a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.” Otto von Bismarck[/b]

So, do you think that’s still true today?

“Failure is the only success at all.” Bob Dylan

Not counting all the money he’s raked in.

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Of course for me that means next to nothing.

“Every man must get to Heaven his own way.” Frederick The Great

You know, if there is one.

“Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.” Baruch Spinoza

Let’s trade absurdities.

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” Arthur Schopenhauer

Let’s file this one under, “Sieg Heil!”

[b]Charles Darwin

The earthquake, however, must be to every one a most impressive event: the earth, considered from our earliest childhood as the type of solidity, has oscillated like a thin crust beneath our feet; and in seeing the laboured works of man in a moment overthrown, we feel the insignificance of his boasted power.[/b]

Time to invent the gods.

I have stated, that in the thirteen species of ground-finches, a nearly perfect gradation may be traced, from a beak extraordinarily thick, to one so fine, that it may be compared to that of a warbler.

And who could have predicted that around the time of the Big Bang?

But I am very poorly today & very stupid & I hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders.

From a letter of course. Almost anything goes there.

…ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge…

Okay, Kids, whaddya think?

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

Are we even allowed to say something like that?

I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics, for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense.

The part where mathematics becomes spooky.

[b]Jean Baudrillard

All societies end up wearing masks.[/b]

Not counting the ones they are turn into laws.

This is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security.

Yes, but isn’t this better left unsaid?

…the neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone–remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygenic design–but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness.

Hell, he must live in mine. If not yours.

There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.

Hey, whatever works.

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays cozily tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

Bottom line? Well, that’s it, right?

America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version. America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present.

Surely that doesn’t include Trunpworld.

[b]Shirley Jackson

I had made sure of what to say to him before I came to the table. The Amanita phalloides, I said to him, holds three different poisons. There is amanitin, which works slowly and is most potent. There is phalloidin, which acts at once, and there is phallin, which dissolves red corpuscles, although it is the least potent. The first symptoms do not appear until seven to twelve hours after eating, in some cases not before twenty-four or even forty hours. The symptoms begin with violent stomach pains, cold sweat, vomiting.[/b]

You never know when this stuff might be useful.

You see, said Tony, her voice still soft so as not to be overheard, but somehow fierce and angry, it frightens me when people try to grab at us like that. I can’t sit still and just let people watch me and talk to me and ask me questions. You see, she said again, as though trying to moderate her words and explain, they want to pull us back, and start us all over again just like them and doing the things they want to do and acting the way they want to act and saying and thinking and wanting all the things they live with every day.

For a start, let’s file this one under, “fuck them”.

We are all measured, good or evil, by the wrong we do to others…

But not all others of course.

Name? the desk clerk said to me politely, her pencil poised.
Name, I said vaguely. I remembered, and told her.
Age? she asked. Sex? Occupation?
Writer, I said.
Housewife, she said.
Writer, I said.
I’ll just put down housewife, she said.

This either resonates or it doesn’t.

I hated them anyway, and wondered why it had been worth while creating them in the first place.

This either resonates or it doesn’t.

Duty and conscience were, for Theodora, attributes which belonged properly to Girl Scouts.

And [even more so] to Boy Scouts. Though, sure, no knows exactly why.

[b]Stieg Larsson

It proved once again the theory that no security system is a match for a stupid employee.[/b]

Admittedly, once stupid is involved it everything changes. And not just with security systems.

I believe that everyone has it in them to kill another person. In desperation, or hatred, or at least to defend themselves.

Or just for the hell of it. Of course, you know where I’ll be going here, right?

Those pointless equations, to which no solution exists, are called absurdities.

Like, for example, life itself?

Much stronger boys in her class soon learned that it could be quite unpleasant to fight with that skinny girl. Unlike other girls in the class, she never backed down, and she would not for a second hesitate to use her fists or any weapon at hand to protect herself. She went around with the attitude that she would rather be beaten to death than take any shit.

Just ask this guy:

‘I am a rapist and a sadistic pig,’ if you get that tattoo removed I will carve it into your forehead, do you understand?

Oh, he understood alright.

What an excellent tool the internet is for freaks.

In particular those beyond good and evil freaks.

[b]so sad today

text me back to tell me you’re not going to text me back [/b]

Postmodern absurdity.

not in the fucking mood for nuclear war

Of course Don Trump may or may not take that into consideration.

by happy i mean moderately depressed

Yeah, we get that part.

by relaxed i mean very anxious

That part too.

there are so many amazing reasons not to like people

Or just stick to most obvious.

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

Better her than me, right?

[b]Stephen Fry

… Our language, tiger, our language: hundreds of thousands of available words, frillions of legitimate new ideas… And yet, oh, and yet, we, all of us, spend all our days saying to each other the same things time after weary time: “I love you,” “Don’t go in there,” “Get out,” “You have no right to say that,” “Stop it,” “Why should I,” “That hurt,” “Help,” "Marjorie is dead.”[/b]

True enough. Well, not counting the last one. But that’s just me.

Mow the fuckers down.

So, what do you think, Don Trump’s foreign policy?

We have also an edition of The Trial, by the notorious Jew, Kafka. Berlin would appreciate it, I am thinking, if this too was added to the bonfire. Also the works of that decadent lesbian Bolshevik, Jane Austen.

Hmm. Sounds like something you might overhear in the Oval Office.

Feelings are not something to which one does or does not have rights.

You know, if you keep them to yourself.

‘If you wouldn’t mind coming with us, sir? I am arresting you now and will shortly make a formal charge at the station.’ I was so happy, so blissfully, radiantly, wildly happy that if I could have sung I would have sung. If I could have danced I would have danced. I was free. At last I was free. I was going on a journey now where every decision would be taken for me, every thought would be thought for me and every day planned for me. I was going back to school.

Sure, that’s one way to look at it.

Mental health is one of the last great taboos.

Not unlike the lack of it.

[b]Liane Moriarty

It was interesting that fury and fear could look so much the same.[/b]

Nope, not in my mirror they don’t.

Poor, poor Pandora. Zeus sends her off to marry Epimetheus, a not especially bright man she’s never even met, along with a mysterious covered jar. Nobody tells Pandora a word about the jar. Nobody tells her not to open the jar. Naturally, she opens the jar. What else has she got to do? How was she to know that all those dreadful ills would go whooshing out to plague mankind forevermore, and that the only thing left in the jar would be hope?

I know: One God is bad enough.

There is no special protection when you cross that invisible line from your ordinary life to that parallel world where tragedies happen. It happens just like this. You don’t become someone else. You’re still exactly the same. Everything around you still smells and looks and feels exactly the same.

You know, in theory.

Nick explained that an aperitif was a pre-dinner drink. Nick came from an aperitif-drinking family. Alice came from a family with one dusty bottle of Baileys sitting hopefully in the back of the pantry with the tins of spaghetti.

Then Nick explained what a digestif drink was. In case Nora had never had one.

Relationships don’t stay the same. There isn’t time.

This sounds clever but probably isn’t.

Only a man could come up with something so ruthless, so essentially stupid and yet brutally effective.

Either a man or a woman. In, for example, Trumpworld.