a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Jean Baudrillard

Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.[/b]

I know, let’s go to war over it. And, sure, maybe make a bundle on the side.

…sense of futility that comes from doing anything merely to prove to yourself that you can do it: having a child, climbing a mountain, making some sexual conquest, committing suicide.

Waiting for godot.

Imagine the amazing good fortune of the generation that gets to see the end of the world.

True, but there are other ways to look it at. There must be.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

Nope, haven’t come across one of them yet. Although I’m sure that I must have.

Philosophy leads to death, sociology leads to suicide.

Well, as long as we’re out of here.

Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.

That’s what it is alright. But not just academically.

[b]Shirley Jackson

I decided that I would choose three powerful words, words of strong protection, and so long as these great words were never spoken aloud no change would come.[/b]

I suspect there’s not much science behind it.

She brought herself away from the disagreeably clinging thought by her usual method - imagining the sweet sharp sensation of being burned alive.

Me, I just conjure up objectivists. You know the ones.

Where did he go, your father?
Africa.
What for?
To shoot lions, of course.
What on Earth for? said Mrs. Willow blankly.
Some people shoot lions, the girl said pleasantly, and some people do not shoot lions. My father is one of the people who do.

And then of course there are those that don’t, but would if they could.

I shall commence, I think, with a slight exaggeration and go on from there into an outright lie.

You know, like Trump.
Sure, and all the rest of them.

To learn what we fear is to learn who we are.

They do kind of tag along.

In my own experience, contacts with the big world outside the typewriter are puzzling and terrifying; I don’t think I like reality very much. Principally, I don’t understand people outside; people in books are sensible and reasonable, but outside there is no predicting what they will do.

Not only that but how dare they!

[b]tiny nietzsche

If you love postmodernism, set it free. If it comes back, doubt its sincerity.[/b]

What if it only sort of, almost, nearly comes back?

fuck 'em, danno

And not just in Hawaii.

Maybe she was born with it. Maybe it slowly shifted into place like continental drift.

Not only that, but maybe he was born with it.

I’m off to see a man about a hearse.

Or an urn.

New research says I don’t exist, but even if I did, so what?

Let’s file this one under “covering all bases”.

trump: pass my healthcare bill
congress: fuck you
trump: fuck me? fuck me? yeah well fuck you
congress: no fuck you
trump: you fucking fucks

Then it’s off to play a round of golf.

[b]Stieg Larsson

No, I don’t believe in God, but I respect the fact that you do. Everyone has to have something to believe in.[/b]

That’s what you’re supposed to say, isn’t it?

…One of them is that a bastard is always a bastard and if I can hurt a bastard by digging up shit about him, then he deserves it.

For some that being the least of it.

It did no good to cry, she had learned that early on. She had also learned that every time she tried to make someone aware of something in her life, the situation just got worse. Consequently it was up to her to solve her problems by herself, using whatever methods she deemed necessary.

Believe it or not, some will go all the way to the grave and never figure this out.

Salander’s greatest fear, which was so huge and so black that it was of phobic proportions, was that people would laugh at her feelings. And all of a sudden all her carefully constructed self-confidence seemed to crumble.

Go ahead, try to bring mine tumbling down.

If love is liking someone an awful lot, then I suppose I’m in love with several people.

Though not in love with a hell of a lot more.

Men could be as big as a house and made of granite, but they all had balls in the same place.

And [conveniently] smack dab in the middle.

[b]Stephen Fry

'Could do better’ is a meaningless conclusion. ‘Could be happier’ is the only one that counts.[/b]

Beyond good and evil even.

It can come a bit hard sometimes to see one’s own unique, heroic life pinned so pitilessly to a wall. At other times it can endorse, affirm and save, but as I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters at all but me.

Let’s file this one under, “you might as well just flip a coin”.

It is perfectly possible to live a life from cradle to grave that is entirely dishonest.One might never reveal one’s true identity, the yearnings and cravings of one’s innermost self, even to the most intimate circle of family and friends; never really speak the truth to anyone. Priests and psychotherapists may believe that the confessional-box or the analysis session reveals truths, but you know and I know and every human being knows that we lie all the time to all the world. Lying is as much a part of us as wearing clothes. Indeed Man’s first act in Eden was to give names to everything on earth, our first act of possession and falsehood was to take away a stone’s right to be a stone by imprisoning it with the name “stone”. There are in reality, as Fenellosa said, no nouns in the universe. Man’s next great act was to cover himself up. We have been doing so ever since. We feel that our true identities shame us. Lying is a deep part of us. TO take it away is to make us something less than, not more than, human.

With any luck it’s all genetic. Beyond our control in other words.

Mankind can live free in a society hemmed in by laws, but we have yet to find a historical example of mankind living free in lawless anarchy.

Tell that to Joker.

Jo Wood was sound, sound as a bell. Solid, cynical, amused and occasionally amusing, he did not appear to be very intelligent, and unlike Richard Fawcett and me, seemed uninterested in words, ideas and the world. But one day he said to me:
I’ve got it now. It’s reading isn’t it?
I’m sorry?
You read a lot, don’t you? That’s where it all comes from. Reading. Yeah, reading.
The next time I saw him he had a Herman Hesse novel in his hands. I never saw him again without a book somewhere on his person. When I heard, some years later, that he had got into Cambridge I thought to myself, I know how that happened. He decided one day to read.

Of course you can take this too far, can’t you?

The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know.

And they certainly don’t care about that.

[b]Melissa Broder

There aren’t many ways to find comfort in this world. We must take it where we can get it, even in the darkest, most disgusting places. Nobody asks to be born. No one signs a form that says, You have my permission to make me exist. Babies are born, because parents feel that they themselves are not enough. So, parents, never condemn us for trying to fill our existential holes, when we are but the fruit of your own vain attempts to fill yours. It’s your fault we’re here to deal with the void in the first place.[/b]

Let’s file this one under, “whine, whine, whine”.

I fear others will discover that I am not only imperfect; I’m not even okay. I fear that I truly am not okay. But most people who meet me never know that I am struggling. On the outside I am smiling. I am juggling all the balls of okayness: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, existential. Underneath, I am suffocating.

On the other hand, maybe she’s not just a loser.

It seems weird to me that here we are, alive, not knowing why we are alive, and just going about our business, sort of ignoring that fact. How are we all not looking at each other all the time just like, Yo, what the fuck?

I know, let’s invent the gods.

Here’s why I’m afraid of life after death: What if there is no nicotine gum?

He wondered: Can you smoke in Heaven?

There would never be enough milk. One titty is too many and a thousand are never enough. What I really sought was a cosmic titty. I sought a titty so omniscient it could sate all my holes.

But what if it’s not nonsense?

Have you ever noticed that your job performance or productivity suffers because of the time spent online?

On the other hand, isn’t that what work is for?

[b]Liane Moriarty

Everyone had another sort of life up their sleeve that might have made them happy.[/b]

He wondered: what happened to mine?

She’d never really believed in it before. Then, as she hit her late thirties, her body said, OK, you don’t believe in PMS? I’ll show you PMS. Get a load of this, bitch. Now, for one day every month, she had to fake everything: her basic humanity, her love for her children, her love for Ed. She’d once been appalled to hear of women claiming PMS as a defense for murder. Now she understood. She could happily murder someone today! In fact, she felt like there should be some sort of recognition for her remarkable strength of character that she didn’t.

Of course most men still don’t believe in it.

Was there anything better than to be wanted? Was that all anyone really needed?

For some sure, that’s all they need. For others though [like me] it’s to be left alone.

That’s what’s so embarrassing about all this. Each time I sobbed for a lost baby, it was like sobbing over the end of a relationship when I’d never even gone out with the guy. My babies weren’t babies. They were just microscopic clusters of cells that weren’t ever going to be anything else. they were just my own desperate hopes. Dream babies. And people have to give up on dreams.

Rationalizations. There must be trillions and trillions of them by now.

The suffragettes didn’t starve themselves for the vote, so that you girls could starve yourselves for a man.

Do girls still do that?

The words “I’m sorry” felt like an insult. You said “I’m sorry” when you bumped against someone’s supermarket [cart]. There need to be bigger words.

On the other hand, nowadays you’re lucky to get any reaction at all.

[b]Nikos Kazantzakis

I felt deep within me that the highest point a man can attain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe![/b]

He’s kidding, right?

To think things out properly and fairly, a fellow’s got to be calm and old and toothless: When you’re an old gaffer with no teeth, it’s easy to say: ‘Damn it, boys, you mustn’t bite!’ But, when you’ve got all thirty-two teeth…

There’s an important truth in there somewhere. Let’s find it.

Never in my life have I feared death as much as I feared that resurrection.

Of course, others are willing to take their chances.

If the soul within us does not change, Judas, the world outside us will never change. The enemy is within, the Romans are within, salvation starts from within!

Instead, Judas does God’s bidding.
I mean, that’s what he did, right?

I knew that over and above the truth, there exists another duty which is much more important and much more human.

And then there are the fools who claim to have found it.

I am not tired, but the night is coming.

Uh-oh.
If you know what I mean.

[b]Jeanette Winterson

I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day. A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone.[/b]

On the other hand, going all the way back to the Big Bang, how far removed is any one particular human life from that?

I didn’t want to be in the teeming mass of the working class. I didn’t want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape - but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community - to society?

[i]Pick three:
1] pop culture
2] mindless consumption
3] worshipping celebrities

Oh, and don’t forget to vote![/i]

Like all familiar objects, it had become invisible.

I know: If only that were actually true.

The pursuit of happiness isn’t all or nothing— it’s all and nothing.

About fifty-fifty I reckon.

The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. That’s the size of it, the immensity of it. It’s not proper, it’s not clean, it’s not containable.

You know what’s coming: “So they tell me”.

I’m telling you stories. Trust me.

In other words, it’s now entirely up to you to differentiate them from lies.

[b]Olivia Dresher

What can’t be said is most everything.[/b]

Though enough can be said to get by.

“Why?” comes right before silence.

I know: If only that were actually true. Here, for example.

“We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t.” – Rebecca Solnit

I think that’s true. Unless of course it’s not.

There is more truth to be found in going slower and slower and slower than going faster and faster and faster…

Of course we’ll need an actual context.

“Men are not afraid of women the way women are afraid of men.” Isabelle Huppert

It’s not even close more often than not.

Perfection is simply what is.

Either that or simply what you think it is.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.[/b]

It is after all a man’s world. Well, not counting all the parts that aren’t.

So this was how you died, in whispers that you did not hear.

Well, not counting all the other ways.

Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?
Yes, every once in a while.
Do you know that in abou thirty- five more years we’ll be dead?
What the hell, Robert, I said. What the hell.
I’m serious.
It’s one thig I don’t worry about, I said.
You ought to.
I’ve had plenty to worry about one time or other. I’m through worrying.
Well, I want to go to South America.
Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.
But you’ve never been to South America.
South America hell! If you went there the way you feel now it would be exactly the same. This is a good town. Why don’t you start living your life in Paris?

Trust me: It’s exactly the same in Baltimore.

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today.

That’s how it works alright.

War is not won by victory.

That sounds about right. Or, sure, maybe not.

There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.

For example, at the impeachment hearings.

[b]Bernard Malamud

There comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to – if there are no doors or windows – he walks through a wall.[/b]

Nope, no videos on youtube yet.

They say God appeared in history and used it for his purposes, but if that was so he had no pity for men.

Well, they say a lot of things. Like we do.

It was a strange thing about people—they could look the same but be different.

Or: It was a strange thing about people—they could look so very, very different but act exactly the same.

Without heroes, we are all plain people and don’t know how far we can go.

Without villains too.

…will you please explain how you can cry for a dead dog yet belong to a society of fanatics that urges death on human beings who happen to be Jews? Explain to me the logic of it.

First, you define what the Jews are. The logic then follows. Right, James?

Since I can’t be a professional on account of lack of education I wouldn’t mind being wealthy.

Well, that’s what the state lotteries are for.

[b]David Byrne

At that time, American radio was a cauldron if impassioned voices—live preachers, talk-show hosts, and salesmen. The radio was shouting at you, pleading with you, and seducing you.[/b]

“At that time” meaning all the time of course.

Maybe the difference between speech and music isn’t all that great. We infer a lot from the tone of someone’s voice, so imagine that aspect of speech pushed just a little further. The weird cadences of a Valley girl, for instance, might be viewed as a species of singing. The malls of Sherman Oaks are a setting for a kind of massed choir.

But sure: Maybe not.

The online music magazine Pitchfork once wrote that I would collaborate with anyone for a bag of Doritos.

I’m sure they were only being ironic.

There’s a good chance that you might be inspired by ideas that originate outside of yourself.

Just not mine, right?

Complete freedom is as much curse as boon; freedom within strict and well-defined confines is, to me, ideal.

Let’s pin this down. Or not as it were.

I’d argue that contemporary hip-hop is written to be heard in cars with systems like the one below. The massive volume seems to be more about sharing your music with everyone, gratis!

In other words, whether they want to hear it or not.

[b]Michael Lewis

Those who know don’t tell and those who tell don’t know.[/b]

Uh, what exactly?

What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don’t need to make smart decisions—if they can get rich making dumb decisions? The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; they’re still all wrong.

Right, tell that to the 1%.

He was ignorant, but a lot of people mistook ignorance for stupidity…

But not here, right?

The lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual.

Either that or inherit it from Mom and Dad.

The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold.

[i]CDO! Remember that:

A collateralized debt obligation (CDO) is so-called because the pooled assets – such as mortgages, bonds and loans – are essentially debt obligations that serve as collateral for the CDO. The tranches in a CDO vary substantially in their risk profile. [/i]

In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $724,000.

Gee, I wonder who owns the house now?

[b]Alan Moore

Trust in the fictive process, in the occult interweaving of text and event must be unwavering and absolute. This is the magic place, the mad place at the spark gap between word and world.[/b]

Providing of course the words are actually there.

It does not do to rely too much on silent majorities, Evey, for silence is a fragile thing…One loud noise, and it’s gone.

Our noise in particular.

Finally, faced with horrors both intolerable and unavoidable, I chose madness.

I know: If only that was something that we could choose.

I do prefer to criticise things from a position of ignorance.

What are you gonna do: Kids.

Just look above you. Do you see? That is called the immense board of lights. And there is the Great Black and, strewn across it, small and surrounded and vulnerable and brave, there is the Great White.
Oh. Oh, yeah. Of course. Hah. You know, that’s perfect. That’s really perfect. And the Great White… I mean, there’s so much more black. A-are we losing?
No. Once there was only black. We are winning.

You know, if you want to call it that.

The relentless onslaught of this stupefying imagery that pounds our inner landscapes flat, a carpet-bombing of the mind. The language of the world, that overwhelms us.

And not just television. Well, on most days.

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

We are being very nomadic with the truth, yes?[/b]

Almost a lie, one supects.

They reciprocated the great and saving lie–that our love for things is greater than our love for our love for things–willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.

Yes, that’s how convoluted the games we play can get.

Money can’t buy you happiness, but happiness isn’t everything.

And that seems more or less good enough for most of us.

Isn’t it so weird how the number of dead people is increasing even though the Earth stays the same size, so that one day there isn’t going to be room to bury anyone anymore?

Just not anything soon, right?

It would be possible, in theory, for life and art to be reversed.

In theory. Always go there with the truly imponderable stuff.

Chickens can do many things, but they cannot make sophisticated deals with humans.

In other words, their goose is cooked.

[b]Haruki Murakami

The world of the grotesque is the darkness within us. Well before Freud and Jung shined a light on the workings of the subconscious, this correlation between darkness and our subconscious, these two forms of darkness, was obvious to people. It wasn’t a metaphor, even. If you trace it back further, it wasn’t even a correlation. Until Edison invented the electric light, most of the world was totally covered in darkness. The physical darkness outside and the inner darkness of the soul were mixed together, with no boundary separating the two. They were directly linked. Like this.” Oshima brings his two hands together tightly. "But today things are different. The darkness in the outside world has vanished, but the darkness in our hearts remains, virtually unchanged. Just like an iceberg, what we label the ego or consciousness is, for the most part, sunk in darkness. And that estrangement sometimes creates a deep contradiction or confusion within us.[/b]

Some considerably darker than others. And then all the way up to pitch black.

People with dark souls have nothing but dark dreams. People with really dark souls do nothing but dream.

Of course we all know that’s not true.

When something bothered me, I didn’t talk with anyone about it. I thought it over all by myself, came to a conclusion, and took action alone…I thought that’s just the way things are. Human beings, in the final analysis, have to survive on their own.

You know, if they can. And there’s nothing wrong with admitting that you can’t.

No one could say how long that life would last. Whatever has form can disappear in an instant.

Not counting me of course.

I was reduced to pure concept. My flesh had dissolved; my form had dissipated. I floated in space. Liberated of my corporeal being, but without dispensation to go anywhere else. I was adrift in the void. Somewhere across the fine line separating nightmare from reality.

Works that way for all practical purposes too.

This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: At the time, no one knew what was coming.

Not counting oblivion anyway.

[b]Thornton Wilder

That’s what it was like 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.[/b]

And not just in his town.

Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.

I know: Go figure.

Imprisonment of the body is bitter; imprisonment of the mind is worse.

Not to mention the other way around.

The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.

Unless of course [as some insist] you count the Bible. Or Atlas Shrugged.

Faith is a never-ending pool of clarity, reaching far beyond the margins of consciousness. We all know more than we know we know.

You know, whatever that means.

He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living.

For example, the business of hating.

[b]Robert Penn Warren

What you don’t know don’t hurt you, for it ain’t real. They called that Idealism in my book I had when I was in college, and after I got hold of that principle I became an Idealist. I was a brass-bound Idealist in those days. If you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn’t real anyway.[/b]

Not only that, but it isn’t real objectively.

History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.

Sounds like something an Idealist might believe.

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn’t anything else to make it out of.

Or [obviously]: Badness . . . You got to make it out of goodness . . . Because there isn’t anything else to make it out of.

I could lie there as long as I wanted, and let all the pictures of things a man might want run through my head, coffee, a girl, money, a drink, white sand and blue water, and let them all slide off, one after another, like a deck of cards slewing slowly off your hand. Maybe the things you want are like cards. You don’t want them for themselves, really, though you think you do. You don’t want a card because you want the card, but because in a perfectly arbitrary system of rules and values and in a special combination of which you already hold a part the card has meaning. But suppose you aren’t sitting in a game. Then, even if you do know the rules, a card doesn’t mean a thing. They all look alike.

So, does this describe the things that you want?
Me?
Or, rather, which one of me?

So there are two you’s, the one you create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you’s are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn’t be any difference between the two you’s or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect alignment.

I can only hope to meet her in the next world. Or maybe the one after that.

He would get up and go out into a world which seemed very unfamiliar, but with a tantalizing unfamiliarity like the world of boyhood to which an old man returns.

We can only imagine watching it all unfolding as it really was.

[b]Karl R. Popper

In my view, aiming at simplicity and lucidity is a moral duty of all intellectuals: lack of clarity is a sin, and pretentiousness is a crime.[/b]

Of course, as we all know, you can take that too far. Way too far for example.

As indicated by our example, methodological nominalism is nowadays fairly generally accepted in the natural sciences. The problems of the social sciences, on the other hand, are still for the most part treated by essentialist methods. This is, in my opinion, one of the main reasons for their backwardness.

This along with objectivism.

For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple, and free life in an egalitarian society. It took some time before I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream; that freedom is more important than equality; that the attempt to realize equality endangers freedom; and that, if freedom is lost, there will not even be equality among the unfree.

Back again [as always] to the part where one ends and the other begins. Where one begins and the other ends.

“It can’t happen here" is always wrong: a dictatorship can happen anywhere.

Now that might be hard to, say, trump. Here in particular.

It is often asserted that, in view of the situation in quantum theory, object and subject can no longer be sharply separated. 1 To use Heitler’s words, the ‘separation of the world into an “objective outside reality”, and “us”, the self-conscious onlookers, can no longer be maintained. Object and subject become inseparable from each other’. 2 This, according to Bohr, is due to ‘the impossibility of any sharp separation between the behaviour of atomic objects and the interaction with the measuring instruments which serve to define the conditions under which the phenomena appear’. 3 Heitler elaborates the point in some detail. ‘One may ask’, he writes, ‘if it is sufficient to carry out a measurement by a self-registering apparatus or whether the presence of an observer is required.’ And he arrives at the conclusion that the self-registering apparatus is insufficient, and that ‘the observer appears, as a necessary part of the whole structure, and in his full capacity as a conscious being’.

One possible interpretation: we’re fucked either way.

…a rational analysis of the consequences of a decision does not make the decision rational; the consequences do not determine our decision; it is always we who decide.

And you know where this leads. Either that or you don’t want to know.