a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Erica Jong

It is heresy in America to embrace any way of life except as half of a couple. Solitude is un-American.[/b]

Actually, for those of us in the know, it’s the other way around.

Novices in the arts think you have to start with inspiration to write or paint or compose. In fact, you only have to start. Inspiration comes if you continue. Make the commitment to sit still in solitude several hours a day and inevitably your muse will visit.

Mine didn’t get the message.

…think about how impossible it is to explain to the young what happens when you know you’re not immune from death. Everything changes. You look at the world differently. When you’re young, you have no perspective. You think life lasts forever—days and months and years stretching out to infinity. You think you don’t have to choose. You think you can waste time doing drugs and alcohol. You think time will always be on your side. But time, once your friend, becomes your enemy. It gallops by as you get older. Holidays come faster and faster. Years fly off the calendar as in old movies. All you long for is to go back and do it all over, correct the mistakes.

Great, just what we need, another rendition of this.

I don’t believe what you believe, I yelled, and I don’t respect your beliefs and I don’t respect you for holding them. If you can honestly make a statement like that about the power behind the throne, how can you possibly understand anything about me or the things I’m struggling with? I don’t want to live by the things you live by, I don’t want that kind of life and I don’t see why I should be judged by its standards.

Trust me: This probably won’t work.

What is the arc of the plot of one’s life? I want! I want!

By hook or by crook as it were.

You must be very specific in your wishes or they’ll come back to haunt you.

Guess what I specifically wish for now.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.” Friedrich Nietzsche[/b]

Take that, Mr. Uberman!

“There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe” Friedrich Nietzsche

Take that, Mr. Objectivist!

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Though, sure, some may well have been insane.

“Many are destined to reason wrongly; others, not to reason at all; and others, to persecute those who do reason.” Voltaire

Go, ahead, give it your best shot.

“The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity.” Voltaire

And not just in our neck of the woods.

“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.” Voltaire

Amen!

[b]John Fowles from The Magus

I needed a new mystery.[/b]

And boy does he get one.

No doubt our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.

No shit?

Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?
For fun?
Fun! He pounced on the word. Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.

On the the other, why not both?

I don’t believe in God. And I certainly don’t feel chosen.
I think you may be.
I smiled dubiously. Thank you.
It is not meant as a compliment. Hazard makes you elect. You cannot elect yourself.

He thought this surely sounded deeper than it actually was.

Sometimes to return is a vulgarity.

And not just here of course.

Girls possess sexual tact in inverse proportion to their standard of education.

Or: Boys possess sexual tact in inverse proportion to nothing in the known universe.

[b]Nein

I’m just here for the degradation of the discourse.[/b]

So, don’t let him down.

Yes, space and time died yesterday. Monday, somehow, survived.

Figures.

Mediocrity walks into a bar. And requests it be lowered.

Imagine then if mediocrity walked into here.

I asked the theorists who wrote it. They told me this shit writes itself.

Academically as it were.

Sorry, sir. This is not a democracy. It is a painting of a democracy.

Paint by numbers nowadays.

A gentle reminder that social media has not destroyed civilization. But I’d like to think there’s still time.

And, with any luck, before you die.

[b]Colson Whitehead

Pain could be killed. Sadness could not, but the drugs did shut its mouth for a time.[/b]

Just out of curiosity, got any to sell?

Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things. That was where they were now. The world wasn’t ending: it had ended and now they were in the new place. They could not recognize it because they had never seen it before.

Out with the old morality, in with the new.

The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.

Let’s just say that so far it’s been a long, long time.

New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.

Demographically as it were.

There was an order of misery, misery tucked inside miseries, and you were meant to keep track.

Like that’s just an option.

Everyone was fucked up in their own way; as before, it was a mark of one’s individuality.

Not counting the parts that overlapped of course.

[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen

Some animals could see in the dark, but it was only humans who deliberately sought out every possible route into the darkness of our own interiors.[/b]

In other words, on purpose.

Remember that the best medical treatment is a sense of relativism. No matter how badly you might feel, take comfort in knowing theres’s someone who feels much worse.

Just don’t expect this to work all the time.

Some will undoubtedly find this episode obscene. Not I! Massacre is obscene. Torture is obscene. Three million dead is obscene. Masturbation, even with an admittedly nonconsensual squid? Not so much. I, for one, am a person who believes that the world would be a better place if the word “murder” made us mumble as much as the word “masturbation.”

Let’s run this by PETA first.

The most important thing to understand is that while we courted, Americans dated, a pragmatic custom whereby a male and a female set a mutually agreeable time to meet, as if to negotiate a potentially profitable business venture. Americans understood dating to be about investments and gains, short or long term , but we saw romance and courtship as being about losses. After all, the only worthwhile courtship involved persuading a woman who could not be persuaded, not a woman already predisposed to examine her calendar for her availability.

Like for example when Gomer Pyle courted Lou Ann Poovie.

I did not want to write this book as a way of explaining the humanity of Vietnamese. Toni Morrison says in Beloved that to have to explain yourself to white people distorts you because you start from a position of assuming your inhumanity or lack of humanity in other people’s eyes. Rather than writing a book that tries to affirm humanity, which is typically the position that minority writers are put into, the book starts from the assumption that we are human, and then goes on to prove that we’re also inhuman at the same time.

Not many races that isn’t applicable to.

Our proper mode in situations where demand was high and supply low was to elbow, jostle, crowd, and hustle, and, if all that failed, to bribe, flatter, exaggerate, and lie. I was uncertain whether these traits were genetic, deeply cultural, or simply a rapid evolutionary development. We had been forced to adapt to ten years of living in a bubble economy pumped up purely by American imports; three decades of on-again, off-again war, including the sawing in half of the country in '54 by foreign magicians and the brief Japanese interregnum of World War II; and the previous century of avuncular French molestation.

And I was once smack dab in the middle of it.

[b]Neil Gaiman

I’m not scared of falling, he told himself. The bit I’m scared of is the bit where you stop falling, and start being dead.[/b]

Like that’s a reasonable distinction to make up on the 20th floor.

All Bette’s stories have happy endings. That’s because she knows where to stop. She’s realized the real problem with stories—if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.

Until finally your own.

We build a shell around it, like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function , day in, day out. Immune to others’ pain and loss.

Let’s file this one under, “hey, whatever works”.

When you love something you just don’t want to stop talking about it.

Worse: When you hate something.

Take one, and you cannot take the other, she said. But neither path is safe. Which way would you walk — the way of hard truths or the way of fine lies?

How about Anton Chigurh’s way: “Call it, heads or tails”

We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story.

That and are willing to pay for it.

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

There are two types of people:

1. “What a fool I was.”
2. “What a fool I am.”[/b]

Actually 3: “What a fool I’ve always been and always will be.”

Siri, find the nearest raison d’être.
Sorry, I didn’t get that.
It’s OK, Siri, neither did I.

The next challenge for AI.

Speak in English
Despair in Russian
Philosophise in German
Intrigue in French
Love in Italian
Sleep in Spanish
Dream in Ancient Greek

Next up: Sign language.

A misanthrope: I hope you die.
A true misanthrope: I hope you don’t.

I think I get that.

Say something smart in Russian?
Idiot.

I don’t think I get that.

I want to be the sound of a razor blade gently scratching your face as you shave.

And then [later] down there.

[b]Spike Lee

If you can’t take a hit, you’re not going to last long, that’s for sure.[/b]

Hell, I take them all the time here.

Critics like to build you up, tear you down, and then, if you’re lucky, build you up again.

So, any critics here?

Everybody does what they want to do for their own specific reasons.

You’d think that would go without saying. But here it is again.

Since the days of slavery, if you were a good singer or dancer, it was your job to perform for the master after dinner.

Of course that’s all in the past now.

I’ve never seen black men with fine white women. They be ugly. Mugly dogs.

He means poor black men of course.

What’s the difference between Hollywood characters and my characters? Mine are real.

If he does say so himself.

[b]The Dead Author

Heidegger is important for showing that people will defend you from accusations of being a Nazi even if you were a member of the Nazi Party.[/b]

Is this more or less complicated than it seems?

I don’t know if the chicken or the egg came first, but hopelessness is the cause of depression as much as the result of it.

Well, at least that’s settled.

Hope is just a sign that something has gone wrong.

Yeah, there is that.

Nietzsche died on this day in 1900. He only got to 55 but at least he outlived God.

You know, if that’s what you believe.

Art is what only you can say but everyone gets.

On the other hand, that may well be the last thing art is.

I sometimes wish narcissists would care as much about other people’s feelings as they care about their opinions.

Or at least work on it.

[b]C.G. Jung

The fact is that each person has to do something different, something that is uniquely his own.[/b]

How the fuck could he not? But point taken.

Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that people are as we imagine them to be.

Now that’s one dumb bastard!

Each is deceived by the sense of finality peculiar to the stage of development at which he stands.

Must be a gene for that, he suspected.

To be “normal” is a splendid ideal for the unsuccessful.

So, anyone here both normal and successful?

His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names.

Secular ones as often as not.

What you resist, persists.

Trust me: Not always. Not to mention the other way around.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

A man never is quite such an abject specimen as his wife makes him look.[/b]

Though never the other way around, he snorted.

He also wearied his mother very often. She saw the sunshine going out of him, and she resented it.

Imagine my mother then.

Why must one climb the hill? Why must one climb? Why not stay below? Why force one’s way up the slope? Why force one’s way up and up, when one is at the bottom? Oh, it was very tiring, very wearying, very burdensome. Always burdens, always, always burdens.

On the other hand, the bills won’t pay themselves.

Some things can’t be ravished. You can’t ravish a tin of sardines.

Anyone here ever done that? Anyone’s cat?

We must start from what seems a be a nullity, the unknowable, the inexpressible, the creative mystery wherein we are established. We cannot become more exact than this without introducing falsehood.

That’s the point I make. If more crudely.

The mosquito knows full well, small as he is he’s a beast of prey. But after all he only takes his bellyful, he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.

You know, if its bite doesn’t kill you.

[b]Existential Comics

One time, like fifteen years ago, the dude in front of me at McDonald’s ordered his Big Mac “medium rare”, and sometime I still think about it.[/b]

As well you should.
For me though it was fucking mustard on the hamburgers.

[b]Jobs for philosophers:

1. Teaching philosophy.
2. Working in politics.
3. Advising companies on ethics.
4. Professional party ruiner who won’t shut up about Kant when people are just trying to watch the game.[/b]

The Super Bowl no less.

People think of nihilism as believing that nothing matters, but there’s another kind of nihilism even more common: thinking that everything matters.

Equally for example.

[b]Tips for people new to cooking:

1. Use more garlic.
2. Every online recipe lies to you about how much garlic to use.
3. One clove? Are you fucking kidding me? I can’t even taste it.
4. I want my whole mouth to taste like garlic for a week.[/b]

He means onions of course.

A “free thinker” is usually, ironically, someone who thinks the ideas that they’ve thoughtlessly absorbed from their culture were generated spontaneously in their mind on account of their genius.
Serious thinking means knowing where you got your ideas from.

Go ahead, tell them you got yours from me.

I wonder if advanced aliens species have printers that work good.

Or, sure, philosophies that work at all.

[b]V.S. Naipaul

Anybody can be decisive during a panic; it takes a strong man to act during a boom.[/b]

Anyone here ever acted in a boom?

What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And – though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall-- what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing.

Like new is always going to be good.

How ridiculous were the attentions the weak paid one another in the shadow of the strong!

Sometimes evolving into a religion.

A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to get to twenty. The beauty of numbers. When it drops to ten again he waits for it to get back to eighteen. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten. Well, it gets back there. But he has wasted a quarter of his life. And all he’s got out of his money is a little mathematical excitement.

We’ll have to run this by Mr. Reasonable, of course.

…paradise seemed further away than India, but Hell had become a bit closer…

As [more and more] the Gods give way to the bottom line.

If a writer knows everything that is going to happen, then his book is dead before he begins it.

He still knows more than the readers.

[b]David Sedaris

Hugh and I have been together for so long that in order to arouse extraordinary passion, we need to engage in physical combat. Once, he hit me on the back of the head with a broken wineglass, and I fell to the floor pretending to be unconscious. That was romantic, or would have been had he rushed to my side rather than stepping over my body to fetch the dustpan.[/b]

Really, it’s always hard to predict these things.

Every day we’re told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it’s always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it’s startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are 'We’re number two!

That’s what wars are for. Those and the military industrial complex.

Shit is the tofu of cursing and can be molded to whichever condition the speaker desires. Hot as shit. Windy as shit. I myself was confounded as shit…

Shit always works for me.

All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I’m afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.

That and not getting caught.

Follow seven beers with a couple of scotches and a thimble of good marijuana, and it’s funny how sleep just sort of comes on its own. Often I never even made it to the bed. I’d squat down to pet the cat and wake up on the floor eight hours later, having lost a perfectly good excuse to change my clothes. I’m now told that this is not called “going to sleep” but rather “passing out,” a phrase that carries a distinct hint of judgment.

Let’s file this one under, “whatever works”.

‘I hate you’ she said to me one afternoon. ‘I really, really hate you.’ Call me sensitive, but I couldn’t help but take it personally.

On the other hand, that might be perfectly normal.

[b]tiny nietzsche

yeah sex is cool but have you ever seen star wars?[/b]

Or Star Trek for that matter.

there are two kinds of people in the world: people that piss in the sink and people that aren’t sociopaths

What about those who piss [or don’t piss] on sociopaths?

unpopular threats:
death
existential
triple

Any triple threats here?
And [of course] you all know mine.

what doesn’t kill you seems very passive aggressive

Maybe next time.

doktor: how did you get all those scars?
me: existence

That’ll do it.

murder, she shrugged

Next up: genocide.

[b]Leon Trotsky

Our planet is being turned into a filthy and evil-smelling imperialist barrack.[/b]

Imagine then his reaction to Trumpworld. Or Vladimir Putin.

…capitalism does live by crises and booms, just as a human being lives by inhaling and exhaling.

You know, until the workers of the world unite.

The bourgeoisie, which far surpasses the proletariat in the completeness and irreconcilibility of its class consciousness, is vitally interested in imposing its moral philosophy upon the exploited masses. It is exactly for this purpose that the concrete norms of the bourgeois catechism are concealed under moral abstractions…The appeal to abstract norms is not a disinterested philosophic mistake but a necessary element in the mechanics of class deception.

You might even say that, by now, they’ve perfected it.

Fascism is a caricature of Jacobinism.

You tell me: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(politics

Workers – men and women – of all countries, place yourselves under the banner of the Fourth International. It is the banner of your approaching victory!

Or: Workers – men and women – of all countries, place yourselves under the banner of the Third Reich. It is the banner of your approaching victory!
The rest is history.

If one cannot get along without a mirror, even in shaving oneself, how can one reconstruct oneself or one’s life, without seeing oneself in the “mirror” of literature?

I promise not to ask you what that means if you promise not to tell me.

[b]Hannah Arendt

The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.[/b]

Nothing new lately though.

…the greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.

Of course no one really knows what that means.

Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity. He had asked for a bottle of red wine and had drunk half of it. He refused the help of the Protestant minister the Reverend William Hull who offered to read the Bible with him: he had only two more hours to live and therefore no “time to waste.” He walked the fifty yards from his cell to the execution chamber calm and erect with his hands bound behind him. When the guards tied his ankles and knees he asked them to loosen the bonds so that he could stand straight. “I don’t need that ” he said when the black hood was offered him. He was in complete command of himself nay he was more: he was completely himself. Nothing could have demonstrated this more convincingly than the grotesque silliness of his last words. He began by stating emphatically that he was a Gottgläubiger to express in common Nazi fashion that he was no Christian and did not believe in life after death. He then proceeded: “After a short while gentlemen we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany long live Argentina long live Austria. I shall not forget them.” In the face of death he had found the cliché used in funeral oratory. Under the gallows his memory played him the last trick he was “elated” and he forgot that this was his own funeral.
It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us-the lesson of the fearsome word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.

Or, ideologically, the banality if good.

Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.

For example, subsistence.

Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.

Here of course all some can hope for is that the Democrats regain control of Congress.

The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.

She’s talking about you, Mr. Epistemologist.

[b]so sad today

i don’t have fear of missing out, i have fear of being invited[/b]

Me too. So don’t even think of it.
[size=50][as though anyone here actually would ; )] [/size]

i only want to talk about sex, death and cereal

Cereal. It’s always cereal with her. My guess: dasein.

just gonna do this to make sure it’s still a bad idea

Post this for example.

body type: not great

I’ll be the judge of that.

one small positive thought in the morning can disappoint the shit out of you for the rest of the day

Fortunately, some of us never have one.

i’ve made the big leap from no self-esteem to very low self-esteem

That won’t last.

[b]José Saramago

A tree weeps when cut down, a dog howls when beaten, but a man matures when offended. [/b]

Maybe, he thought, but don’t try it on me.

As my cat would say, all hours are good for sleeping.

You know, when it’s not licking itself.

…[just as you] have to leave the island in order to see the island, we can’t see ourselves unless we become free of ourselves.
Unless we escape from ourselves you mean?
No, that’s not the same thing.

Not even close as often as not. Though, in the end, it is still no less an existential contraption.

We never consider that the things dogs know about us are things of which we have not the faintest notion.

So, what do you think that might be?

Even death, faced with the option of death or life, she would choose life.

If only hypothetically.

Oh, I’m not just going too far, I’ve arrived.

And [sometimes] how can that not be worse?