a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

Home is the place with the most rules.[/b]

So, more opportunities to break them.

…I thought, it’s a shame that we have to live, but it’s a tragedy that we get to live only one life…

You know, if applicable. To you, for example.

No baby knows when the nipple is pulled from his mouth for the last time. No child knows when he last calls his mother “Mama.” No small boy knows when the book has closed on the last bedtime story that will ever be read to him. No boy knows when the water drains from the last bath he will ever take with his brother. No young man knows, as he first feels his greatest pleasure, that he will never again not be sexual. No brinking woman knows, as she sleeps, that it will be four decades before she will again awake infertile. No mother knows she is hearing the word Mama for the last time. No father knows when the book has closed on the last bedtime story he will ever read: From that day on, and for many years to come, peace reigned on the island of Ithaca, and the gods looked favorably upon Odysseus, his wife, and his son.

Clearly, that about covers it.

He knew that I love you also means I love you more than anyone else loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one else loves your, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else.

Not all that far removed from “I hate you”.

Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we have traveled, just as the dead can never be counted.

Let’s just chalk it all up instead to an essentially absurd and meaningless world.

Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless - it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another. Consistency is not required, but engagement with the problem is.

Or, as likely as not, engagement with the solution. In particular, when it isn’t yours.

[b]Terry Pratchett

I hate cats.
Death’s face became a little stiffer, if that were possible. The blue glow in his eye sockets flickered red for an instant.
I see he said. The tone suggested that death was too good for cat haters.[/b]

Sure, it might be.

The Ephebians believed that every man should have the vote (provided that he wasn’t poor, foreign, nor disqualified by reason of being mad, frivolous, or a woman). Every five years someone was elected to be Tyrant, provided he could prove that he was honest, intelligent, sensible, and trustworthy. Immediately after he was elected, of course, it was obvious to everyone that he was a criminal madman and totally out of touch with the view of the ordinary philosopher in the street looking for a towel. And then five years later they elected another one just like him, and really it was amazing how intelligent people kept on making the same mistakes.

We can, say, trump them, can’t we?

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.

Or the final draft if you’re that good.

Nanny Ogg knew how to start spelling ‘banana’, but didn’t know how you stopped.

Short of death in other words.

And then Jack chopped down what was the world’s last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant’s children didn’t have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done…which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.

Not only this but that’s how it works in reality too.

So much universe, and so little time.

“Little” doesn’t quite do, does it?

[b]tiny nietzsche

I wasn’t sure about anything so I shaved.[/b]

Down there he means.

postmodernism means never having to say you’re lying

Not even when they actually prove it. Right, Mr. Trump?

If life stops making sense, you’re probably right.

If it ever did, in other words.

it’s always darkest before a whole week of this shit

And Bob Mueller is just getting started.

I am in no shape to talk to myself

Let alone to listen.

I don’t trust dead people

Not that he’ll note any examples.

[b]C.G. Jung

There’s no coming to consciousness without pain.[/b]

Ouch. Among other things.

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

And there will never be a shortage of that, will there?

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

Until, of course, we actually try to pin that down.

Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.

What he knows? What she knows? What you know? What I know? What we know? What they know?
But point taken.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.

And then in taking this – living as comfortably as we can – to the grave.

Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event.

This sounds rather profound. Yet continues to escape me.

[b]Joseph Heller

Just for once I’d like to see all these things sort of straightened out, with each person getting exactly what he deserves. It might give me some confidence in this universe.[/b]

Among other things: :laughing:

But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.

Tell that to, among others, the arms manufacturers.

Victory gave us such insane delusions of grandeur that we helped start a world war we hadn’t a chance of winning. But now that we are losing again, everything has taken a turn for the better, and we will certainly come out on top again if we succeed in being defeated.

After all, when it comes to war, there’s not much you can’t spin.

And don’t tell me God works in mysterious ways, Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. There’s nothing so mysterious about it. He’s not working at all. He’s playing. Or else He’s forgotten all about us. That’s the kind of God you people talk about - a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed.

Sometimes you’ll just find yourself stammering, “fuck…fuck…fuck you God!”
Then pray to God that He doesn’t exist.

Nurse Duckett found Yossarian wonderful and was already trying to change him.

Into being as wonderful as she was probably.

Yossarian marveled that children could suffer such barbaric sacrifice without evincing the slightest hint of fear or pain. He took for granted that they did submit so stoically. If not, he reasoned, the custom would certainly have died, for no craving for wealth or immortality could be so great, he felt, as to subsist on the sorrow of children.

Subsisting? How about thriving on it.
You know the ones.

[b]so sad today

having no life is going amazing[/b]

But, of course, she has a life: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_Broder

dreamt we fucked

Dreamt it was me.

she died as she lived: kind of ready for it but not really

I hear that. And, on some days, loud and clear.

text me back to tell me you’re not going to text me back

It doesn’t get much more post-modern than that.

one problem with depression is that when good things happen you still have depression

If only up until the day you day.
You know, for some.

you say potato, i say inevitable death

Apparently you can take it that far.

[b]Steven D. Levitt

In a sample of thirteen African countries between 1999 and 2004, 52 percent of women surveyed say they think that wife-beating is justified if she neglects the children; around 45 percent think it’s justified if she goes out without telling the husband or argues with him; 36 percent if she refuses sex, and 30 percent if she burns the food. And this is what the women think. We live in a strange world.[/b]

A strange patriarchal world perhaps.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote across many genres, including children’s books. In an essay called “Why I Write for Children,” he explained the appeal. Children read books, not reviews, he wrote. They don’t give a hoot about the critics. And: When a book is boring, they yawn openly, without any shame or fear of authority. Best of all—and to the relief of authors everywhere—children don’t expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity.

On the other hand, don’t most kids grow up?

Learn to say “I don’t know” when you really don’t know.

Right, like that would ever catch on here.

The fact is that solving problems is hard. If a given problem still exists, you can bet that a lot of people have already come along and failed to solve it.

You know, if it can be solved at all.

One can imagine many patients being turned off by the words fecal transplant or, as researchers call it in their academic papers, “fecal microbiota transplantation.” The slang used by some doctors (“shit swap”) is no better. But Borody, after years of performing this procedure, believes he has finally come up with a less disturbing name. “Yes,” he says, “we call it a ‘transpoosion’.

No, really: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal_mic … transplant

It was John Kenneth Galbraith, the hyperliterate economic sage, who coined the phrase “conventional wisdom.” He did not consider it a compliment.

Actually, there are still folks around today that do.

[b]Jade Chang

So, the thing is, my dad, the immigrant, is really, really disappointed that I have an allergy. A peanut allergy. Because immigrants do not believe in allergies. I swear to God, ask any brown person with an accent that you see and they’ll tell you that allergies are some New World shit.[/b]

Any brown folks here?

America usually felt like iPhones and pizza and swimming pools to Andrew. L.A. was America. New sneakers. Sunshine. Pot and blue balls. Phoenix was America. Sprinklers and blow jobs and riding shotgun. Vegas was America, all of it. But if there were monsters and magic anywhere in this country, they would be here in New Orleans. New Orleans was an ancient doppelgänger city that grew in some other America that never really existed.

Again, no mention of Baltimore. And not for nothing.

How many times did people have to prove that anything could be art before we could finally admit that very little was actually art?

Or here: How many times did people have to prove that anything could be philosophy before we could finally admit that very little was actually philosophy?

Throughout history we have believed that markets determine worth and that bubbles are eternal, despite ample evidence to the contrary. In the midst of each bubble, we believe that this time it will last forever. We have all been complicit in our own deluding. The professor paused. It’s all bullcrap. There is no market. The market is people, and people are dolts. Even the smartest people are moronic.

In other words, the rich get richer. This doesn’t change that.

Our first big mistake—we believed that money was rational. Our second big mistake—we thought that risk could be quantified. Our third big mistake—Alan Greenspan.

Next up: the Trump bubble.

How can we be a polis when 95 percent of us would rather watch aging housewives bicker on TV than express a well-formed opinion of our own?

Not to worry. In the next election we’ll change all that.

[b]Rick Moody

Cool is spent. Cool is empty. Cool is ex post facto. When advertisers and pundits hoard a word, you know it’s time to retire from it. To move on. I want to suggest, therefore, that we begin to avoid cool now. Cool is a trick to get you to buy garments made by sweatshop laborers in Third World countries. Cool is the Triumph of the Will. Cool enables you to step over bodies. Cool enables you to look the other way. Cool makes you functional, eager for routine distraction, passive, doped, stupid.[/b]

Trust me, nobody hates that idiotic word more than I do.
Except, perhaps, him.

Fucking family. Feeble and forlorn and floundering and foolish and frustrating and functional and sad, sad. Fucking family. Fiend or foe.

Actually, there are folks who do not think this way at all. About their own family, for example.

It was monks who first taught the art of reading in silence. During the Dark Ages. Augustine, perhaps, was first. And silence was a tongue Elena understood. Silence was her idiom for support and caring. Silence was permissive and contemplative and nonconfrontational and there was melody to it. It was both earth and ether.

Obviously not you run-of-the-mill silence.

Death was terribly durable. It was the sturdiest idea around. A body was dead, and before long it wasn’t even a body anymore, it was just elements. But it was still dead.

Death. Hell, it’s right up there with God, isn’t it?

You could pay Arthur Janov to teach you to scream about history, or you could learn prayer or a mantra, or you could write your life down and hope to make peace with it, write it down, or paint it, or turn it into improvisational theater, but that was the best you could probably do. You were stuck.

Stuck, yes. And then some.

The sounds of southwestern cacti are broadcast for several weeks until, by general assent, it is agreed that cacti make no sounds.

Are they supposed to?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Men are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit, because gratitude is a burden and revenge a pleasure.” Tacitus[/b]

What do you think, human nature?

“It is very important in life to know when your cue comes.” Søren Kierkegaard

He thought: Let’s not go there.

“Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.” Søren Kierkegaard

And then repeat as necessary.

“A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him." Ezra Pound

Of course it may well be more complicated than this. Having never been a slave himself.

“Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists.” John Dewey

He means real art of course.

“Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.” Martin Heidegger

And let’s not forget women.

[b]André Gide

What was doubly disconcerting for me was that he showed such extraordinary and precocious insight in describing his own feelings that I felt he was making my own confession.[/b]

Most of us will go to the grave and never experience something like this…

Nothing thwarts happiness so much as the memory of happiness.

Though that’s going back some.

I looked at myself in the mirror and didn’t like what I saw.

So he bought another mirror.

For what use is it to forbid what we can’t prevent?

We can dream can’t we?

What would be the description of happiness? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it, can be told.

A general description I can live with.

Do you know the reason why poetry and philosophy are nothing but dead-letter nowadays? It is because they have severed themselves from life.

For example, Cue Will Durant’s “epistemologists”. And not just James. :wink:

[b]Nein

Moby Dick can teach us many things, friends. Diplomacy isn’t one of them.[/b]

And not just in regard to white whales.

Discontent. Everyone’s favorite season.

Are there any others?

A gentle reminder from November. That every month is the cruelest.

I’ve never known one that wasn’t.

Sometimes you wonder where certain authors were all your life. What they were doing there. And why they never wrote.

Nope, never wondered that. Well, not that I can recall.

Your own. Personal. October Revolution.

No. Thank. You.

Sorry, we’re out of context. But perhaps I could interest you in a fundamental misunderstanding.

I know: Let’s explore what the two might have in common.

[b]Lou Reed

There’s a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out.[/b]

You know, generally speaking.

Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony.

And here I thought only I believed this.

You’re going to reap just what you sow.

Here for example: youtu.be/iDtO88QyKMM

I’m still not sure I didn’t die.

Trust me: He did.

And no kinds of love are better than others.

For example, after you are dead and gone.

There is only one good thing about a small town
You know that you want to get out

Unless of course [now] you want to go back.

[b]Jeanette Winterson

There is always a city. There is always a civilization. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilization, but to become that city, that civilization, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated is what you did not understand.[/b]

In other words, back again to genes and memes.

It was Hell, if hell is where the life we love cannot exist.

If even Hell itself describes it.

Everyone assumed it had to be some sort of biography, because if you are a woman and use yourself as a character, it has to be some sort of confessional, whereas if you’re a man, you’re actually doing some post-modern play on the novel, some critique on identity with lots of references to Foucault.

Come on, admit she has a point here.

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

At any rate, for some of us, eventually.

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea.

Not counting Allen Bauer of course.

As he turned inwards she turned outwards, but while he wore his intensity like a garment, she slept in hers.

Seems counterintuitive doesn’t it?

[b]Mary Roach

Human remains dogs are distinct from the dogs that search for escaped felons and the dogs that search for whole cadavers. They are trained to alert their owners when they detect the specific scents of decomposed human tissue. They can pinpoint the location of a corpse at the bottom of a lake by sniffing the water’s surface for the gases and fats that float up from the rotting remains. They can detect the lingering scent molecules of a decomposing body up to fourteen months after the killer lugged it away.[/b]

Imagine this from the dog’s point of view.

Any discussion of the sexuality of the digestive tract must inevitably touch on the anus. Anal tissue is among the most densely innervated on the human body. It has to be. It requires a lot of information to do its job. The anus has to be able to tell what’s knocking at its door: Is it solid, liquid, or gas? And then selectively release either all of it or one part of it. The consequences of a misread are dire. As Mike Jones put it, You don’t want to choose poorly. People who understand anatomy are often cowed by the feats of the lowly anus. Think of it, said Robert Rosenbluth, a physician whose acquaintance I made at the start of this book. No engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine-tuned as an anus. To call someone an asshole is really bragging him up.

Not counting the assholes here of course.

No one goes out to play anymore. Simulation is becoming reality.

You either understand this [really understand it] or you don’t.

Penguins can shut down digestion by lowering the temperature inside their stomach to the point where the gastric juices are no longer active. The stomach becomes a kind of cooler to carry home the fish they’ve caught for their young. Penguins’ hunting grounds may be several days’ journey from the nest. Without this handy refrigerated mode, the swallowed fish would be completely digested by the time the adults get back.

Nature: Nothing short of astounding.

Women who routinely have orgasm in intercourse without explicit clitoral stimulation all say that it makes little difference what the guy does, as long as he doesn’t come too soon.

He thought: Let’s not go there.

Every now and then in life, a compliment is tucked so seamlessly into a insult that it’s impossible to know how to react.

And trust me: Practice makes perfect.

[b]Existential Comics

Stupid people often think they are more “rational” because they don’t understand the social context of a problem, making the problem simple.[/b]

Objectively as it were.

Nazi: we will eliminate the Jews.
Antifa: no.
Liberal: whoa, let’s just have a civil discussion about whether or not to eliminate the Jews.

He does have a point, right?

Philosophy is when you think about a topic so much you realize that not only do you not understand it, but you don’t understand anything.

On the other hand, even that’s something.

The major problem with life is that you have to be yourself the whole time.

Now that you mention it…

Imagine explaining Capitalism to a alien: “Well…a few people own everything, and for 40 hours a week everyone else has to do what they say.”

I know: Let’s have a revolution!

Nihilist: nothing matters, nothing’s good or bad, there is no meaning.
Also nihilist: I’ll riot if this computer game doesn’t run at 60 fps.

So, what’s the problem?

[b]John Cage

As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.[/b]

Just short of, say, a contradiction in terms.

There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.

Well, since the big bang anyway.

When you start working, everybody is in your studio- the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas- all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.”

Just what we need, another metaphsyical pragmatist.

Artists talk a lot about freedom. So, recalling the expression “free as a bird,” Morton Feldman went to a park one day and spent some time watching our feathered friends. When he came back, he said, You know? They’re not free: they’re fighting over bits of food.

Besides, it’s all in the genes anyway.

The emotions - love, mirth, the heroic, wonder, tranquility, fear, anger, sorrow, disgust - are in the audience.

Whether you put them there or not.

Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of it’s own accord.

Tried that once myself. And I still don’t understand it.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

How good a book is should be judged by the man who writes it by the excellence of the material that he eliminates.[/b]

Not many of us are up to that though.

If a four-letter man marries a five-letter woman, he was thinking, what number of letters would their children be?

You tell me.

You’re going to have things to repent, boy,’ Mr. John had told Nick. 'That’s one of the best things there is. You can always decide whether to repent them or not. But the thing is to have them.

Among other things, sins.

This book is fiction, but there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

Just don’t expect to actually pin this down.

Imagination is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine. If he gets so he can imagine truly enough people will think that the things he relates all really happened and that he is just reporting.

Imagine that, he thought. But then couldn’t.

That I am a foreigner is not my fault. I would rather have been born here.

So, where would you rather have been born?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The mind is everything. What you think you become.” Buddha[/b]

Really, how could anyone in their right mind actually believe this?

“Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.” Denis Diderot

Really, how could anyone in their right mind actually believe this?

“What is a monster? A being whose survival is incompatible with the existing order.” Denis Diderot

Indeed. Yesterday being the 100th anniversity of the Russian Revolution.
You know, for better or for worse.

“To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.” Aristotle

So, how am I doing?

“When the world becomes a massive mess with nobody at the helm, it’s time for artists to make their mark.” Joni Mitchell

Recognizing of course that the world has never not been that way.
But, sure, now especially.

“The sun at noon is the sun setting. The thing born is the thing dying.” Chinese Proverb

Now that’s grim.

[b]Neil Gaiman

Truly, life is wasted on the living…[/b]

Is it possible to take it that far?

She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty.

Of course 9 times out of 10 she’s a he.

There are things that wait for us, patiently, in the dark corridors of our lives. We think we have moved on, put them out of mind, left them to desiccate and shrivel and blow away; but we are wrong. They have been waiting there in the darkness, working out, practicing their most vicious blows, their sharp hard thoughtless punches into the gut, killing time until we came back that way.

And who among us doesn’t?

The problems with success, frankly, are infinitely preferable to the problems of failure.

Let’s at least agree it’s not a cliche.

Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.

As opposed to, say, philosophy.

[b]Here: an exercise in choice. Your choice. One of these tales is true.

She lived through the war. In 1959 she came to America. She now lives in a condo in Miami, a tiny French woman with white hair, with a daughter and a grand-daughter. She keeps herself to herself and smiles rarely, as if the weight of memory keeps her from finding joy.

Or that’s a lie. Actually the Gestapo picked her up during a border crossing in 1943, and they left her in a meadow. First she dug her own grave, then a single bullet to the back of the skull.

Her last thought, before that bullet, was that she was four months’ pregnant, and that if we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us.

There is an old woman in Miami who wakes, confused, from a dream of the wind blowing the wildflowers in a meadow.

There are bones untouched beneath the warm French earth which dream of a daughter’s wedding. Good wine is drunk. The only tears shed are happy ones.[/b]

Actually, I didn’t know her. But that sounds like something the Gestapo would do. In fact, it sounds like something certain folks here might do.