a thread for mundane ironists

[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.

[b]May Sarton

We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.[/b]

Let’s just say that is not applicable to all of us.

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.

I’m living proof of this.

Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.

He thought, how idiotic is that!
He being [among others] me.

Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.

What it is founded on by and large is the creation of wage slaves.

The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.

Of course that doesn’t explain Don Trump though.

Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.

Go ahead then, take mine.

[b]Emily Gould

Existential angst was far, far above her pay grade.[/b]

Unless you count being born.

As a child I was a little bit disgusted and embarrassed to learn about the facts of life, and did not immediately connect the idea of “sex” to the feelings I got when I lay on the carpet on my stomach,idly humping a stuffed animal while watching Sesame Street. The realization that sex could be something to anticipate happily rather than to dread as another unpleasant grown-up duty came to me in a dream. Nothing overtly sexual even happened in this dream—it was a dream about lying in bed on a sunny afternoon with sun streaking the sheets, surrounded by warmth, feeling satisfied. It took life a long time for life to catch up with what this idealized version of sex could be like; it’s still not like that every time, but when it is, I notice.

Let’s exchange our own versions of this.

Amy had always thought she was too vain and selfish to seriously contemplate suicide, also too afraid of pain. She realized now that when she’d thought that, she hadn’t understood how painful existence could get. It could get so painful, it turned out, that any other kind of pain began to seem preferable. She felt ridiculous thinking these goth-teenager thoughts, but they were real.

Someone pass this along to Peter Kropotkin.

She wondered if it counted as being good if you did the good thing for purely selfish reasons. Probably not, but who cared. What was important was what you did, not how you felt.

Or: She wondered if it counted as being bad if you did the bad thing for purely selfless reasons.

And there was Sam’s charming Marxist thing of thinking that restaurants, new clothes, et cetera, were frivolities that only served to keep workers addicted and enslaved by Capital. Amy agreed with him about this, in theory, but she loved wearing a new outfit for the first time, ideally to a restaurant.

The new class struggle.

We would talk about the future while holding it forcibly at bay with our inactivity.

Hey, he thought, whatever works.

[b]Temple Grandin

I believe that the place where an animal dies is a sacred one. There is a need to bring ritual into the conventional slaughter plants and use as a means to shape people’s behavior. It would help prevent people from becoming numbed, callous, or cruel. The ritual could be something very simple, such as a moment of silence. In addition to developing better designs and making equipment to insure the humane treatments of all animals, that would be my contribution.[/b]

They’re still butchered though of course.

There’s a saying in engineering: You can build things cheap, fast, or right, but not all three.

Let’s think up one for philosophy.

If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what’s unique about language isn’t the brilliant humans who invented it to communicate high-level abstract thoughts. What’s unique about language is that the creatures who develop it are highly vulnerable to being eaten.

Does this square with Wittgenstein?

My mind can always separate the two. Even when I am very upset, I keep reviewing the facts over and over until I can come to a logical conclusion.

So, Temple, logically speaking, is it ethical to eat animals?

The word “autism” still conveys a fixed and dreadful meaning to most people—they visualize a child mute, rocking, screaming, inaccessible, cut off from human contact. And we almost always speak of autistic children, never of autistic adults, as if such children never grew up, or were somehow mysteriously spirited off the planet, out of society.

On the other hand, just how exceptional is she?

Neither living nor learning was good without order.

Though it is surely more complicated than that.

[b]Nein

The past, the present, and the future walk into a bar. Bartender: What will it have been?[/b]

Probably not a true story.

Yes, everything’s already been said. But not by you.

Probably not by you either.

If it’s any consolation, there isn’t any.

What, are you expecting one?

In the beginning, we’ll say, there was Adam. Then they made Smith.

And then they made Don Trump.
[Well, some of you assholes anyway]

We regret to inform you that Twitter has deleted your fake followers. If it’s any consolation, your fake leaders remain all too real.

Trust me: Not just on Twitter.

Listen: Monday doesn’t want to be here either.

Around 4,000 of them won’t want to be for most of us.

[b]Nein

The past, the present, and the future walk into a bar. Bartender: What will it have been?[/b]

Probably not a true story.

Yes, everything’s already been said. But not by you.

Probably not by you either.

If it’s any consolation, there isn’t any.

What, are you expecting one?

In the beginning, we’ll say, there was Adam. Then they made Smith.

And then they made Don Trump.
[Well, some of you assholes anyway]

We regret to inform you that Twitter has deleted your fake followers. If it’s any consolation, your fake leaders remain all too real.

Trust me: Not just on Twitter.

Listen: Monday doesn’t want to be here either.

Around 4,000 of them won’t want to be for most of us.

[b]Nora Ephron

On some level, my life has been wasted on me. After all, if I can’t remember it, who can?
The past is slipping away and the present is a constant affront. I can’t possibly keep up.[/b]

Me, I’m just around the corner from that.

Failure, they say, is a growth experience; you learn from failure. I wish that were true. It seems to me the main thing you learn from failure is that it’s entirely possible you will have another failure.

Hell, it’s almost impossible not to have one.

I think I was so entranced with being a couple that I didn’t even notice that the person I thought I was a couple with thought he was a couple with someone else.

The stuff that movies are made from.

I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction; there is only narrative.

Then eventually it gets around to the stuff I’m saying.

Of course, everyone has something wrong with him, that’s for sure, but this guy probably had something really wrong.

Of course he’s dead now.

Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.

Just for some though.

[b]Erica Jong

I don’t know what the definition of pornography is and nobody else does either. Pornography is somebody else’s erotica that you don’t like. People are interested in their own sexuality and they’ve always reflected it in their art. End of story.[/b]

In other words, the end of her story.

But the fact is, the muse won’t be summoned. She alights when it damn well pleases her. She falls in love with one artist, then deserts him for another. She’s a real bitch!

Or, if she’s a he, a real bastard.

All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing.

Let’s run this by the victims first.

I see the whole episode in my memory as if it were a very crisply photographed black and white movie. Directed by Bergman perhaps. We are playing ourselves in the movie version. If only we could escape from always having to play ourselves!

Or, for some, our hopelessly fractured and fragmented selves.

What all the ads and whorescopes seemed to imply was that if only you took proper care of your smells, your hair, your boobs, your eyelashes, your armpits, your crotch, your stars, your scars, your choice of Scotch in bars - you would meet a beautiful powerful, potent, and rich man who would satisfy every longing, fill every hole, make your heart skip a beat, make you misty, and fly you to the moon, where you would live totally satisfied forever.

Come on, if they didn’t work they wouldn’t still be around. Hell, we’re buried in them.

Once I worshipped Keats for dying young. Now I think it’s braver to die old.

Or, rather, what’s left of us does.

[b]Nathanael West

A button machine makes buttons, no matter what the power used, foot, steam or electricity. They, no matter what the motivating force, death, love or God, made jokes.[/b]

Let’s decide what we make here.

In the king’s bed is always found, just before it becomes a museum piece, the droppings of the black sheep.

Wow, how ominous is that?

Once he had tried to get fired by recommending suicide in his column. All that Shrike had said was : “Remember, please, that you job is to increase the circulation of our paper. Suicide, it is only reasonable to think, must defeat this purpose”.

Still it was just a ruse.

You dedicate your life to the pursuit of pleasure. No over-indulgence, mind you, but knowing that your body is a pleasure machine, you treat it carefully in order to get the most out of it.

Could that really be all it is?

But now let us consider the holes in our own bodies and into what these congenital wounds open. Under the skin of man is a wondrous jungle where veins like lush tropical growths hang along over-ripe organs and weed-like entrails writhe in squirming tangles of red and yellow. In this jungle, flitting from rock-gray lungs to golden intestines, from liver to lights and back to liver again, lives a bird called the soul.

Which as we all know, freed from all the gunk and goo, will one day fly off to Heaven.

It was on this trip that Faye acquired a new suitor by the name of Homer Simpson.

Really, there have to be at least a few out there.

[b]Elias Canetti

How unfair, he thought; I can close my mouth whenever I like, as tight as I like, and what has a mouth to say? It is there for taking in nourishment, yet it is well defended, but ears - ears are a prey to every onslaught.[/b]

Imagine then how lucky we are.

You draw closer to truth by shutting yourself off from mankind.

Let’s just say that works for me.

One lives in the naive notion that “later” there will be more room than in the entire past.

Unless of course one doesn’t.

A tormenting thought: as of a certain point, history was no longer real. Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality; everything happening since then was supposedly not true; but we supposedly didn’t notice. Our task would now be to find that point, and as long as we didn’t have it, we would be forced to abide in our present destruction.

I know, but just imagine if it were true.

She was crude, but loyal. He began to understand her even better than before. A pity she was so old; it was too late to try to make a human being of her.

It wouldn’t work on me either.

Slumbering in every human being lies an infinity of possibilities, which one must not arouse in vain. For it is terrible when the whole man resonates with echoes and echoes, none becoming a real voice.

More to the point [for some of us] you never get used to it.

[b]Günter Grass

Suppose you’re teaching math. You assume that parallel lines meet at infinity. You’ll admit that adds up to something like transcendence.[/b]

You being not me for example.

…there is something very strange and childish in the way grown-ups feel about their clocks—in that respect, I was never a child. I am willing to agree that the clock is probably the most remarkable thing that grown-ups ever produced. Grown-ups have it in them to be creative, and sometimes, with the help of ambition, hard work, and a bit of luck they actually are, but being grown-ups, they have no sooner created some epoch-making invention than they become a slave to it.

And not just the fucking capitalists.

They had tried doing it by themselves in her room with a cheap onion, but it wasn’t the same. You needed an audience. It was so much easier to cry in company. It gave you a real sense of brotherhood in sorrow when to the right and left of you and in the gallery overhead your fellow students were all crying their hearts out.

What shall we all cry about?

Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way.

Of course we forget why.

If Hell’s in store for us someday, one of its most refined forms of torture will be to lock a person naked in a room filled with framed photos of his era.

How preposterous is that?

What more can I say: born beneath light bulbs, interrupted my growth at the age of three, was given a drum, sangshattered glass, smelled vanilla, coughed in churches, stuffed Luzie with food, watched ants as they crawled, decided to grow, buried the drum, moved to the West, lost what was East, learned to carve stone and posed as a model, went back to my drum and inspected concrete, made money and cared for the finger, gave the finger away and fled as I laughed, ascended, arrested, convicted, confined, now soon to be freed, and today is my birthday, I’m thirty years old, and still as afraid of the Black Cook as ever—Amen.

On the other hand, who hasn’t said that?