a thread for mundane ironists

[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?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“To philosopher and historian the madness and imbecile wickedness of mankind ought to appear ordinary events.” David Hume[/b]

Another thing [surely] we can all agree on.

“The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker -judge.” Michel Foucault

Any actual philosopher-judges here?

"There are three causes of strife in human nature: rivalry, distrust, pride.” Thomas Hobbes

Provided of course in this day and age we get around to the part about money.

“The privilege of absurdity is restricted to only human.” Thomas Hobbes

And, let’s face it, that’s more than enough.

“The fool tells me his reason; the wise man persuades me with my own.” Aristotle

Well, he wasn’t Aristotle for nothing, right? Just ask, among others, the followers of Ayn Rand.

“Those who excel in virtue have the best right of all to rebel, but then they are of all men the least inclined to do so.” Aristotle

He means the part where rebelling engenders, among other things, actual consequences.

[b]Neil Gaiman

Media. I think I have heard of her. Isn’t she the one who killed her children?[/b]

Every night on the news.

I decided that I would do my best in the future not to write books just for money. If you didn’t get the money then you didn’t have anything. If I did the work I was proud of and I didn’t get the money, at least I’d have the work.

In other words, after already accumulating a boat load of dough.

When people tell you there’s something wrong with a story, they’re almost always right. When they tell what it is that’s wrong and how it can be fixed, they’re almost always wrong.

Go ahead, try it with me.

In fact, the only things in the flat Crowley devoted any personal attention to were the houseplants. They were huge, and green, and glorious, with shiny, healthy, lustrous leaves.
This was because, once a week, Crowley went around the flat with a green plastic plant mister spraying the leaves, and talking to the plants…
Although talking is perhaps the wrong word for what Crowley did.
What he did was put the fear of God into them.
More precisely, the fear of Crowley.
In addition to which, every couple of months Crowley would pick out a plant that was growing too slowly, or succumbing to leaf-wilt, or browning, or just didn’t look quite as good as the others, and he would carry it around to all the plants. “Say goodbye to your friend,” he’d say to them. “He just couldn’t cut it…”
Then he would leave the flat with the offending plant, and return an hour or so later with a large empty flower pot, which he would leave somewhere conspicuously around the flat.
The plants were the most luxurious, verdant, and beautiful in London. Also the most terrified.

Obviously a metaphor. For what though?

Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down.

Either that or copy and paste them.

It was not that he was feckless, more that he had simply not been around the day they handed out feck.

They missed me too. Though [clearly] not you.

[b]Edgar Allan Poe

There are few persons who have not, at some period of their lives, amused themselves in retracing the steps by which particular conclusions of their own minds have been attained.[/b]

Some less amused then horrified.

I am walking like a bewitched corpse, with the certainty of being eaten by the infinite, of being annulled by the only existing Absurd.

Or, sure, something like that.

Man’s real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.

I trust then that among us I am not the only exception.

Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis.

Anyway, terror is around them somewhere.

There are surely other worlds than this - other thoughts than the thoughts of the multitude - other speculations than the speculations of the sophist.

Or surely not, he thought.

The history of human knowledge has so uninterruptedly shown that to collateral, or incidental, or accidental events we are indebted for the most numerous and most valuable discoveries, that it has at length become necessary, in any prospective view of improvement, to make not only large, but the largest allowances for inventions that shall arise by chance, and quite out of the range of ordinary expectation. It is no longer philosophical to base, upon what has been, a vision of what is to be. Accident is admitted as a portion of the substructure. We make chance a matter of absolute calculation. We subject the unlooked for and unimagined, to the mathematical formulae of the schools.

The quantum world writ large?

[b]God

I’m deeply sorry for the racist, sexist and homophobic things I wrote when I was younger.[/b]

I’m sure if He does exist, He might possibly even mean it.

No matter what you think of Donald Trump, you have to admit: he’s a piece of shit.

On the other hand, aren’t we all?
[at least to someone]

I’d like to see some dirt on Trump. Six feet of it.

See you in Hell, Don.

Putin is grabbing Trump by the pussy.

Sounds like collusion to me.

And now, back to the shit show.

Going all the way back [so far] to the Garden of Eden.

Alexa, run the universe for Me.

What am I missing here?

[b]Federico García Lorca

As I have not worried to be born, I do not worry to die.[/b]

On the other hand, it’s not exactly the same thing.

We’re all curious about what might hurt us.

Also: We’re all curious about what might kill us.

My head is full of fire
and grief and my tongue
runs wild, pierced
with shards of glass.

We’ll need a context of course.

In Spain the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world.

Do they know that?

Don’t ask me any questions. I’ve seen how things that seek their way find their void instead.

And that’s before enduring the answers.

Like a snake, my heart
has shed its skin.
I hold it here in my hand,
full of honey and wounds.

Though no less slithering.