a thread for mundane ironists

[b]so sad today

depression is like “i’m always here for you baby”[/b]

And it’s not as though you can tell it to go to hell.

honk if you’re sick of your own bullshit

Or, sure, you can honk for me.

we regret to inform you that you’ll be this person forever

Anyone know who they are?

me: stop pretending it’s not fucking weird that we exist, ok?!

Actually, it’s somewhere between weird and utterly inexplicable.

i don’t think we get the dick we think we deserve

And not just the homosexuals.

worried about death and my hair at the same time

Like that old tee-shirt: “can’t decide whether to commit suicide or go bowling”

[b]Roland Barthes

To be engulfed: outburst of annihilation which affects the amorous subject in despair or fulfillment. At its best, when it’s fulfillment, it’s a kind of disappearance at will. An easeful death. Death liberated from dying.[/b]

Here though [assuredly] one size does not fit all.

In the sentence “She’s no longer suffering,” to what, to whom does “she” refer? What does that present tense mean?

Well, of course, we could just ask her.

The text you write must prove to me that it desires me.

Or [here] that it doesn’t despise me.

I ask for nothing but to live in my suffering.

That and [one suspects] to contribute to ours.

We often hear it said that it is the task of art to express the inexpressible: it is contrary which must be said (with no intention of paradox): the whole task of art is to unexpress the expressible, to kidnap from the world’s language, which is the poor and powerful language of the passion, another speech, an exact speech.

Imagine then his take on the task of philosophy.

To see someone who does not see is the best way to be intensely aware of what he does not see.

Go ahead try to get around dasein here.

[b]Evelyn Waugh

Literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of utterance.[/b]

Is this more or less ridicuous than I think it is?

Faster… Faster… it’ll stop all right when the time comes.

In reality of course this is hardly ever true.

Julia used to say, ‘Poor Sebastian. It’s something chemical in him.’ That was the cant phrase of the time, derived from heaven knows what misconception of popular science. ‘There’s something chemical between them’ was used to explain the overmastering hate or love of any two people. It was the old concept of determinism in a new form. I do not believe there was anything chemical in my friend.

Unless of course this is all chemical too.

Money is only useful when you get rid of it. It is like the odd card in Old Maid; the player who is finally with it has lost.

Really, imagine arguing that today!

When the waterholes were dry, people sought to drink at the mirage.

Let’s file this one under, “to no avail”.

Instruction would be wasted on me. Just give me the form and I’ll sign on the dotted line.

And just like that, his soul was bought.

[b]Mary Roach

In 1998, a woman in Saline, Michigan received a patent for a Decorative Penile Wrap…The patent included three pages of drawings, including a penis wearing a ghost outfit, another in the robes of the Grim Reaper, and one dressed up to look like a snowman.[/b]

No, really: google.com/patents/US6145506

Space doesn’t just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between.

Some spaces more than others one suspects

A bright light at the end of a tunnel can seem warm and inviting, or it can seem mysterious and terrifying.

Yes, but which one ought it to be?

Here’s the other thing I think about. It makes little sense to try to control what happens to your remains when you are no longer around to reap the joys or benefits of that control. People who make elaborate requests concerning disposition of their bodies are probably people who have trouble with the concept of not existing…I imagine it is a symptom of the fear, the dread, of being gone, of the refusal to accept that you no longer control, or even participate in, anything that happens on earth. I spoke about this with funeral director Kevin McCabe, who believes that decisions concerning the disposition of a body should be made by the survivors, not the dead. “It’s none of their business what happens to them when they die,” he said to me. While I wouldn’t go that far, I do understand what he was getting at: that the survivors shouldn’t have to do something they’re uncomfortable with or ethically opposed to. Mourning and moving on are hard enough. Why add to the burden? If someone wants to arrange a balloon launch of the deceased’s ashes into inner space, that’s fine. But if it is burdensome or troubling for any reason, then perhaps they shouldn’t have to.

Clearly, there may well be no one right answer here.

People are messy, unpredictable things.

Yes, but only from the cradle to the grave.

People can’t anticipate how much they’ll miss the natural world until they are deprived of it. I have read about submarine crewmen who haunt the sonar room, listening to whale songs and colonies of snapping shrimp. Submarine captains dispense ‘periscope liberty’- a chance to gaze at clouds and birds and coastlines and remind themselves that the natural world still exists. I once met a man who told me that after landing in Christchurch, New Zealand, after a winter at the South Pole research station, he and his companions spent a couple days just wandering around staring in awe at flowers and trees. At one point, one of them spotted a woman pushing a stroller. ‘A baby!’ he shouted, and they all rushed across the street to see. The woman turned the stroller and ran.

Let’s pin down why this matters.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.” Voltaire[/b]

Welcome to Trumpworld, for example.

"Those who cannot understand how to put their thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of debate.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Let’s nail down what this really means.

“Tyranny and anarchy are never far apart.” Jeremy Bentham

In theory for example.

“It doesn’t matter how slowly you go—so long as you do not stop." Confucius

Not counting all the times when, having gotten there, it was too late.

“There is another world, but it is in this one.” W.B. Yeats

Just our luck, isn’t it?

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” W.B. Yeats

Less the catastrophic infernos of course.

[b]Jeanette Winterson

You said, Why do I frighten you?
Frighten me? Yes you do frighten me. You act as though we will be together for ever. You act as though there is infinite pleasure and time without end. How can I know that? My experience has been that time always ends. In theory you are right, the quantum physicists are right, the romantics and the religious are right.[/b]

Everybody’s right, nobody’s wrong. Just ask them.

Why did I walk so purposefully in a straight line? Where would it take me? He went round and round and we got there all the same.

To the abyss for example.

They believed that if a mouse found your hair clippings and built a nest with them you got a headache. If the nest was big enough, you might go mad.

They believed lots of shit like that though.

And what is enlightenment anyway but delusions we can live with?

And others if they know what’s good for them.

Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.

Does this take us closer to me or to you?

The world is surely wide enough to walk without fear.

Apparently not.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

I wish I did not think about it so much, he thought.[/b]

Of course that is often easier said than done.

[b]The two kinds of fools we have in Russia, karkov grinned and began. First there is the winter fool. The winter fool comes to the door of your house and he knocks loudly. You go to the door and you see him there and you have never seen him before. He is an impressive sight. He is a very big man and he has on high boots and a fur coat and a fur hat and he is all covered with snow. First he stamps his boots and snow falls from them. Then he takes off his fur coat and shakes it and more snow falls from them, Then he takes off his fur hat and knocks it against the door. More snow falls from his fur hat. Then he stamps his boots again and advances into the room. Then you look at him and you see he is a fool. That is the winter fool."

Now in the summer you see a fool going down the street and he is waving his arms and jerking his head from side to side and everybody from two hundred yards away can tell he is a fool. that is a summer fool.[/b]

Okay, which one is Putin, and which one is Trump?

I was a little crazy. But I wasn’t crazy in any complicated manner.

So, does that leave room for hope?

Pain does not matter to a man.

On the other hand, it matters a lot to men.
Or, rather, it does around here.

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

I suggest we not go there.

If people bring so much courage to the world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them.

Eventually, for example.

[b]Philip Larkin

I wouldn’t mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.[/b]

Some might say the same thing about Hell.

Most things may never happen: this one will.

Unless of course it won’t.

[b]When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide[/b]

On the other hand, you can take it too far.

Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.

Does that mean what I think it does? And, knowing me, what do you think that is?

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

Let’s grapple with the distinction.

The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Before the second day in other words.

[b]Neil Gaiman

Nothing’s changed. You’ll go home. You’ll be bored. You’ll be ignored. No one will listen to you, really listen to you. You’re too clever and too quiet for them to understand. They don’t even get your name right.[/b]

Sure, we all want to believe that’s the explanation. But, really, for me, it is.

When the first living thing existed, I was there waiting. When the last living thing dies, my job will be finished. I’ll put the chairs on the tables, turn out the lights and lock the universe behind me when I leave.

Not counting all of the other universes of course. Well, if that’s true.

It’s still National Library Week. You should be especially nice to a librarian today, or tomorrow. Sometime this week, anyway. Probably the librarians would like tea. Or chocolates. Or a reliable source of funding.

That reminds me: Can you even imagine Don Trump in a library?

This isn’t about what is . . . it’s about what people think is.

We’re fucked in other words.

It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But a half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.

Trump naked in the Oval Office?
Well, maybe Ivanka, he thought.

Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

I know: You’re the exception.

[b] Jonathan Safran Foer

I think about all of the things I’ve done, Oskar. And all of the things I didn’t do. The mistakes I’ve made are dead to me. But I can’t take back the things I never did.[/b]

Of course that’s probably a good thing.

In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.

Even with oblivion then it’s turtles all the way down.

Let’s go to bed. Those four words differentiate a marriage from every other kind of relationship. We aren’t going to find a way to agree, but let’s go to bed. Not because we want to, but because we have to. We hate each other right now, but let’s go to bed. It’s the only one we have. Let’s go to our sides, but the sides of the same bed. Let’s retreat into ourselves, but together. How many conversations had ended with those four words? How many fights?

Not counting those who who end up on the living room couch.

If I’d been somone else in a different world I’d’ve done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.

That’s why God [one of them] created parallel universes.

It feels like a moment I’ve lived a thousand times before, as if everything is familiar, right up to the moment of my death, that it will happen again an infinite number of times, that we will meet, marry, have our children, succeed in the ways we have, fail in the ways we have, all exactly the same, always unable to change a thing. I am again at the bottom of an unstoppable wheel, and when I feel my eyes close for death, as they have and will a thousand times, I awake.

Of course he’s just paraphrasing that other guy.

‘Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old.’ I read that in a book somewhere and it’s stuck in my head. Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s not true. More likely, the young and the old are lonely in different ways, in their own ways…

Deep down [one suspects] no one really knows.

[b]Nein

The question, friends, is not if you’ll die alone. It’s what’re you doing this weekend.[/b]

Let’s grope in despair for the right answer.

A gentle reminder, friends, never to seize the day. Simply meet it for a beer. Have a few laughs. And let it go along its merry way.

Most days, sure. But today especially.

In other news: Donald has strengthened to a Category 5 authoritarian despot. Residents are being warned to evacuate.

Unless of course he’s your Category 5 Uberman.

Anything is possible. And, yes, that’s the bad news.

Or, if nothing seems possible, the good news.

Heidegger walks into a bar.
What’ll it be?
How much time you got?

But then [eventually] gets around to being.

Kant walks into a bar. Writes his first Yelp critique.

So, any Yelp critiques of ILP?

[b]Terry Pratchett

Many people could say things in a cutting way, Nanny knew. But Granny Weatherwax could listen in a cutting way. She could make something sound stupid just by hearing it.[/b]

Here of course some read us in a cutting way.

There’s a door.
Where does it go?
It stays where it is, I think.

How then [philosophically] is this more than just a joke?

Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn’t believing. It’s where belief stops, because it isn’t needed any more.

How then [philosophically] is this more than just a clever observation?

But here’s some advice, boy. Don’t put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That’s why they’re called revolutions.

Not counting the revolutions that never really get started.

Sometimes it’s better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.

Or [if you can] just start a nuclear war.

You know what the greatest tragedy is in the whole world?.. It’s all the people who never find out what it is they really want to do or what it is they’re really good at. It’s all the sons who become blacksmiths because their fathers were blacksmiths. It’s all the people who could be really fantastic flute players who grow old and die without ever seeing a musical instrument, so they become bad plowmen instead. It’s all the people with talents who never even find out. Maybe they are never even born in a time when it’s even possible to find out. It’s all the people who never get to know what it is that they can really be. It’s all the wasted chances.

True, but only for the vast majority of us.

wrong thread

wrong thread

wrong thread

[b]e e cummings

One’s not half of two; two are halves of one.[/b]

Surely depending on the context though.

She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn’t standing still

And how comforting that must be.

And now you are and I am and we’re a mystery which will never happen again.

And we’ll let you know if it does.

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.

Or ugly as the case may be.

Humanity I love you because when you’re hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.

Or, more often than not these days, dope.

We can never be born enough.

Or for some quite the opposite.

[b]Joseph Heller

Rise above principal and do what’s right.[/b]

Instinctively as it were.

The enemy, retorted Yossarian with weighted precision, is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on…

Wow, does that bring back memories.

While none of the work we do is very important, it is important that we do a great deal of it.

That and get paid for it.

Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective.

Next on the chopping block: nouns and verbs.

The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization, and he was exhilarated by his discovery. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.

On the other hand, does anyone really know what “character” is? Aside perhaps from the obvious: being “one of us”.[/i]

I’ll bet I can name two things to be miserable about for every one you can name to be thankful for.

At least two.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

How long can you be offline before crippling anxiety sets in?
2005: A week, no problem.
2010: A day. Maybe.
2017: “Offline”? What’s that?[/b]

Clearly an exaggeration. Though clearly not by much.

2015: Download a pirated PDF because the book is 5 feet away on a shelf
2017: Re-download the PDF rather than find the file on your computer

Let’s note the significance of this.

A successful philosophy
Aristotle: teaches the good life
Descartes: feeds off doubt
Benjamin: leaves thought in ruins
Tarski: is successful

“Leaves thoughts in ruins”. Wow. I wish I had thought of that.

Logic: That’s not true!
Epistemology: You can’t be sure!
Aesthetics: I can’t bear to look!
Politics: I’ll make it all better. Trust me.

So, is the swamp drained yet?
I know, let’s ask Don and Chuck and Nancy.

Nothing is more real than
Hegel: something from nothing
Nietzsche: nothing from something
Camus: nothing from nothing
Beckett: nothing

Actually, it’s now less than zero.

The strength of your conviction that you have something important to tweet is inversely proportional to the likelihood that you do.

Or [obviously] here: The strength of your conviction that you have something important to post is inversely proportional to the likelihood that you do.

[b]Lionel Trilling

Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.[/b]

Even bad literature. Well, for some.

…we should consider an idea that once was salient in western culture: the idea of “making a life”, by which was meant conceiving human existence, one’s own or another’s, as if it were a work of art upon which one might pass judgment…This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self.

Now it’s more akin to “making a buck”. Selflessly if necessary.

We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.

Except of course in theory.

At the behest of the criterion of authenticity, much that was once thought to make up the very fabric of culture has come to seem of little account, mere fantasy or ritual, or downright falsification. Conversely, much that culture traditionally condemned and sought to exclude is accorded a considerable moral authority by reason of the authenticity claimed for it, for example, disorder, violence, unreason.

And now look where we are: In the belly of the beast that is Trumpworld.

In the most secret heart of every intellectual … there lies hidden … the hope of power, the desire to bring his ideas to reality by imposing them on his fellow man.

Whatever could have given him that idea.

We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire’s, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, “It is later than you think.” But with us it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naïve moralizing. We seem to like to condemn our finest but not our worst qualities by pitting them against the exigency of time.

Now there’s a swamp worth draining. Unless of course I’m wrong.

[b]Jasmine Warga

We all want to believe that every day is different, that every day we change, but really, it seems that certain things are coded into us from the very beginning.[/b]

Well, until you get down to the specifics.

He’s no longer the person I want to die with; he’s the person I want to be alive with.

Nope, never found her.

At least in physics my classmates aren’t desperately trying to make uncomplicated shit complicated. Nope, in physics, we’re all trying to make complicated things uncomplicated.

Objectively, with any luck.

I’m like a grenade made of ceramic – solid and dense and cold – but still fragile.

Including the pin.

I know it’s all in my head, but some feelings are harder to shake than others.

And then [eventually] you get down to the ones that you never do.

Maybe it’s all relative, not just light and time like Einstein theorized, but everything. Like life can seem awful and unfixable until the universe shifts a little and the observation point is altered, and then suddenly, everything seems more bearable.

Or less bearable as it were.