a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Nathanael West

Perhaps I can make you understand. Let’s start from the beginning. A man is hired to give advice to the readers of a newspaper. The job is a circulation stunt and the whole staff considers it a joke. He welcomes the job, for it might lead to a gossip column, and anyway he’s tired of being a leg man. He too considers the job a joke, but after several months at it, the joke begins to escape him. He sees that the majority of the letters are profoundly humble pleas for moral and spiritual advice, and they are inarticulate expressions of genuine suffering. He also discovers that his correspondents take him seriously. For the first time in his life, he is forced to examine the values by which he lives. This examination shows him that he is the victim of the joke and not its perpetrator.[/b]

Now that’s a fucking insight!

He was giving birth to groups of words.

Worse, words meant only to define and to defend other words.

She wasn’t hard-boiled. It was just that she put love on a special plane, where a man without money or looks couldn’t move.

Works that way when he isn’t hard-boiled either.

His mouth formed an O with lips torn angry in laying duck’s eggs from a chicken’s rectum.

It actually doesn’t matter what it means; you either get it or you don’t.

It seems to me that someone must surely take the hint and write the life of Miss McGeeney, the woman who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of Boswell.

Of course no one ever did.

We must take the long view—every defeat is a victory in a war of attrition.

Of course that can stretch all the way out to the beginning of time.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Philosophy 101: Being, Meaning, The Infinite Joy of Thought
Philosophy 201: Nothingness, Nonsense, The Infinite Pain of Thought
Philosophy 301: Does this class countv towards my business major?[/b]

Philosophy 401: The stuff we do here?

Above all a philosopher must be willing to work with
Plato: universals
Leibniz: infinitesimals
Kierkegaard: seemingly lost causes
Nietzsche: forces beyond her control
Sartre: methamphetamine

Different folks, different strokes?

Life is
Kierkegaard: anxiety
Schopenhauer: despair
Bataille: terror
Benjamin: guilt
Beckett: all that stuff, but really, really funny

On the other hand, is he laughing now?

We would set you free but
Sade: you love your chains
Lacan: you love your masters
Bataille: there is no we
Beckett: there is no you
Camus: there is no free

Obviously: Sade

Wilde: Football is a game for gentlemen played by barbarians
Sartre: In football everything is complicated by the presence of the other team
Camus: All I know about morality and the obligations of men, I owe to football

Obviously: Sartre

[b]Worst Philosophers of All Time
20. It’s
19. Absurd
18. To
17. Rank
16. Philosophers
15. As
14. If
13. They
12. Were
11. Films
10. Or
9. Light
8. Beers
7. Rather
6. Than
5. Our
4. Bravest
3. Conceptual
2. Warriors

  1. Ayn Rand[/b]

Finally, one thing we can all agree on.

[b]Elias Canetti

I have no sounds that could serve to soothe me, no violincello like him, no lament that anyone would recognize as a lament because it sounds subdued, in an inexpressibly tender language. I have only these lines on the yellowish paper and words that are never new, for they keep saying the same thing through an entire life.[/b]

Sort of like me here, right? Though probably not even close.

Most religions do not make men better, only warier.

Maybe, but that’s not nothing in this world.

Books have no life; they lack feeling maybe, and perhaps cannot feel pain, as animals and even plants feel pain. But what proof have we that inorganic objects can feel no pain? Who knows if a book may not yearn for other books, its companions of many years, in some way strange to us and therefore never yet perceived?

My guess: We all know.

It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite. The crowd he needs is the dense crowd, in which body is pressed to body; a crowd, too, whose psychical constitution is also dense, or compact, so that he no longer notices who it is that presses against him. As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch. Ideally, all are equal there; no distinctions count. Not even that of sex. The man pressed against him is the same as himself He feels him as he feels himself. Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body.

How fucking idiotic is that, he thought!!

Nothing among all human emotions is more beautiful and more hopeless than the wish to be loved for oneself alone.

As you might guess, that has never been a problem for me.

His meals were always punctual. Whether she cooked well or badly he did not know; it was a matter of total indifference to him. During his meals, which he ate at his writing desk, he was busy with important considerations. As a rule he would not have been able to say what precisely he had in his mouth. He reserved consciousness for real thoughts; they depend upon it; without consciousness, thoughts are unthinkable. Chewing and digestion happen of themselves.

No, really, for some of us this is almost true.

[b]Günter Grass

Once upon a time there was a musician who slew his four cats, stuffed them in a garbage can, left the building, and went to visit friends.[/b]

Of course once upon a time nothing much hasn’t happened.

We were convinced that she looked on with indifference if she noticed us at all. Today I know that everything watches, that nothing goes unseen, and that even wallpaper has a better memory than ours. It isn’t God in His heaven that sees all. A kitchen chair, a coathanger, a half-filled ash tray, or the wooden replica of a woman named Niobe can perfectly well serve as an unforgetting witness to every one of our acts.

In novels of course you can say things like this.

Behind all sorrows in the world Klepp saw a ravenous hunger; all human suffering, he believed, could be cured with a portion of blood sausage. What quantities of fresh blood sausage with rings of onion, washed down with beer, Oskar consumed in order to make his friend think his sorrow’s name was hunger and not Sister Dorothy.

On the other hand, just the words “blood sausage” give some of us the creeps.

We struck up a conversation, but took pains to keep to small talk at first. We touched on the most trivial of topics: I asked if he thought the fate of man was unalterable. He thought it was.

So, is that small enough for you?

You can begin a story in the middle and create confusion by striking out boldly, backward and forward. You can be modern, put aside all mention of time and distance and, when the whole thing is done, proclaim, or let someone else proclaim, that you have finally, at the last moment, solved the space-time problem.

You meaning not us I suspect.

You American intellectuals—you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!

He figured it must be the other American intellectuals.

[b]Existential Comics

Never trust someone who says they are seeking the good of all humanity, but are nasty to every single human they meet.[/b]

Not many folks [on the left] that doesn’t include.

Should we teach philosophy before college? The answer is obvious if you state the opposite, and substitute the definition in for “philosophy”:
“We should NOT teach kids to question our fundamental beliefs.”
“We should NOT teach kids about logic, ethics, and knowledge.”

He wondered, “Why can’t I make sense of this?”

My main problem with Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason is that it just isn’t very funny.

My guess: It wasn’t meant to be.

Amazon’s major innovation was bringing sweatshops back to America.

Yeah, but that’s already old news. returntonow.net/2018/02/03/amaz … sweatshop/

Philosophical thought experiment: imagine a “Twin Earth” where everything was the same, except there were hot local singles in your area looking to hook up.

Not counting Baltimore of course.

Here’s the litmus test: until middle aged suburban wine moms can no longer call someone up because their Mexican waiter was rude to them, and have federal agents show up demanding their papers like god damn fascists, we haven’t abolished ICE.

In other words, when Hell freezes over.

[b]Neil Gaiman

You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women.[/b]

1] is this true
2] if so, why does it matter?

I only met Mad Sweeney twice, alive, he said. The first time I thought he was a world-class jerk with the devil in him. The second time I thought he was a major fuckup and I gave him the money to kill himself. He showed me a coin trick I don’t remember how to do, gave me some bruises, and claimed he was a leprechaun. Rest in peace, Mad Sweeney.

Hear! Hear!

Change. Change. Change. Change … change. Change. Chaaange. When you say words a lot they don’t mean anything. Or maybe they don’t mean anything anyway, and we just think they do.

[i]Or:
Dasein. Dasein. Dasein. Dasein…Dasein. Dasein. Dasssein. When you say words a lot they don’t mean anything. Or maybe they don’t mean anything anyway, and we just think they do.

How’d this go for you?[/i]

Rain in the graveyard, and the world puddled into blurred reflections.

Never needed rain for that, he thought. Let alone in the graveyard.

It was a dream, and in dreams you have no choices: either there are no decisions to be made, or they were made for you long before ever the dream began.

Why stop there? If you get my drift.

I will be a wise and tolerant monarch, dispensing justice fairly, and only setting nightmares to rip out the winds of the evil and the wicked. Or just anybody that I don’t like.

After all, who’s gonna stop him?

[b]Edgar Allan Poe

For all we live to know is known.[/b]

Possibly excepting all that we don’t.

There are two bodies — the rudimental and the complete; corresponding with the two conditions of the worm and the butterfly. What we call “death,” is but the painful metamorphosis. Our present incarnation is progressive, preparatory, temporary. Our future is perfected, ultimate, immortal. The ultimate life is the full design.

Now all that’s left is to prove it.

…but it is a trait in the perversity of human nature to reject the obvious and the ready, for the far-distant and equivocal.

If only for all practical purposes.

I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain or of grief --oh, no! --it was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well.

Anyone here have it on tape?

It was well said of a certain German book that er lasst sich nicht lesen—it does not permit itself to be read.

“Sprechen sie deutsch, baby?”

Ah, Death, the spectre which sate at all feasts! How often, Monos, did we lose ourselves in speculations upon its nature! How mysteriously did it act as a check to human bliss — saying unto it "thus far, and no farther!”

Well, that’s what it would probably say no doubt.

[b]tiny nietzsche

putin: are you my little pissboy?
trump: maybeee
putin: do you want me to piss on you?
trump: yes, daddy[/b]

Let’s pin down close this is.

my sexual orientation is north by northwest

How queer is that?

i can see clearly now, the forest is gone

In fact, the only things left are the trees.

stop retrograding yourself orbits stop retrograding yourself orbits stop retrograding yourself orbits stop retrograding yourself orbits stop retrograding yourself orbits stop retrograding yourself orbits stop retrograding yourself orbits stop retrograding yourself

Should I know what this means?

kiss me, I’m a communist

Wow, that sure takes me back.

kiss me, I’m ambiguous

any takers?

[b]Federico García Lorca

To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.[/b]

You get this, right?

I know there is no straight road
No straight road in this world
Only a giant labyrinth
Of intersecting crossroads

And even that’s hidden behind all the lies.

The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.

No, it can’t be explained any clearer than that.

I am the immense shadow of my tears

Drenched is what he is.

At the heart of all great art is an essential melancholy.

Actually at the heart of most shitty art too.

Only mystery allows us to live, only mystery.

That and all the other things.

[b]C.G. Jung

If you go to thinking take your heart with you. If you go to love, take your head with you. Love is empty without thinking, thinking hollow without love.[/b]

Of course we all know that it makes no difference.

A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one.

Okay, but how about a billion?

You are what you do, not what you say you will do.

The guy was a fucking genuis!

But if we understand anything of the unconscious, we know that it cannot be swallowed. We also know that it is dangerous to suppress it, because the unconscious is life and this life turns against us if suppressed, as happens in neurosis.

No getting around that, right, Mr. Objectivist? Well, except for you, of course.

Man becomes whole, integrated, calm, fertile, and happy when (and only when) the process of individuation is complete, when the conscious and the unconscious have learned to live at peace and to complement one another.

Let’s file this one under, “the mother of all general descriptions.”
The father too for some of us.

It would be a ridiculous and unwarranted presumption on our part if we imagined that we were more energetic or more intelligent than the men of the past—our material knowledge has increased, but not our intelligence.

Not counting, say, the slaveowners: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_slave_owners

[b]tiny nietzsche

write your obituary in crayons[/b]

Or pay some kid to.

cop: do you know how fast you were going?
me: time is a construct
cop: do you know how fast you were not going?

Obviously they deserve each other.

I’d probably be happy without me.

And we all know that you’d be.

Just because I don’t believe you doesn’t mean you’re not telling the truth.

Still, the odds are I’m not.

violins beget more violins

Clever if not actually true.

portrait of the allusion as a young metaphor

Either that or a simile.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

There’s a bad time coming, boys, there’s a bad time coming! If things go on as they are, there’s nothing lies in the future but death and destruction, for these industrial masses.[/b]

Cue [among other things] Trumpworld.

But, mind you, it’s like this; while you live your life, you are in some way an organic whole with all life. But once you start the mental life you pluck the apple. You’ve severed the connection between the apple and the tree: the organic connection. And if you’ve got nothing in your life but the mental life, then you yourself are a plucked apple…you’ve fallen off the tree.

I think, therefore I suffer. Or, sure, what it really means.

To die is to move on with the invisible. To die is also a joy, a joy of submitting to that which is greater than the known, namely, the pure unknown. That is a joy. But to live mechanized and cut off within the motion of the will, to live as an entity absolved from the unknown, that is shameful and ignominious. There is no ignominy in death. There is complete ignominy in an unreplenished, mechanized life. Life indeed may be ignominious, shameful to the soul. But death is never a shame. Death itself, like the illimitable space, is beyond our sullying.

Bullsht no doubt. But so well articulated.

But to a woman, failure is another matter. For her it means failure to live, failure to establish her own life on the face of the earth. And this is humiliating, the ultimate humiliation.

And what man could possibly understand this?

Her eyes were like the first morning of the world, so ageless.

And then one day, well, she died.

But a democracy is bound in the end to be obscene, for it is composed of myriad disunited fragments, each fragment assuming to itself a false wholeness, a false individuality. Modern democracy is made up of millions of frictional parts all asserting their own wholeness.

What we need here then is our very own Vladimir Putin.

[b]Edward St. Aubyn

But then neither revenge nor forgiveness change what happened. They’re sideshows, of which forgiveness is the less attractive because it represents a collaboration with one’s persecutors.[/b]

On the other hand, you do what you have to do. All the rest is the sideshow.

Sometimes, when he was lying in bed, a single word like ‘fear’ or ‘infinity’ flicked the roof off the house and sucked him into the night, past the stars that had been bent into bears and ploughs, and into a pure darkness where everything was annihilated except the feeling of annihilation.

Let’s file this one under, “been there, done that.”

Nobody ever died of a feeling, he would say to himself, not believing a word of it, as he sweated his way through the feeling that he was dying of fear. People died of feelings all the time, once they had gone through the formality of materializing them into bullets and bottles and tumours.

Few things are trickier than emotions, right?

What was the thread that held together the scattered beads of experience if not the pressure of interpretation? The meaning of life was whatever meaning one could thrust down its reluctant throat.

On the other hand, steer clear of mine.

How could he think his way out of the problem when the problem was the way he thought…

He means me of course.

People think they are individuals because they use the word ‘‘I’’ so often.

The fools!

[b]so sad today

when i see people reproducing i’m like what are you doing[/b]

What would you tell her?

being my own worst enemy is going ok

With me it’s still too close to call.

it’s all fun and games until you’re born

Truth be told, I don’t actually recall.

at least i’m not permanent

Of course first we’ll have to run that by God.

if i get reincarnated i’m gonna be like are you fucking kidding me?

Unless she comes back as a cow.

i love you but i’ve chosen masturbation

What’s love got to do with it, he thought.

[b]Tom Stoppard

I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you’re either a revolutionary or you’re not, and if you’re not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can’t be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary… I forget the third thing.[/b]

My guess: Working 9 to 5 as a wage slave.

It’s all trivial-your grouse, my hermit, Bernard’s Byron. Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in. That’s why you can’t believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after but not the life. Believe in god, the solid, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of view. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.

Just what the world needs, he thought, another optimist.

I got dizzy, he explained.
I should think you did. What were you doing?
Nothing, said Moon. I was trying to face one way or the other and I got confused and fell over.
Let that be my epitaph.

Let’s file this one under, “another dumb bastard bites the dust”.

War is capitalism with the gloves off.

For some in other words. Though, in particular, the mutts they recruit to fight them.

A lesson in folly is worth two in wisdom.

Trump’s advice to Putin more or less than Putin’s advice to Trump?

You cannot conceive of the quantity of explosives the armies throw at each other for each man killed! The shells make a continuous noise, sometimes like an enormous machine breaking apart. At other times, they come whistling towards you in a thoughtful sort of way and then go crump and the screw cap flies off, hurtling through the air, screaming. There’s a kind of shell which comes with a crescendo like an express train, only faster. Another kind which makes a noise like tearing calico, louder and louder. The largest kind are the ones which burst in the sky and make a double crack, like a wet canvas being shaken out by a giant. Such immense explosions to kill such small, weak animals.

More to the point who makes how much manufacturing them?

[b]Svetlana Alexievich

Question: Is the world as it’s depicted in words the real world?[/b]

Sure, if you need it to be.

…often thought that the simple fact, the mechanical fact, is no closer to the truth than a vague feeling, rumor, vision.

Sure, if you don’t need it to be.

These people had already seen what for everyone else is still unknown.

I might say the same about myself. And not just here.

We share a communist collective memory. We’re neighbors in memory.

Tell me that’s not embedded in dasein.

You’re young. Why are you doing this? That’s not a person anymore, that’s a nuclear reactor. You’ll just burn together. I was like a dog, running after them. I’d stand for hours at their doors, begging and pleading. And then they’d say: All right! The hell with you! You’re not normal!

Not much you can do sometimes with “the young”.

I clipped my nails down till they bled so I wouldn’t accidentally cut him. None of the nurses could approach him; if they needed anything they’d call me.

Can’t really imagine it, can you?

[b]so sad today

i have trouble expressing my feelings except to the whole internet[/b]

Of course here you can always just make things up.

if there’s one thing worse than having to die it’s being born

She’s just going on the record.

got my self-esteem at the dollar store

Or: got my self-esteem at the flea market

my gift to humanity is not having kids

On behalf of all of us, thank you.

remember when i thought I knew you but I didn’t know you at all

Actually, it was the other way around.

many classic works of literature don’t have enough pussy eating

Let’s list the ones that that do.

[b]Meg Wolitzer

When you looked closely at anything, you could almost faint, Jules thought, although you had to look closely if you wanted to have any knowledge at all in life.[/b]

True, there is that.

Edie was a gorgeous, avant-garde girl back in the day when that could be a full-time occupation, but in marriage she slowly became less wild. To Manny’s great disappointment, though, her domestic skills didn’t rise to the fore as her sexual and artistic ones receded.

True, there is that.

Bending Spring Ranch, Cole Valley, Colorado.
What kind of a ranch is it anyway? Dennis had asked Jules originally when the property had been purchased. Cattle? Dude? I wasn’t really sure.
No, it’s a tax ranch, she’d said. See, they raise little tax brackets there. It’s the only one of its kind in the world.

It’s a franchise now of course.

They should hand out vibrators if they’re going to demand so much of you that you can’t find time for a private life.

Those and inflatable love dolls.

The present could never be held, it did not allow it.

At least not for long.

For years it had been enough to be the intelligent one. All that had meant, in the beginning, was that you could answer the kinds of questions that your teachers asked. The whole world appeared to be fact-based, and that had been a relief to Greer, who could dredge up facts with great ease, a magician pulling coins from behind any available ear. Facts appeared before her, and the she simply articulated them, and in this way she became known as the smartest one in her class.

Then straight on to Jeopardy.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.” Michel Foucault[/b]

Like this can actually be pinned down.

“Explanation is where the mind rests.” David Hume

For example we could make the attempt to explain this.

“Art may make a suit of clothes, but nature must produce a man.” David Hume

The question clearly begged: What then of philosophy?

“Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance.” Michel Foucault

So, would he think that is still true?

“He who has peace of mind disturbs neither himself nor another.” Epicurus

Yeah, like this is a good thing.
It’s not, right?

“Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?” Epicurus

Of course he’s just paraphrasing Mickey’s father.

[b]Ambrose Bierce

Vote, n. The instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.[/b]

Imagine then his reaction to Trumpworld.

Philosophy - A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

Or: Philosophy - A route of many roads leading from nothing to nowhere.

Lawyer – One skilled in the circumvention of the law.

The only possible exception perhaps being Carleas.

Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.
Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.

He means our football of course.

History – An account mostly false, of events unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.

And, no, not just American history.

Logic, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. The basic of logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion - thus:
Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man.
Minor Premise: One man can dig a post-hole in sixty seconds; Therefore-
Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a post-hole in one second.
This may be called syllogism arithmetical, in which, by combining logic and mathematics, we obtain a double certainty and are twice blessed.

And yet not a single mention of dasein.