Perhaps having to spot online faux personas is something we’ve newly developed as part of our survival toolset, but in this instance Iam, what made you question the validity of persona?
[b]Henri Bergson
The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.[/b]
Try to pin that down objectively.
To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
If only all the way to the grave.
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
Sure, why not. You’ll only end up rationalizing all of it anyway.
The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.
Indeed, the idea of lots of things.
Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon them from birth through social conditioning. They begin sensing that something is amiss, and start looking for answers. Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins their journey of awakening. Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of following the crowd and by choosing knowledge over the veils of ignorance.
Or, sure, for many, unfortunately.
The universe is a machine for the making of Gods.
What, you thought it was the other way around?
Stuff like this mostly: nytimes.com/2018/04/26/book … roder.html
She seems to be reveling in it now. Less time to be sad.
[b]Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is not the length of life, but the depth.[/b]
I’ll go out on a limb here and vouch for both.
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Poetically as it were.
Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.
In, for example. a wholly determined world. Though “conspires” is a bit of a stretch.
If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.
Or, for some, which books he has written.
Or she even.
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.
This might actually be true.
Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
And, who knows, perhaps one day it will be.
[b]Nein
We regret to inform you that it’s the end of the week. Not the world.[/b]
Let’s change that.
Let’s be honest: if it isn’t blatantly disregarded, it probably isn’t truth.
You know where that leaves me. Here for example.
Thank you, psychoanalysis. The mother of all fathers.
Not counting mine I suspect.
Be the ontology you want to see in the world.
Try to imagine it.
I suggest taking a week off of Twitter. Realizing what your life has become. Then never doing so again.
Of course that’s what we’re all expected to say.
A beautiful spring day. Should you happen to like beauty. Spring. And days.
I can live with them.
[b]Neil Gaiman
So, he asked. How’s death?
Hard, she said. It just keeps going.[/b]
Jesus, imagine if we are still around to know it.
Fair enough, said Thor. What’s the price?
Freya’s hand in marriage.
He just wants her hand? asked Thor hopefully. She had two hands, after all, and might be persuaded to give up one of them without too much of an argument. Tyr had, after all.
All of her, said Loki. He wants to marry her.
Oh, said Thor. She won’t like that.
The gods as we’d least expect them.
It’s not sipping wine. It’s a mourning wine. You drain it. Like this.
Same as with the harder stuff in other words.
People talk about books that write themselves, and it’s a lie. Books don’t write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you’d believe.
Great, there’s my excuse.
Richard wondered how the marquis managed to make being pushed around in a wheelchair look like a romantic and swashbuckling thing to do.
That makes two of us then.
There is something about riding a unicorn, for those people who still can, which is unlike any other experience: exhilarating, and intoxicating, and fine.
Maybe, but what’s that next to riding a dragon?
Ahhh! but they do say that depression is catching… let’s not be tainted by that brush, huh! 
Apparently, she went through some rather brutal years dealing with both depression and panic attacks. It’s clearly not all just persona. Or [now] a potential cash cow.
It’s just that, like everything else of this sort, we can only hazard a guess regarding what is really unfolding from day to day “in her head”. And in her life.
There are parts of her twitter personality [and posts] that I can truly relate too. And all we can do in situations like this is to take out of others what we first put into them: “I”.
Much like they do with us.
It’s just that, unlike most of us, she is becoming increasingly more “famous”. And that can make her a target for any number of folks for any number of reasons.
She only has so much control over what others will make of her.
[b]Jan Mieszkowski
Kierkegaard: Tuesday must be lived forwards but understood backwards.
Nietzsche: Tuesday cannot be understood.
Beckett: Tuesday cannot be lived.
Blanchot: Tuesday is always already backwards.[/b]
We still have about 10 hours to decide.
Eastern Standard Time anyway.
Hegel: There is no ground of the ground
Lacan: There is no other of the other
Adorno: There is no self in the selfie
Adorno, definitely.
Introductory Philosophy: I’m learning questions and answers
Intermediate Philosophy: I’m learning that answers are questions and questions are answers Advanced Philosophy: I’m learning to question the existence of questions and answers
Let’s pin down ILP here.
Greek philosophy: Can I truly know myself?
French philosophy: Can I truly doubt myself?
German philosophy: Can I truly affirm myself?
American philosophy: I’m selling myself to the highest bidder!
What do you suppose someone would pay for me?
British lit: The flower is a simile
French lit: The flower is a metaphor
German lit: The flower is a metonym
American lit: The Flower® is a brand name
Metonym? This apparently: a word, name, or expression used as a substitute for something else with which it is closely associated. For example, Washington is a metonym for the federal government of the US.
Philosophers: We can’t leave thinking in the hands of the politicians!
Literary Critics: We can’t leave culture in the hands of the politicians!
Historians: We can’t leave knowledge in the hands of the politicians!
Politicians: Look, Ma, no hands!
Actually, they are in our pockets.
[b]Edgar Allan Poe
Philosophers have often held dispute
As to the seat of thought in man and brute
For that the power of thought attends the latter
My friend, thy beau, hath made a settled matter,
And spite of dogmas current in all ages,
One settled fact is better than ten sages. [/b]
Facts have always worked for me.
Out- out are the lights- out all! And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.
Of course the worms don’t know that.
That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.
I’m always up for it.
I continued, as was my wont, to smile in his face, and he did not perceive that my smile now was at the thought of his immolation.
On the other hand, that’s probably his wont too.
I was cautious in what I said before the young lady; for I could not be sure that she was sane; and, in fact, there was a certain restless brilliancy about her eyes that half led me to imagine she was not.
Nothing to do here but roll the dice.
There are few persons, even among the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half credence in the supernatural, by coincidences of so seemingly marvellous a character that, as mere coincidences, the intellect has been unable to receive them.
Go ahead, ask me about Gary Crigger.
[b]Jeff VanderMeer
We live in a universe driven by chance, his father had said once, but the bullshit artists all want causality.[/b]
Bullshit artists like his father.
The world we are a part of now is difficult to accept, unimaginably difficult. I don’t know if I accept everything even now. I don’t know how I can. But acceptance moves past denial, and maybe there’s a defiance in that, too.
Of course some things are considerably more difficult to accept than others.
The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what was a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?
Those clever bastards!
The gods are here, if they are anywhere at all in the world.
Here where though?
He believed a kind of fragmentation had crept into people’s minds in the modern era.
Gee, you think so?
…is nothing more liberating than playing an illogical game where only you understand all of the rules.
Starting with the definitions, right?
[b]Existential Comics
I’ve always been a big fan of the consistency of the laws of physics over space and time. I hope that sticks around.[/b]
Or at least until we’re all dead and gone.
The best thing about philosophy is that all the great philosophers in history were basically wrong about almost everything, so there’s really not that much pressure to be right.
And we do our bit here to carry that tradition on. Well, you more than me of course.
[b]These right wing “self help” gurus are pretty surreal. They are like:
- Exercise regularly.
- Focus on concrete goals.
- Find supportive friends.
- Women are serpentine creatures that undermine society and must be tamed by a dominant will.
- Stay hydrated.[/b]
See if you can spot the outlier.
[b]How be an existentialist:
- Drink constantly, but because of angst, not alcoholism.
- Don’t get any work done, but because of existential anxiety, not laziness.
- Sleep with tons of people, but because you are fleeing nihilistic despair, not horniness.[/b]
How be a nihilist? Just double it.
To paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre, all of the mistakes that I’ve made in my life were made because I wasn’t extremely online enough.
Explain this please.
[b]“…wealth disparity grows to unprecedented levels…”
Republicans: what if we gave tax cuts to the rich.
Democrats: what if instead we did absolutely nothing.[/b]
We don’t call it a two-party system for nothing.
[b]Robert Crumb
I was a child of American popular culture. All I did as a kid was what I could get at the local supermarket or the dime store. Nothing else was seen. Plus what was on television, or the movie theatre. That was it.[/b]
So, what exactly does that explain?
The fine-art world knows very little about the cartoon world.
Let’s decide if that’s understandable.
When people say ‘What are underground comics?’ I think the best way you can define them is just the absolute freedom involved…we didn’t have anyone standing over us.
A miracle, in other words.
Most of my adult life I had this towering contempt for America.
Of course it’s our constitutional right to.
They can buy talent. You can’t buy it for yourself, but you can buy other people’s talent to serve your purposes. And once an artist does that, he becomes like a plaything of the rich.
So, does that make them scumbags?
I knew I was weird by the time I was four. I knew I wasn’t like other boys. I knew I was more fearful. I didn’t like the rough and tumble most boys were into. I knew I was a sissy.
My guess? They let him know it.
[b]Tom Wolfe
To say that animals evolved into man is like saying that Carrara marble evolved into Michelangelo’s David. Speech is what man pays homage to in every moment he can imagine.[/b]
Would you say that?
If language sealed off man from animal, then the Theory of Evolution applied only to animal studies and reached no higher than the hairy apes.
The naked truth, Mr Chomsky?
If a monkey has become a man—what may not a man become?
Or, for that matter, a woman.
Darwin’s goal was to show that all Müller’s and Wallace’s Higher Things evolved from animals—animals even as small as earwigs. He had no evidence, causing him to fall back over and over on the life and times of “my dog”.
Imagine then if it had been a cat.
Huxley became such an ardent Darwinist not because he believed in Darwin’s theory of natural selection—he never did—but because Darwin was obviously an atheist, just as he was.
Huxley, Darwin and now Wolfe. All dead and gone.
So: What say them today about all this?
Subscribing to Darwinism showed that one was part of a bright, enlightened minority who shone far above the mooing herd down below.
Axiomatically as it were.
[b]The Dead Author
The only way to still be free is to make mistakes.[/b]
Well, one of the only ways.
Some people are just bad at smalltalk because they don’t even superficially care about other people.
Sure, go ahead, point the finger at me.
Arranging American celebrities by those that were accused of sexual assault, those that became president, and those that were accused of sexual assault and became president.
What do you say, let’s do it!
Philip Roth has died. Male neurosis caused by entitlement lives on.
As well it should?
Philip Roth taught me that no matter who you are, you will be humiliated and forgotten already in your lifetime.
One man’s opinion?
By age 35 you should be dead.
Or, at the very least, wish you were.
[b]C.G. Jung
Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.[/b]
That and owning up to it.
Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche.
So, whatever you do, put it to good use.
…there are many people who become neurotic because they are only normal, as there are people who are neurotic because they cannot become normal. For the former the very thought that you want to educate them to normality is a nightmare; their deepest need is really to be able to lead “abnormal” lives.
Normal, of course, being almost anything.
We are always human and we should never forget the burden of being only human.
Human all too human he means.
One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.
See what he’s done here? No, of course not.
People think you have only to ‘tell’ a person that he ‘ought’ to do something in order to put him on the right track. But whether he can or will do it is another matter.
Go ahead, try it on me.
[b]Edward St. Aubyn
He was just one of those Englishmen who was always saying silly things to sound less pompous, and pompous things to sound less silly.[/b]
Of course that’s more or less a global phenomenon.
It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they’re dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right.
You know, as consolations go.
At the beginning, there had been talk of using some of her money to start a home for alcoholics. In a sense they had succeeded.
We know what sense that is, don’t we?
The claim that every man kills the thing he loves seemed to him a wild guess compared with the near certainty of a man turning into the thing he hates.
Or for some the approximate certainty.
What could he do but accept the disturbing extent to which memory was fictional and hope that the fiction lay at the service of a truth less richly represented by the original facts?
Let’s file this one under, “I guess so”.
We are entering the Dark Ages, my friend, but this time there will be lots of neon, and screen savers, and street lighting.
Kind of ironic, isn’t it?
[b]Existential Comics
It’s absolute bullshit that they have a top hat emoji but no guillotine emoji[/b]
Let’s connect the dots here to, among other things, the Reign of Terror.
One of the most difficult things you can do is be honest with yourself about the reasons you believe what you do.
Actually impossible for some of us.
The weird thing about people who say that nothing really matters is that they seem to have no shortage of opinions of what we should be doing.
Yeah, I used to be just like that.
Marxist analysis of the Avengers movies: they are bad.
Now to convince the masses…
A “middle class” person is just a working class person who the upper class have somehow convinced to look down on working class people.
Hell, and not only if they’re black. You know, in Trumpworld.
…by age 35 you should have robbed your first Bank to finance your underground communist newspaper that you smuggle across the border into your native country from which you have been exiled for political dissent.
And nowadays that’s no longer routine.
[b]Meg Wolitzer
If someone said ‘diametrically,’ could ‘opposed’ be far behind?[/b]
Why wouldn’t it be?
Everyone simply had to wait patiently in order to lose the people they loved one by one, all the while acting as if they weren’t waiting for that at all.
My guess: Only almost everyone.
The city was a paradox, though maybe it had always been one. You could have an excellent life here, even as everything disintegrated. The city at that moment was not a place that anyone would remember with nostalgia, except for the fact that in the midst of all this, if you played it right, your money could double, and you could buy a big apartment with triple-glazed windows that overlooked the chaos.
Unless of course like me you played it wrong and the chaos tagged along.
Though Jonah felt transfixed inside his own childhood, no one else saw him as a child. He was already over the hump of middle age, heading rapidly toward those year that no one like to speak of. The best parts had already passed for people Jonah’s age. By now you were meant to have become what you would finally be, and to gracefully and unobtrusively stay in that state for the rest of your life.
Oh well, so much for “you’re only as young as you feel”.
Is there anything sadder than the scrawniest little piece of uneaten chicken at a dinner party?
Hmm, said Jules. Yes. The Holocaust.
Not for some though.
The past is so tenacious.
Or, from time to time, not tenacious enough.
[b]Harvey Pekar
He wasn’t a man, but a tape recorder, repeating catch phrases and old slogans without any thought to the concepts behind them, a dog stuck in the training of his youth and faithfully executing his tasks long after his master had moved on.[/b]
Most of us in other words.
It’s my perspective: gloom and doom.
For some of us though it’s the other way around.
You do not pursue potential conflict unless you hold power over your foe.
If only in the best of all possible worlds.
Praise from people I respect can get me through times of no money better than money can get me through times of no praise.
Still, sometimes it’s just too close to call.
As a matter of fact, I deliberately look for the mundane, because I feel these stories are ignored. The most influential things that happen to virtually all of us are the things that happen on a daily basis. Not the traumas.
Let’s just say you can take this to far.
I’ve probably had my day in the sun. I think I’ve influenced a lot of comic book writers.
Make of this what you will, in other words.