a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Paul Valéry

How can one not feel enthusiasm for the man who never said anything vague?[/b]

Is this even possible? And, if so, is it even wise?

Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated.

After all, time is money.

For the fact is that disorder is the condition of the mind’s fertility: it contains the mind’s promise, since its fertility depends on the unexpected rather than the expected, depends on what we do not know, and because we do not know it, than what we know.

Not counting the parts that pulverize you.

I have made a similar suggestion for poetry: that one should approach it as pure sonority, reading and rereading it as a sort of music, and should not introduce meanings or intentions into the diction before clearly grasping the system of sounds that every poem must offer on pain of nonexistence.

I think I understand this. Would you like to confirm it?

I think of the presence and of the habits of mortals in this so fluid stream, and reflect that I was among them, striving to see all things just as I see them at this very moment. I then placed Wisdom in the eternal station which now is ours. But from here all is unrecognizable. Truth is before us, and we no longer understand anything at all.

I think I understand this. Would you like to confirm it?

There is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography.

Haven’t I been saying this now for years?

[b]Naomi Alderman

The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.[/b]

Best perhaps not to go there.

It was like being part of a wave of water, she says. A wave of spray from the ocean feels powerful, but it is only there for a moment, the sun dries the puddles and the water is gone. Then you feel maybe it never happened. That is how it was with us. The only wave that changes anything is a tsunami. You have to tear down the houses and destroy the land if you want to be sure no one will forget you.

Best perhaps not to go there.

What is freedom, in the end, but that no one cares any longer to try to restrain us?

I know, but what if it is true?

It’s not for us to worry about the men, she says. Let them please themselves, as they always have. If they want to war with each other and to wander, let them go. We have each other. Where you go, I will go. Your people will be my people, my sisters.

Nor for men to worry about the women?

…you are trying to steal that which you do not even desire.

On the other hand, don’t ever expect to understand why.

Fox News would say whatever makes the most people tune into Fox News.

Let’s file this one under, “they deserve each other.”

[b]Mary Roach

I like the term “decedent”. It’s as though the man weren’t dead but merely involved in some sort of protracted legal dispute.[/b]

My own personal favorite: Stiff.

The driving aesthetic of military style is uniformity. Whence the word uniform. From first inspection to Arlington National Cemetery, soldiers look like those around them: same hat, same boots, identical white grave marker. They are discouraged from looking unique, because that would encourage them to feel unique, to feel like an individual. The problem with individuals is that they think for themselves and of themselves, rather than for and of their unit. They’re the lone goldfish on the old Pepperidge Farm bags, swimming the other way. They’re a problem.

I know that I was. Just short of a court martial in AIT.

“Morning breath” is hydrogen sulfide released by bacteria consuming shed tongue cells while you mouth-breathe for eight hours; saliva normally washes the debris away.

Let’s file this one under, “where would we be without science?”

This book is a tribute to the men and women who dared. Who, to this day, endure ignorance, closed minds, righteousness, and prudery. Their lives are not easy. But their cocktail parties are the best.

Bonk of course.

cadavers’ intestines hanging like a parade streamers off the sides of tables, skulls bobbing in boiling pots, organs strewn on the floor being eaten by dogs…

Clearly, this cries out for a context.

Nurses on transplant wards often remarked that male transplant patients show renewed interest in sex. One reported that a patient asked her to wear something other than “that shapeless scrub” so he could see her breasts. A post-op who had been impotent for seven years before the operation was found holding his penis and demonstrating an erection. Another nurse spoke of a man who left the fly of his pajamas unfastened to show her his penis. Conclude Tabler and Frierson, “this irrational but common belief that the recipient will somehow develop characteristics of the donor is generally transitory but may alter sexual patterns.”

I know: Human all too human. Or, sure, just men.

[b]Robert M. Sapolsky

Suddenly, I get this giddy desire to shock these guys a little. I continue, These baboons really are our relatives. In fact, this baboon is my cousin. And with that I lean over and give Daniel a loud messy kiss on his big ol’ nose. I get more of a response than I bargained for. The Masai freak and suddenly, they are waving their spears real close to my face, like they mean it. One is yelling, He is not your cousin, he is not your cousin! A baboon cannot even cook ugali! Ugali is the ubiquitous and repulsive maize meal that everyone eats here. I almost respond that I don’t really know how to cook the stuff either, but decide to show some prudence at last. He is not your cousin![/b]

Another smartass imperialist?

Fossey, Fossey, you cranky difficult strong-arming self-destructive misanthrope, mediocre scientist, deceiver of earnest college students, probable cause of more deaths of the gorillas than if you had never set foot in Rwanda, Fossey, you pain-in-the-ass saint, I do not believe in prayers or souls, but I will pray for your soul, I will remember you for all of my days, in gratitude for that moment by the graves when all I felt was the pure, cleansing sadness of returning home and finding nothing but ghosts.

Sounds like a personal problem.

You don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.

Unless of course there is lots and lots of money involved.

Being healthy consists of having the same disease as everyone else.

Let’s pin down a disease we all have.

The purpose of science in understanding who we are as humans is not to rob us of our sense of mystery, not to cure us of our sense of mystery.

For example: Why is there something instead of nothing?

Why should people in one part of the globe have developed collectivist cultures, while others went individualist? The United States is the individualism poster child for at least two reasons. First there’s immigration. Currently, 12 percent of Americans are immigrants, another 12 percent are children of immigrants, and everyone else except for the 0.9 percent pure Native Americans descend from people who emigrated within the last five hundred years.

And then all that stuff Marx suggested.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“To know what life is worth you have to risk it once in a while.” Jean-Paul Sartre[/b]

Just don’t get carried away.

"Art and revolt will die only with the last man.” Albert Camus

Update: Or the last woman.

“The need to be right — the sign of a vulgar mind.” Albert Camus

You might mean you, Mr. Objectivist.

“Time is the wisest of all things that are; for it brings everything to light.” Thales of Miletus

Not literally of course. Unless of course it is.

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.” Ursula K. Le Guin

And then one by one we’re gone.

“Find a path or make one.” Seneca

Or, sure, you can just take mine.

[b]Anatole France

It is possible that these millions of suns, along with thousands of millions more we cannot see, make up altogether but a globule of blood or lymph in the veins of an animal, of a minute insect, hatched in a world of whose vastness we can frame no conception, but which nevertheless would itself, in proportion to some other world, be no more than a speck of dust.[/b]

And here we all are, bound to stuff “I” in there somewhere.

War will disappear only when men shall take no part whatever in violence and shall be ready to suffer every persecution that their abstention will bring them. It is the only way to abolish war.

Never in other words.

An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.

Between a little and a lot for example.

You see, Dimitri and I, we are both suffering from ennui! We have still the match-boxes. But at last one gets tired even of match-boxes. Besides, our collection will soon be complete. And then what are we going to do?

What everyone does of course. Not that anyone knows what that is.

Ah! Yes, the truth, that ingenious concoction of desirability of appearance.

And not just in the Oval Office.

To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all.

Come on, who the hell would ever go that far?

[b]Malcolm Lowry

How, unless you drink as I do, could you hope to understand the beauty of an old Indian woman playing dominoes with a chicken?[/b]

Point taken. If there is one.

To say nothing of what you lose, lose, lose, are losing, man. You fool, you stupid fool … You’ve even been insulated from the responsibility of genuine suffering … Even the suffering you do endure is largely unnecessary. Actually spurious. It lacks the very basis you require of it for its tragic nature. You deceive yourself.

What does it mean to speak of another’s suffering? Let alone to pass judgment on how genuine it is.

Adiós, she added in Spanish, I have no house only a shadow. But whenever you are in need of a shadow, my shadow is yours.
Thank you.
Sank you.
Not sank you, Señora Gregorio, thank you.
Sank you.

Lost in translation?

Only against death does man cry out in vain.

Maybe in la la land.

Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.

Let’s file this one under, “he had his reasons”.

Nothing is altered and in spite of God’s mercy I am still alone. Though my suffering seems senseless I am still in agony. There is no explanation of my life. Indeed there was not, nor was this what he’d meant to convey. Please let Yvonne have her dream – dream? – of a new life with me – please let me believe that all that is not an abominable self-deception, he tried…Please let me make her happy, deliver me from this dreadful tyranny of self. I have sunk low. Let me sink lower still, that I may know the truth. Teach me to love again, to love life. That wouldn’t do either… Where is love? Let me truly suffer. Give me back my purity, the knowledge of the Mysteries, that I have betrayed and lost. – Let me be truly lonely, that I may honestly pray. Let us be happy again somewhere, if it’s only together, if it’s only out of this terrible world. Destroy the world! he cried in his heart.

I was just thinking this myself.

[b]The Dead Author

A communist, an existentialist, and a fascist walk into a bar. But enough about Slavoj Žižek.[/b]

A fascist? Explain please.

Why read Foucault when you could be at a public library mining bitcoin.

Okay, I admit it: Huh?

The irony of the president of the United States calling other countries shitholes is lost on a lot of people.

Americans for example.

So the founder of IKEA has died. We are all equal in death, if you thought that all your friends owning the same furniture as you wasn’t enough already.

Cue the Coneheads “consuming mass quantities” of IKEA.

No, introversion and anxiety are not the same thing, but the main reason so many people call themselves introverts these days is to romanticize their anxiety.

I know that I do. At least I think I know that I do.

The last Davos conference that actually mattered was the international academic congress of 1929, when Martin Heidegger beat the most respected philosopher of the time, Ernst Cassirer, in a debate on the question “What is man?” Cassirer’s reputation never recovered. Sorry.

You decide: newrepublic.com/article/81380/h … davos-kant

[b]Neil Gaiman

So, having found a lady, could you not have come to her aid, or left her alone? Why drag her into your foolishness?
Love, he explained.
She looked at him with eyes the blue of the sky. I hope you choke on it, she said, flatly.[/b]

Flatly? That’ll do it.

If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist.

Let alone an analytic philosopher.

We are all wearing masks. That is what makes us interesting.

That and other things.

And then he’d tried to become an official Atheist and hadn’t got the rock-hard self-satisfied strength of belief even for that.

A real atheist in other words. Like the kind we have here.

The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored.

Not unlike the history of all the other nations.

People tend to find books when they are ready for them.

You know, if they ever are.

[b]Leonardo da Vinci

The painter will produce pictures of little merit if he takes the works of others as his standard.[/b]

My guess: There’s the equivalent of this for philosophers.

Details make perfection, and perfection is not a detail.

Rather abstract though, isn’t it?

While human ingenuity may devise various inventions to the same ends, it will never devise anything more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than nature does, because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.

Even when it is pounding you to a pulp?

He who truly knows has no occasion to shout.

Well, maybe back then.

The worst evil which can befall the artist is that his work should appear good in his own eyes.

Right, I’m sure he actually believed that.

A well-spent day brings happy sleep.

So they tell me, he thought.

[b]Terry Pratchett

Death was standing behind a lectern, poring over a map. He looked at Mort as if he wasn’t entirely there.
Yᴏᴜ ʜᴀᴠᴇɴ’ᴛ ʜᴇᴀʀᴅ ᴏғ ᴛʜᴇ Bᴀʏ Oғ Mᴀɴᴛᴇ, ʜᴀᴠᴇ ʏᴏᴜ? he said.
No, sir, said Mort.
Fᴀᴍᴏᴜs sʜɪᴘᴡʀᴇᴄᴋ ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ.
Was there?
Tʜᴇʀᴇ ᴡɪʟʟ ʙᴇ, said Death, ɪғ I ᴄᴀɴ ғɪɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴀᴍɴ ᴘʟᴀᴄᴇ.[/b]

Say you knew. Would you tell him?

He hated games they made the world look too simple. Chess, in particular, had always annoyed him. It was the dumb way the pawns went off and slaughtered their fellow pawns while the king lounged about doing nothing. If only the pawns would’ve united … the whole board could’ve been a republic in about a dozen moves.

Next up: Monopoly.

And these are your reasons, my lord?
Do you think I have others? said Lord Vetinari. My motives, as ever, are entirely transparent.
Hughnon reflected that ‘entirely transparent’ meant either that you could see right through them or that you couldn’t see them at all.

Or: And these are your reasons, Mr. President?

Two types of people laugh at the law: those that break it and those that make it.

For some though how do you tell them apart?

Most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally evil, but by people being fundamentally people.

Of course he’s just paraphrasing Nietzsche.

He felt that the darkness was full of unimaginable horrors - and the trouble with unimaginable horrors was that they were only too easy to imagine…

On the other hand, not just the darkness anymore.

[b]Saul Alinsky

This is the world as it is. This is where you start.[/b]

That can’t be good.

Curiosity and irreverence go together. Curiosity cannot exist without the other. Curiosity asks, “Is this true?” Just because this has always been the way, is the best or right way of life, the best or right religion, political or economic value, morality? To the questioner, nothing is sacred. He detests dogma, defies any finite definition of morality, rebels against any repression of a free, open search of ideas no matter where they may lead. He is challenging, insulting, agitating, discrediting. He stirs unrest.

He is nearly extinct.

If people don’t think they have the power to solve their problems, they won’t even think about how to solve them.

Not counting those who really don’t.

Once you accept your own death, all of a sudden you’re free to live. You no longer care about your reputation. You no longer care except so far as your life can be used tactically to promote a cause you believe in. We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful new world. We will see it when we believe it.

He thought: Did I actually once believe that?!!

Those who are most moral are farthest from the problem.

No, really, think about that.

It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral…

That’s what it is alright.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"There is no beginning of the infinite, for in that case it would have an end. " Anaximander[/b]

And here we all are somewhere in the vast, vast middle.

“Immortal and indestructible, surrounds all and directs all." Anaximander

Not counting us of course. Unless you do.

“I know of no great man except those who have rendered great services to the human race.” Voltaire

Nobody like that here one suspects.

“Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.”

If only essentially absurd.

“It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.” David Hume

He means power.

“Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few.” George Berkeley

Your move. Either that or mine.

[b]C.G. Jung

The sure path can only lead to death.[/b]

On the other hand, does he still think that now?

Man cannot stand a meaningless life.

Surely then they don’t just make one up.

His retreat into himself is not a final renunciation of the world, but a search for quietude, where alone it is possible for him to make his contribution to the life of the community.

Yeah, I once thought this too. And now look at me.

We often dream about people from whom we receive a letter by the next post. I have ascertained on several occasions that at the moment when the dream occurred the letter was already lying in the post-office of the addressee.

He thought: Bullshit!

The sad truth is that man’s real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites - day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been and always will be…

But then we have death to look forward to.

Psychological or spiritual development always requires a greater capacity for anxiety and ambiguity.

I know that mine did.

[b]Allen Ginsberg

Banks burn, boys die bullet-eyed, mothers scream realization the vast tonnage of napalm.[/b]

Tell that to the military industrial complex.

You can own an elephant or a bank or power thereof but if there’s no personal breast bliss all you own is a lot of dead atoms and ideas.

Personal breast bliss…right.

Who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish.

I actually tried to publish mine.

I don’t do anything with my life except romanticise and decay with indecision.

In other words, all but one of the masses.

The electric network selling itself: The medium is the message

If only all the way to the bank.

My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour and twenty-five-thousand mental institutions.

Though not literally one suspects.

[b]Nein

To be or bot to be.[/b]

Or bot to be both.

Sorry, I’m out of the office at the moment. If this is an urgent matter, I suggest you leave yours as well.

I’m already gone.

Russia. And literature. They’ve been colluding for years.

Trump and literature?

The sad thing is, of course, everything. Otherwise, no complaints.

On the other hand, I’ve got tons of them.

I suggest we read Lacan. Misunderstand him. And fall in love.

Let’s decide if this is even possible.

What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?
Understanding.

That and the state of the union.

[b]Ali Smith

She had entered him like he was water. Like he was a dictionary and she was a word he hadn’t known was in him. Or she had entered him more simply, like he was a door and she opened him, leaving him standing ajar as she walked straight in.[/b]

When he entered her [no doubt] it was considerably less complicated.

Think how quiet a book is on a shelf, he said, just sitting there, unopened. Then think what happens when you open it.

Is there the Kindle equivalent of this?

It makes Brooke feel strange in her stomach. It is like the feeling when she reads a book like the one about the man with the bomb, or thinks a sentence, just any old sentence like: the girl ran across the park, and unless you add the describing word then the man or the girl are definitely not black, they are white, even though no one has mentioned white, like when you take the the out of a headline and people just assume it’s there anyway. Though if it were a sentence about Brooke herself you’d have to add the equivalent describing word and that’s how you’d know. The black girl ran across the park.

This sort of thing either matters to you or it doesn’t.

The people in this country are in furious rages at each other after the last vote, she said, and the government we’ve got has done nothing to assuage it and instead is using people’s rage for its own political expediency. Which is a grand old fascist trick if ever I saw one, and a very dangerous game to play. And what’s happening in the United States is directly related, and probably financially related.

Of course he hasn’t actually drained the swamp yet.

You never stop being yourself on the inside, whatever age people think you are by looking at you from the outside.

Best to keep that to yourself.

I’m tired of the news. I’m tired of the way it makes things spectacular that aren’t, and deals so simplistically with what’s truly appalling. I’m tired of the vitriol. I’m tired of the anger. I’m tired of the meanness. I’m tired of the selfishness. I’m tired of how we’re doing nothing to stop it. I’m tired of how we’re encouraging it. I’m tired of the violence there is and I’m tired of the violence that’s on its way, that’s coming, that hasn’t happened yet. I’m tired of liars. I’m tired of sanctified liars. I’m tired of how those liars have let this happen.

Gee, I wonder what [or who] brought this on?

[b]T.E. Lawrence

The fringes of their deserts were strewn with broken faiths.[/b]

And broken bones. If not actual skeletons.

Immorality, I know. Immortality, I cannot judge.

And now?

We had been hopelessly labouring to plough waste lands; to make nationality grow in a place full of the certainty of God…

They still are.

Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.

Not quite the white man’s burden as it were.

The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armory of the modern commander.

That and all the weapons of mass destruction.

Half-way through the labour of an index to this book I recalled the practice of my ten years’ study of history; and realized that I had never used the index of a book fit to read.

Does this make sense?

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

The two most vital philosophical questions of the Russian intelligentsia:

  1. Where does money go;
  2. Where does dust come from.[/b]

God knows. Or, sure, maybe Trump.

Perfect memory implies occasional forgetfulness.

If you’re lucky for example.

A Short Introduction to Surrealism: Ceci n’est pas une ceci n’est pas.

Something about a pipe I think.

The only lingua franca we all speak fluently and confidently is, in fact, misunderstanding.

Could we possibly be the exception? :laughing:

The only language we must all be fluent in is beauty.

As in drop dead gorgeous.

In the beginning there was Beauty. Then we tried to define it.

Logically as it were.

[b]Kurt Andersen

…mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.[/b]

Then throw Don Trump in there.

The disagreements dividing Protestants from Catholics were about the internal consistency of the magical rules within their common fantasy scheme.

That and political economy.
To wit:

Protestantism has been that it gave a self-righteous oomph to moneymaking and capitalism—hard work accrues to God’s glory, success looks like a sign of His grace. But it seems clear to me the deeper, broader, and more enduring influence of American Protestantism was the permission it gave to dream up new supernatural or otherwise untrue understandings of reality and believe them with passionate certainty.

And, boy, do we have some wacky ones here!

Back then I used to say that I despised the new coinage “quality time,” that it was yuppie parents’ smiley-face equivalent to lawyers’ “billable hours.”

Back now too.

When somebody asked Alexander Hamilton why the Framers hadn’t mentioned God in the Constitution, his answer was deadpan hilarious: “We forgot.”

True story?

If underground militant cells were setting off hundreds of bombs and robbing banks around the country these days, of course, America would be crazed, consumed, talking of nothing else, and probably under martial law. The bombings back then seldom made the national news because a reasonable and rational Establishment was still in charge of the media discourse, determined to help Americans remain reasonable and rational.

And now?