a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Neil Gaiman

It’s certainly not too late to change to the winning side. But you know, you also have the freedom to stay just where you are. That’s what it means to be an American. That’s the miracle of America. Freedom to believe means the freedom to believe the wrong thing, after all. Just as freedom of speech gives you the right to stay silent.[/b]

Good luck with that, right?

I sometimes imagine I would like my ashes to be scattered in a library. But then the librarians would just have to come in early the next morning to sweep them up again, before the people got there.

What the fuck, do it anyway.

The marquis de Carabas was not a good man, and he knew himself well enough to be perfectly certain that he was not a brave man. He had long since decided that the world, Above or Below, was a place that wished to be deceived, and, to this end, he had named himself from a lie in a fairy tale, and created himself–his clothes, his manner, his carriage–as a grand joke.

He may just as well have gotten that from me. Now ask me who I got it from.

To be a good writer… read a lot and write every day.

For starters I’m guessing.

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

Wow, is that depressing or what.

I’d love to write some porn, but I don’t know if I have the right engines. When I was a young man and I was tempted to write porn, imaginary parents would appear over my shoulder and read what I was writing; just about the point that I managed to banish the imaginary parents, real children would lean over my shoulder and read what I was writing.

Of course it goes without saying that some aren’t bothered by this at all.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.” Jean-Paul Sartre[/b]

Unless of course you just make something up.

“Art is uncompromising and life is full of compromises.” Günter Grass

Imagine then if it were the other way around?

“The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.” Günter Grass

Of course look where that got him.

“Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.” Honoré de Balzac

Okay, I’m telling you.

"'The ‘Enlightenment’, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.” Michel Foucault

That and the responsibilities.

“The world is my idea” Arthur Schopenhauer

Well, not counting all the parts that aren’t.

[b]Edgar Allan Poe

I am a writer. Therefore, I am not sane.[/b]

He probably actually wasn’t.

And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave.

I can live with that he thought.

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw

That makes [at least] two of us.

There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors, and looking them piteously in the eyes — die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed.

Let’s reveal them anyway.

Sensations are the great things, after all. Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations; they will be worth to you ten guineas a sheet.

How much is that in American dollars?

After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.

But don’t take it personally of course.

[b]Existential Comics

People with ugly faces will be the last to receive social justice.[/b]

For some of course that’s true even if it’s not.

I bet if Socrates were alive today he’d have a really annoying Twitter account.

Jesus too.

Philosophy is important because without it we would probably all think we knew what the fuck was going on.

So, how should we take this?

People think Logical Posivitism failed because it is self defeating, but that’s a myth. It failed because the Vienna Circle were a bunch of nerds and no one wants the solution to philosophy to be some lame ass nerd shit like an “exact scientific language”.

And that’s all before the parts about dasein.

[b]A good University professor usually has four traits:

  1. Knowledgeable of the subject.
  2. Passion for teaching.
  3. Good at communicated.
  4. Radicalizes the students towards global communism.[/b]

Is there even one of them left?

A lot of people think existentialism is just thinking about death all the time, but it is actually mostly about giving bad reviews to Camus’s plays out of spite because you got into an argument about communism with him.

Jesus, not that again!

[b]Jeff VanderMeer

…you look you see only bitterness or despair. If all of these conditions and situations apply to you, I recommend a refreshing suicide attempt.[/b]

Let’s file this one [once again] under, “tired of living, scared of dying”.

Take two pictures representing the same subject; one may be dismissed as illustration if it is dominated by the subject and has no other justification but the subject, the other may be called painting if the subject is completely absorbed in the style, which is its own justification, whatever the subject, and has an intrinsic value.

Clearly, something only the true artist can grasp.

I am writing this sitting in the waterlogged lobby of a rotting, half-finished condominium complex. I am surrounded by cavorting freshwater seals and have two pearl-handled revolvers in my lap, a bottle of vodka in my right hand, a human body in the freezer in the kitchens behind me, and a rather large displaced rockhopper penguin staring me in the face.

Sounds made up to me.

…subtle or bold, The Weird acknowledges that our search for understanding about worlds beyond our own cannot always be found in science or religion and thus becomes an alternative path for exploration of the numinous.

Numinous. What a great word for something that almost certainly doesn’t exist.

Never skip a step. Skip a step, you’ll find five more new ones waiting ahead of you.

Or, sure, just skip them all.

I think I would remember forgetting that.

Let’s take this even deeper.

[b]Anthony Powell

Human relationships flourish and decay, quickly and silently, so that those concerned scarcely know how brittle, or how inflexible, the ties that bind them have become.[/b]

Let’s pin down why that is.

In short, the persons we see most clearly are not necessarily those we know best.

Let’s pin down why that is.

There is always an element of unreality, perhaps even of slight absurdity, about someone you love.

Never been myself but I don’t doubt it.

His mastery of the hard-luck story was of a kind never achieved by persons not wholly concentrated on themselves.

I won’t point to you if you don’t point to me.

Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they’ll marry anybody.

Or, sure, it just seems that way.

It doesn’t do to read too much, Widmerpool said.You get to look at life with a false perspective. By all means have some familiarity with the standard authors. I should never raise any objection to that. But it is no good clogging your mind with a lot of trash from modern novels.

Cue for example the best seller list.

[b]C.G. Jung

Funnily enough, “self-criticism” is an idea much in vogue in Marxist countries, but there it is subordinated to ideological considerations and must serve the State, and not truth and justice in men’s dealing with one another. The mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual. The more unrelated individuals are, the more consolidated the State becomes, and vice versa.[/b]

Spot the irony?

Although my belief in the world returned to me, I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it.

Impressions. Really, what to make of them?

In studying the history of the human mind one is impressed again and again by the fact that the growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and that each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement. One could almost say that nothing is more hateful to man than to give up even a particle of his unconsciousness. Ask those who have tried to introduce a new idea!

Among others [here], he means me.

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

Unless of course you discern God.

We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the wheel depends. We turn clay to make a vessel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the vessel depends. We pierce doors and windows to make a house; And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the utility of the house depends. Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the utility of what is not.

Let’s apply this to, say, the Trump administration.

If it be true that there can be no metaphysics transcending human reason, it is no less true that there can be no empirical knowledge that is not already caught and limited by the a priori structure of cognition.

Let’s apply this to, say, the Trump administration.

[b]Edward St. Aubyn

It was never quite clear to Eleanor why the English thought it was so distinguished to have done nothing for a long time in the same place.[/b]

The idle rich in particular.

She was ghastly and quite mad, but when I grew up I figured her worst punishment was to be herself and I didn’t have to do anything more.

We should all be that lucky.

Personally I think that competition should be encouraged in war and sport and business, but that it makes no sense in the arts. If an artist is good, nobody else can do what he or she does and therefore all comparisons are incoherent.

Tell that to the folks at, say, Sotheby.

But that, after all, was the point of romantic folly. If it hadn’t all gone horribly wrong, it wouldn’t have been the real thing.

Too many to count he thought.

Nobody can find me here, he thought. And then he thought, what if nobody can find me here?

Why on earth would you want them to?

After less than a year together they now slept in separate rooms because Victor’s snoring, and nothing else about him, kept her awake at night.

Let’s weep for their future.

[b]so sad today

likes: death
dislikes: dying[/b]

Not very realistic is it? But point taken.

ok, here’s the thing, you have to rescue me from myself

I’ll give it a go.

me: fuck authority
also me: can someone just tell me what to do

Perfectly normal, isn’t it?

if i sound depressed it’s because i am

Yep, that’ll do it.

twitter is a dark, cruel, reactionary, disembodied, serotonin-chasing, polarizing, punishing pit of snakes & it’s so much better than instagram

Someone explain this please.

too anxious to sit still, too depressed to move

That can’t be good.

[b]Meg Wolitzer

Maybe she had “no more books left inside her,” as people often sorrowfully say about writers, envisioning the imagination as a big pantry, either well stocked with goods or else wartime-empty.[/b]

Better that than ''no books inside you at all".

Your personal history of pain, by the time you reached the age of forty, was supposed to have been folded thoroughly into the batter of the self, so that you barely needed to acknowledge it anymore.

Right, like there really is nothing new under the sun.

When do I stop? When I’m tewnty-five? Thirty? Thirty-five? Forty? Or right this minute? Nobody tells you how long you should keep doing something before you give it up forever.

Let’s name the folks here who should give it up forever.

You sometimes heard about the marginally talented wives of powerful men publishing children’s books or designing handbags or, most commonly, becoming photographers. There might even be a show of the wife’s work in a well-known but slightly off gallery. Everyone would come see it, and they would treat the wife with unctuous respect. Her photographs of celebrities without makeup, and seascapes, and street people, would be enormous, as though size and great equipment could make up for whatever else was missing.

And then every once in a while the talented husbands of powerful women.

I want to be dipped into the world of a novel. I want to be immersed. I travel a lot for my work and my happiest moments are coming back to the hotel late at night, [knowing that a] book I’ve brought with me [is] waiting for me there. It’s like my version of chocolates on a pillow. Fiction is a necessity in my life. It’s a strange moment where the world is roiling. People are glued to the news, and rightly so. But what fiction can do is look with nuance and depth at something that’s not always looked at that way. There are those studies that say fiction teaches empathy. I feel like, here’s a chance. Reading fiction gives me a chance to look into other people and their lives. That’s incredibly moving to me.

Of course nowadays most of what see on the news is fiction.

Words matter. All semester, we were looking for the words to say what we needed to say.

You know, when that matters.

[b]Ambrose Bierce

Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.[/b]

That or desparate.

Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.

Religion in a nutshell?

Redemption, n. Deliverance of sinners from the penalty of their sin through their murder of the deity against whom they sinned. The doctrine of Redemption is the fundamental mystery of our holy religions, and whoso believeth in it shall not perish, but have everlasting life in which to try to understand it.

Of course that’s not how they see it.

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

Cue all the cronies in Washington.

Apologize: To lay the foundation for a future offence.

Repeat as necessarry.

Heathen, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something he can see and feel.

Sure, I might be one of them.

[b]Tom Stoppard

Words deserve respect. Get the right ones in the right order, and you can nudge the world a little.[/b]

Of course others can nudge it right back again.

When I was twelve I was obsessed. Everything was sex. Latin was sex. The dictionary fell open at ‘meretrix’, a harlot. You could feel the mystery coming off the word like musk. ‘Meretrix’! This was none of your mensa-a-table, this was a flash from a forbidden planet, and it was everywhere. History was sex, French was sex, art was sex, the Bible, poetry, penfriends, games, music, everything was sex except biology which was obviously sex but not really sex, not the one which was secret and ecstatic and wicked and a sacrament and all the things it was supposed to be but couldn’t be at one and the same time - I got that in the boiler room and it turned out to be biology after all.

On the other hand, one way or another, everything comes down to that. Eventually.

Real data is messy…It’s all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it’s playing your song, but unfortunately it’s out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk.

Not only that but who’s to say how real?

As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don’t know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.

Sure, if that actually works for you.

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

Okay but less trivial sometimes than others.

Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.

So, how dumb is that?

[b]D.H. Lawrence

There was nothing now but this empty treadmill of what Clifford called the integrated life, the long living together of two people, who are in the habit of being in the same house with one another. Nothingness! To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the one end of living. All the many busy and important little things that make up the grand sum-total of nothingness![/b]

Go ahead, see if you can describe it better.

Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.

Nope, don’t remember it that way at all.

It was like something lurking in the darkness within him…There it remained in the darkness, the great pain, tearing him at times, and then being silent.

Then a kind of swooshing back and forth.

She knew she would die like an early, colourless, scentless flower that the end of the winter puts forth mercilessly.

Now that’s grim.

Art-speech is the only truth.

Unless, of course, that’s a lie.

The bitch-goddess, as she is called, of Success, roamed, snarling and protective, round the half-humble, half-defiant Michaelis’ heels, and intimidated Clifford completely: for he wanted to prostitute himself to the bitchgoddess Success also, if only she would have him.

Fuck her has always been my own reaction.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny.” Martin Heidegger[/b]

Well, maybe sometimes.

“Everyone is the other and no one is himself.” Martin Heidegger

Let’s think – really think – about the implications of that.

“Nature has no history.” Martin Heidegger

Let’s think – really think – about the implications of that.

“Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have." Jean-Paul Sartre

For some of course how grim is that.

“Life begins on the other side of despair.” Jean-Paul Sartre

You know, if you can get there.

"It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.” Gabriel García Márquez

Enough for him maybe.

[b]Svetlana Alexievich

No one had taught us what freedom means. We’d only ever learned how to die for freedom.[/b]

My guess: The State’s rendition.

No one knows what’s in the other world. It’s better here. More familiar.

The devil we know best and all that crap.

According to Abkhazian custom, the time you spend with guests around the table doesn’t count toward your lifespan because you’re drinking wine and enjoying yourself.

Come on, he thought, what do they know?

“He’s going to die.” I understood later on that you can’t think that way. I cried in the bathroom. None of the mothers cry in the hospital rooms. They cry in the toilets, the baths. I come back cheerful: “Your cheeks are red. You’re getting better.” “Mom, take me out of the hospital. I’m going to die here. Everyone here dies.” Now where am I going to cry? In the bathroom? There’s a line for the bathroom—everyone like me is in that line.

They endure it. Though, for some, they pray to God.

He knew that in order to survive, you only needed three things: bread, onions, and soap.

Well, that and water.

At first, the question was, Who’s to blame? But then, when we learned more, we started thinking, What should we do?

And then: What are our options?

[b]Nathanael West

Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily.[/b]

In other words, her lies.

Art Is a Way Out. Do not let life overwhelm you. When the old paths are choked with the débris of failure, look for newer and fresher paths. Art is just such a path. Art is distilled from suffering.

Of course you still have to be good at it.

He felt as though his heart were a bomb, a complicated bomb that would result in a simple explosion, wrecking the world without rocking it.

Mine would rock it too.

You once said to me that I talk like a man in a book. I not only talk, but think and feel like one. I have spent my life in books; literature has deeply dyed my brain its own colour. This literary colouring is a protective one–like the brown of the rabbit or the checks of the quail–making it impossible for me to tell where literature ends and I begin.

Scripted in other words. A character.

But whether he was happy or not was hard to say. Probably he was neither, just as a plant is neither.

Probably not a good thing. But maybe it is.

I’m going to be a star some day, she announced as though daring him to contradict her.
I’m sure you…
It’s my life. It’s the only thing in the whole world that I want.
It’s good to know what you want. I used to be a bookkeeper in a hotel,
but…
If I’m not, I’ll commit suicide.

Probably already has.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.” Jean-Paul Sartre[/b]

In any event, it’s too late for him.

“The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately." Seneca

And that narrows it down to…what exactly?

“Our greatest fears lie in anticipation.” Honoré de Balzac

I know that mine do.

“Questioning is the piety of thought.” Martin Heidegger

Answering is the piety of Nazis.

“We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny.” Martin Heidegger

Well, maybe sometimes.

“Everyone is the other and no one is himself.” Martin Heidegger

Let’s think – really think – about the implications of that.

[b]Nora Ephron

So many of the conscious and unconscious ways men and women treat each other have to do with romantic and sexual fantasies that are deeply ingrained not just in society but in literature. The women’s movement may manage to clean up the mess in society, but I don’t know if it can clean up the mess in our minds.[/b]

Let’s just say that it hasn’t so far.

I must try this again, I thought; I must try again someday to sit still and not say a word. Maybe when I’m dead.

It’s got to be a lot easier then.

You fall in love with someone, and part of what you love about him are the differences between you; and then you get married and the differences start to drive you crazy.

Five will get you ten he’s thinking much the same thing.

It was exciting in its own self-absorbed way, which is very much the essence of journalism: you truly believe that you are living at the center of the universe and that the world out there is on tenterhooks waiting for the next copy of whatever publication you work at.

You know, if you’re an objectivist. Though sure one suspects even if you’re not.

You’d be amazed how little choice you have about loony bins.

By then though what difference does it make?

I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are.

Some women [like some men] more than others.

[b]Erica Jong

Someday every woman will have orgasms—ike every family has color TV—and we can all get on with the business of life. [/b]

Okay, so what are the latest stats?

Beware of the man who denounces woman writers; his penis is tiny and he cannot spell.

She means you, asshole.

I have lived my life according to this principle: If I’m afraid of it, then I must do it.

Or pencil it on the calendar somewhere.

And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

Nope, no way, not all the time.

We drove to the hotel and said goodbye. How hypocritical to go upstairs with a man you don’t want to fuck, leave the one you do sitting there alone, and then, in a state of great excitement, fuck the one you don’t want to fuck while pretending he’s the one you do. That’s called fidelity. That’s called monogamy. That’s called civilization and its discontents.

Or, sure, you might call it something else.

Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are.

Most of us though will take our chances with it.

[b]so sad today

everything happens for a stupid reason[/b]

Either that or a really stupid reason.

mood: abandoned building

Mine: abandoned building demolished.

she died as she lived: feeling like she was about to die

Not to worry, I’m working on it.

i am anxiety

And then one day: i [b]AM[/b] anxiety

in a threesome with fear of death and fear of life

And they’re on top.

ever just feel like you don’t have a right to exist for your entire life

Clearly not rhetorical.