a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]Existential Comics

Most people are bad authors not because they are bad at writing, but because they have nothing interesting to say.[/b]

Or they just say the same interesting thing over and over and over again.You know, if it is interesting.

The true power of a philosophy education is being able to come up with really deep sounding tweets that are actually just stupid bullshit.

Tweets, posts…what’s the difference?

Okay you guys, we had a pretty good run, but enough with being ironic. Irony is lame now, spread the word.

Never!!!

Human behavior makes a lot more sense once you realize that happiness is mostly a post hoc justification used to explain our motivations.

Not only this but most don’t even know that’s what they’re doing.

Nietzsche: there are no facts, only interpretations.
Lou Salomé: just answer the question, Nietzsche, are you a virgin or not?

Just out of curiosity, was he?

I’ve found that people will generally believe anything that is formatted in bullet points.

What do you say Kids, make them mandatory here?

[b]Malcolm Gladwell

The scholars who research happiness suggest that more money stops making people happier at a family income of around seventy-five thousand dollars a year. After that, what economists call “diminishing marginal returns” sets in. If your family makes seventy-five thousand and your neighbor makes a hundred thousand, that extra twenty-five thousand a year means that your neighbor can drive a nicer car and go out to eat slightly more often. But it doesn’t make your neighbor happier than you, or better equipped to do the thousands of small and large things that make for being a good parent.[/b]

You know, all things considered.

Lesson Number One: The Importance of Being Jewish

You know, if it is.

Cultures of honor tend to take root in highlands and other marginally fertile areas, such as Sicily or the mountainous Basque regions of Spain. If you live on some rocky mountainside, the explanation goes, you can’t farm. You probably raise goats or sheep, and the kind of culture that grows up around being a herdsman is very different from the culture that grows up around growing crops. The survival of a farmer depends on the cooperation of others in the community. But a herdsman is off by himself. Farmers also don’t have to worry that their livelihood will be stolen in the night, because crops can’t easily be stolen unless, of course, a thief wants to go to the trouble of harvesting an entire field on his own. But a herdsman does have to worry. He’s under constant threat of ruin through the loss of his animals. So he has to be aggressive: he has to make it clear, through his words and deeds, that he is not weak.

In other words, that’s how bizarre these “general descriptions” can be.

…general intelligence and practical intelligence are “orthogonal”: the presence of one doesn’t imply the presence of the other.

Uh, no shit?

Chris Langan told me not long ago. “I found if I go to bed with a question on my mind, all I have to do is concentrate on the question before I go to sleep and I virtually always have the answer in the morning. Sometimes I realize what the answer is because I dreamt the answer and I can remember it. Other times I just feel the answer, and I start typing and the answer emerges onto the page”.

One suspects however that “in reality” this hardly ever works at all.

To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish.

Not counting the outliers of course.

[b]André Gide

We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It’s absurd. We run the risk of warping what’s best in us.[/b]

Not only that, but, more often than not, it’s the portrait of us that others have drawn.

What would a narrative of happiness be like? All that can be described is what prepares it, and then what destroys it.

Technically as it were.

There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.

True, but there are others we can never fear enough.

Wisdom comes not from reason but from love.

Yes, but only if you are foolish enough to go there.

The most decisive actions of our life – I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future – are, more often than not, unconsidered.

Along the lines of, for example, “I never asked to be born”.

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.

Though not literally more often than not.

[b]Roland Barthes

One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United Sates, where everything is transformed into images: only images exist and are produced and are consumes … Such a reversal necessarily raises the ethical question: not that the image is immoral, irreligious, or diabolic (as some have declared it, upon the advent of the Photograph), but because, when generalized, it completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it.[/b]

So much more to the point: Who decides all this?

We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

Right, like this can actually be calculated.

Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

I know that mine is lost.

As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don’t do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires. . . . And I think of Bloy’s words: “there is nothing perfectly beautiful except what is invisible and above all unbuyable".

Fortunately, as we all know, you can’t buy love.
That is still true, right?

A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.

And, for some, that more or less revolves around getting paid for it.

Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.

In order to, for example, be “one of us”.
And not be exterminated.

[b]Evelyn Waugh

What is a “canty day”, Dennis?
I’ve never troubled to ask. Something like hogmanay, I expect.
What is that?
People being sick on the pavement in Glasgow.
Oh.[/b]

Oh works for me too.

What is adolescence without trash?

I know: Where to draw the line.

He delighted in writing, in the joinery and embellishment of his sentences, in the consciousness of high rare virtue when every word had been used in its purest and most precise sense, in the kitten games of syntax and rhetoric. Words could do anything except generate their own meaning.

So, is this technically correct?

They are all negros. And the Fascists won’t be called black because of their racial pride, so they are called White after the White Russians. And the Bolsheviks want to be called Black because of their racial pride. So when you say black you mean red, and when you mean red you say white and when the party who call themselves blacks say traitors they mean what we call blacks, but what we mean when we say traitors I really couldn’t tell you. But from your point of view it will be quite simple. Lord Copper only wants patriot victories and both sides call themselves patriots, and of course both sides will claim all the victories. But, of course, it’s really a war between Russia and Germany and Italy and Japan who are all against one another on the patriotic side. I hope I make myself plain?

Couldn’t be plainer. Human nature as some say.

I can quite understand that many people may be depressed by the spectacle of naked humanity. Personally I cannot see that an ugly body is any more offensive than an ugly dress.

Clearly with exceptions.

There was a change in both of us. We had lost a sense of discovery which had infused the anarchy of our first year.

Ah, the first year!

[b]Mary Roach

It’s the reason we say “pork” and “beef” instead of “pig” and “cow.” Dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial.[/b]

What about chicken?

…the act of vomiting deserves your respect. It’s an orchestral event of the gut.

Even if you’re bulimic.

I challenge you to find a more innocuous sentence containing the words sperm, suction, swallow, and any homophone of seaman. And then call me up on the homophone and read it to me.

Shall we take her up on it?

He has a minor in explosives and the slightly bitter, misanthropic personality of someone who shouldn’t.

Better that than a major.

Khoruts gave me a memorable example of how behavior can be covertly manipulated by microorganisms. The parasite Toxoplasma infects rats but needs to make its way into a cat’s gut to reproduce. The parasite’s strategy for achieving this goal is to alter the rat brain such that the rodent is now attracted to cat urine. Rat walks right up to cat, gets killed, eaten. If you saw the events unfold, Khoruts continued, you’d scratch your head and go, What is wrong with that rat?

In a wholly determined world of course.

As when astronaut Mike Mulhane was asked by a NASA psychiatrist what epitaph he’d like to have on his gravestone, Mulhane answered, “A loving husband and devoted father,” though in reality, he jokes in Riding Rockets, "I would have sold my wife and children into slavery for a ride into space.

You know, if it was a joke.

[b]The Dead Author

You don’t have to be Vladimir Lenin to be a little bit unnerved every time someone calls a two millimeter wider iphone screen a “revolution”.[/b]

Not to mention Mao Zedong.

Never forget 9/11. Theodor W. Adorno was born on this day in 1903.

The other reason of course.

Postmodernity: when you’re not sure if you’re bored of waiting for the apocalypse to happen, or bored of witnessing it every day.

Yeah, I like that.
So, which one ought we to be?

We’ve come to value authenticity so highly that people will lie about everything if it makes them seem more believable.

And it’s not as easy as it sounds.

Dostoyevsky always sounds like he needs a lawyer. Kafka sounds like he shouldn’t have become one.

Of course that’s just common sense.

Happy 247th birthday, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. I got you nothing.

He won’t miss it.

[b]Jeanette Winterson

You need a language in this world. People want words, they want to hear their situation in language, and find a way to talk about it. It allows you to find a language to talk about your own pain.[/b]

And then one day the words themselves become the world. For example, in your head.

If you give kids a language, they can use it. I think that’s what these educators fear. If you really educate these kids, they aren’t going to punch you in the face, they are going to challenge you with your own language.

I know that I do.

What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home.

The wild and the tame cock too.

I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex.

Well, it is her house. And that’s just one of the rules. But, sure, point taken.

Napoleon was in love with himself and France joined in.

Let’s see if it works that way for Don Trump.

The heart is so easily mocked, believing that the sun can rise twice or that roses bloom because we want them to.

Or that money grows on trees.