. As it commenced to burn, the ants swarmed out and went first toward the center where the fire was; then turned back and ran toward the end. When there were enough on the end they fell off into the fire. Some got out, their bodies burnt and flattened, and went off not knowing where they were going. But most of them went toward the fire and then back toward the end and swarmed on the cool end and finally fell off into the fire. I remember thinking at the time that it was the end of the world and a splendid chance to be a messiah and lift the log off the fire and throw it out where the ants could get off onto the ground. But I did not do anything but throw a tin cup of water on the log, so that I would have the cup empty to put whiskey in before I added water to it. I think the cup of water on the burning log only steamed the ants.

I’m trying to imagine PETA’s reaction.

For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.

On the other hand, what does nowhere lead to? Here, perhaps?

Do not think about sin, he thought.

Let’s just say he’s not off to a good start.

And another thing. Don’t ever kid yourself about loving some one. It is just that most people are not lucky enough ever to have it. You never had it before and now you have it. What you have with Maria, whether it lasts just through today and a part of tomorrow, or whether it lasts for a long life is the most important thing that can happen to a human being. There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow.

I know this is true, of course, but I just don’t believe it.

[b]Existential Comics

History of Enlightenment philosophy: Things were going generally fine, then Immanuel Kant came along and fucked everything up for everyone.[/b]

Really? I thought that was Nietzsche.

one thing that I like about dogs is that they are dogs

True objectively one suspects.

Things were never good. Where did people get this idea that things were good?

Well, believe it or not, for some folks, things really were good. Or, at any rate, a hell of a lot better than they are now.

How to be a philosopher: say how things that don’t seem like social constructs are actually, in fact, social constructs.

Hmm, let’s run this one by Satyr…

Self help book: become an übermensch in these five easy steps.

Or just start packin’.

How to live the authentic life: buy your own bullshit.

After all, no one has to know but you.

What Hegel didn’t realize is that in the future ideas won’t move towards the truth, but towards whatever has the biggest advertising budget.

Or anything embedded in the military industrial complex.

[b]Bernard Malamud

But she had recently come to think that in such unhappy times–when the odds were so high against personal happiness–to find love was miraculous, and to fulfill it as best two people could was what really mattered.[/b]

Okay, okay, but why do they keep rubbing it in? Unless perhaps that’s my own doing.

He remembered how satisfied he had been as a youngster, and that with the little he had had - a dog, a stick, an aloneness he loved (which did not bleed him like his later loneliness), and he wished he could have lived longer in his boyhood. This was an old thought with him.

Me too. And it’s not getting any younger.

In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.

I know: What would Freud say?

A meshummed gives up one God for another. I don’t want either. We live in a world where the clock ticks fast while he’s on his timeless mountain staring in space. He doesn’t see us and he doesn’t care.

But not your God, right?

She is not for you. She is a wild one–wild, without shame. This is not a bride for a rabbi.

Or, for that matter, any ecclesiastic.

I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist. One often feels helpless in the face of the confusion of these times, such a mass of apparently uncontrollable events and experiences to live through, attempt to understand, and if at all possible, give order to; but one must not withdraw from the task if he has some small things to offer - he does so at the risk of diminishing his humanity.

Instead, I withdrew from the task. Unless you count this.

[b]David Byrne

There’s a biological basis for music, and that biological basis is the similarity between music and speech, said Purves. That’s the reason we like music. Music is far more complex than the ratios of Pythagoras. The reason doesn’t have to do with mathematics, it has to do with biology.[/b]

Like that explains…what exactly?

I also realized that there were lots of unacknowledged theater forms going on all around. Our lives are filled with performances that have been so woven into our daily routine that the artificial and performative aspect has slipped into invisibility.

Let’s file this one under “the games we play”.
If only more or less self-consciously.

It was rumored that the length of the CD was determined by the duration of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, because that was Norio Ohga’s favorite piece of music, and he was the president of Sony at the time. Philips had designed a CD with an 11.5 cm diameter, but Ohga insisted that a disc must be able to hold the entire Beethoven recording. The longest recording of the symphony in Polygram’s archive was 74 minutes, so the CD size was increased to 12 cm diameter to accommodate the extra data.

Actually, I didn’t know that.

I welcome the liberation of music from the prison of melody, rigid structure, and harmony. Why not? But I also listen to music that does adhere to those guidelines. Listening to the Music of the Spheres might be glorious, but I crave a concise song now and then, a narrative or a snapshot more than a whole universe. I can enjoy a movie or read a book in which nothing much happens, but I’m deeply conservative as well—if a song establishes itself within a pop genre, then I listen with certain expectations. I can become bored more easily by a pop song that doesn’t play by its own rules than by a contemporary composition that is repetitive and static. I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea—do I have to choose between the two?

Let’s file this one under, “you think too much.” Or, sure, maybe not.

Recordings aren’t time sensitive. You can hear the music you want whether it’s morning, noon, or the middle of the night. You can “get into” clubs virtually, “sit” in concert halls you can’t afford to visit, go to places that are too far away, or hear people sing about things you don’t understand, about lives that are alien, sad, or wonderful. Recorded music can be ripped free from its context, for better and worse. It becomes its own context.

In other words, yet another manifestation of “I”.

The mixtapes we made for ourselves were musical mirrors. The sadness, anger, or frustration you might be feeling at a given time could be encapsulated in the song selection. You made mixtapes that corresponded to emotional states, and they’d be available to pop into the deck when each feeling needed reinforcing or soothing. The mixtape was your friend, your psychiatrist, and your solace.

Let’s just say this: not me. I never matched the music to my mood, but let the music create the mood itself. Very hard to explain though.