a thread for mundane ironists

[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?

[b]Ayn Rand from The Fountainhead

I don’t want to see you. I don’t like you. I don’t like your face. You look like an insufferable egotist. You’re impertinent. You’re too sure of yourself. Twenty years ago I would have punched your face with the greatest of pleasure.[/b]

Objectivist love.

Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.

And if that idea is Communism?

She tried to tear herself away from him. The effort broke against his arms that had not felt it. Her fists beat against his shoulders, against his face. He moved one had, took her two wrists, pinned them behind her, under his arm, wrenching her shoulder blades. She twisted her head back. She felt his lips on her breast. She tore herself free…She fought like an animal. But she made no sound. She did not call for help. She heard the echoes of her blows in a gasp of his breath, and she knew that it was a gasp of pleasure…She felt the hatred and his hands; his hands moving over her body, the hands that broke granite. She fought the last convulsion. Then the sudden pain shot up, through her body, to her throat, and she screamed. Then she laid still. It was an act that could be performed in tenderness, as a seal of love, or in contempt, as a symbol of humiliation and conquest. It could be an act of a lover or the act of a soldier violating an enemy woman. He did it as an act of scorn. Not as love, but as defilement. And this made her still and submit…the act of a master taking shameful , contemptuous possession of her was the kind of rapture she had wanted…

Objectivists fucking.

I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need. I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.

If you don’t mind, I’ll file this one under, “blah, blah, blah”.

Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burnt at the stake he’d taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived and he lifted darkness from the face of the Earth.

What really happened: youtu.be/UZiVsKbwut0

A quest for self-respect is proof of its lack.

I know that I never went looking for it.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.” David Hume[/b]

Or [far more likely] less surprising.

“The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason.” David Hume

Cue Kant. And what a fool he was.

“All knowledge degenerates into probability.” David Hume

Not excluding this of course.

“The ego is a fictional idea.” David Hume

Rhymes with dasein.

“At every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, what one is.” Michel Foucault

And that can’t be good.

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

Rome plus technology?

[b]Dorothy Parker

Authors and actors and artists and such
Never know nothing, and never know much[/b]

Obviously: they’re not philosophers like we are.

There’s little in taking or giving
There’s little in water or wine
This living, this living , this living
was never a project of mine.
Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is
the gain of the one at the top
for art is a form of catharsis
and love is a permanent flop
and work is the province of cattle
and rest’s for a clam in a shell
so I’m thinking of throwing the battle
would you kindly direct me to hell?

She’s a poet
She knows it
She hopes she doesn’t blow it

The only “ism” Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.

Or: The only “ism” Hollywood believes in is plagiarism commercialism.

Never complain, never explain.

Or, sure, the other way around.

Trapped like a trap in a trap

And then wrapped in a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, wrapped in an enigma.

Excuse my dust.

Either that or fuck you.

[b]Lillian Hellman

Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.[/b]

Bad habits for example.

There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. And other people who stand around and watch them eat.

And then those who put it all on youtube.

Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?

I don’t know, he thought, you just do.

People change and forget to tell each other.

Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen here.

You are what you are. It is my opinion that trouble in the world comes from people who do not know what they are, and pretend to be something they’re not.

In my opinion trouble in the world comes from people.
Period.

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.

My guess: dasein.

[b]God

This will all be over very soon.[/b]

Only this time He may well mean it.

Anyone in the Carolinas should evacuate immediately. Same with the other 48 states.

Let’s all pass this along.

I send natural disasters to punish mankind for being stupid enough to believe in a God who would send natural disasters to punish it.

Anyone that stupid here?

You can skip church today. It’s just the same old crap.

Do you dare to defy Him?

Serena Williams is better at tennis than you are at whatever you are best at.

Really, and what’s more important than tennis?

The fact that the book you swear on to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is the Bible is an all-time irony classic.

He said in jest.

[b]John Fowles from The Magus

Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone. I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, because only extroverts cry twice; I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her.[/b]

Of course we [and Alison Kelly] know better.

I had always believed, and not only out of cynicism, that a man and a woman could tell in the first ten minutes whether they wanted to go to bed together; and that the time that passed after those first ten minutes represented a tax, which might be worth paying if the article promised to be really enjoyable, but which nine times out of ten became rapidly excessive.

My guess: Men calculate this one way, women another.

Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?

The novel is full of stuff like this.

If Rome, a city of the vulgar living, had been depressing after Greece, London, a city of the drab dead, was fifty times worse.

Anyone here know if that’s true?

I suppose I’d had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car-not so common among undergraduates in those days-and I had some money. I wasn’t ugly; and even more important, I had my loneliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with women. My ‘technique’ was to make a show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjurer with his white rabbit, I produced the solitary heart.

Of course I know why that never worked for me.

He said it as if ‘very rich’ was a nationality; as perhaps it is.

Never been there myself. Never even wanted to.

[b]Colson Whitehead

Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people’s heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.[/b]

Or not of course.

There were plenty of things in the world that deserved to stay dead, yet they walked.

Let’s name some.

He told himself: Hope is a gateway drug, don’t do it.

Well, maybe a few times.

As the years pass, Valentine observed, racial violence only becomes more vicious in its expression. It will not abate or disappear, not anytime soon, and not in the south.

The south being the north too.

Men start off good and then the world makes them mean. The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death.

Great, just what we need, another optimist.

Colored, Negro, Afro-American, African American. … Every couple of years someone came up with something that got us an inch closer to the truth. Bit by bit we crept along. As if that thing we believed to be approaching actually existed.

What do you suppose the next one will be?

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Logic: A = A
Ethics: A is good
Aesthetics: A is beautiful
Epistemology: I know A
Psychology: I like A
Politics: I rule A
Literature: I vaguely remember losing A[/b]

Next up: B

Things You Should Never Assume
Descartes: that you exist
Kant: that you are free
Hegel: that you can think
Nietzsche: that you can act
Sartre: that you can love
Beckett: that you didn’t die before you were born

Next up: Things You Should Always Assume.

Idealism: I drink to remember
Realism: I drink to forget
Materialism: I drink therefore I am

Or, for that matter, smoke dope.

Don’t hate the signifier, hate the signified.

Or, sure, both.

Philosophy 101: Being is becoming
Philosophy 201: Becoming is nothing
Philosophy 301: Nothing is a virtual something
Philosophy 401: How did this become a comp lit seminar?

Blame it on the existentialists no doubt.

History is written
Germany: by the victors
Britain: by the Germans
France: by the British
Russia: in blood
Italy: in stone
United States: in crayon

Crayon, sure. And in big block capital letters.

[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen

The only problem with not talking to oneself was that oneself was the most fascinating conversational partner one could imagine. Nobody had more patience in listening to one than oneself, and while nobody knew one better than oneself, nobody misunderstood one more than oneself.[/b]

Not only that but you don’t even need a mirror.

Movies were America’s way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences with the hit, the smash, the spectacle, the blockbuster, and, yes, even the box office bomb. It mattered not what story these audiences watched. The point was that it was the American story they watched and loved, up until the day that they themselves might be bombed by the planes they had seen in American movies.

And historically that could be anywhere around the globe.

Love is being able to talk to someone else without effort, without hiding, and at the same time to feel absolutely comfortable not saying a word. At least that’s one way I’ve figured out how to describe love.

I once thought this was possible for me.
For about fifteen minutes.

…nothing is more precious than independence and freedom…

And not just up in the clouds here.

If we forgot our resentment, if we forgot revenge, if we acknowledged that we are all puppets in someone else’s play, if we had not fought a war against each other, if some of us had not called ourselves nationalists or communists or capitalists or realists, if our bonzes had not incinerated themselves, if the Americans hadn’t come to save us from ourselves, if we had not bought what they sold, if the Soviets had never called us comrades, if Mao had not sought to do the same, if the Japanese hadn’t taught us the superiority of the yellow race, if the French had never sought to civilize us, if Ho Chi Minh had not been dialectical and Karl Marx not analytical, if the invisible hand of the market did not hold us by the scruffs of our necks, if the British had defeated the rebels of the new world, if the natives had simply said, Hell no, on first seeing the white man, if our emperors and mandarins had not clashed among themselves, if the Chinese had never ruled us for a thousand year, if they had used gunpowder for more than fireworks, if the Buddha had never lived, if the Bible had never been written and Jesus Christ never sacrificed, if you needed no more revisions, and if I saw no more of these visions, please, could you please just let me sleep?

Sure, if you can.

Isn’t that what education is all about? Getting the student to sincerely say what the teacher wants to hear?

What does this remind you of, Mr. Objectivist?

[b]Neil Gaiman

If you do not climb, you will not fall. This is true. But is it that bad to fail, that hard to fall?[/b]

Uh, sometimes?

My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of ‘Gone With the Wind’, and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It’s actually one of the things that you live and die for.

He wondered: Could that possibly be applicable in turn to what we do here?

I like the stars. It’s the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they’re always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend…I can pretend that things last.

Not only that but all of the “stuff” that you are now came from stars, will return to stars.
You know, for whatever that’s worth.

Sometimes the way to do what you hope to do will be clear cut, and sometimes it will be almost impossible to decide whether or not you are doing the correct thing, because you’ll have to balance your goals and hopes with feeding yourself, paying debts, finding work, settling for what you can get.

So, is that more before or more after we get to the part we call philosophy?

The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them.

Or you can focus more instead on how much it fetches at the auction.

You’re very good. Are you a professional artist?
I dabble, she said.
Shadow had spent enough time talking to the English to know that this meant either that she dabbled, or that her work was regularly hung in the National gallery or the Tate Modern.

In America of course almost no one says they dabble.

[b]Existential Comics

Guide to help understand American foreign policy:
Freedom = American business interest.
Democracy = American business interest.
Peace = killing everyone against American business interest.
Civilized society = white people.[/b]

And, no, not just in Trumpworld.

I love it when biologists or neurologists think they’ve disproven free will. We’ve been operating under the assumption that the physical universe is deterministic since Democritus. Being able to see where the synapses fire in the brain changes absolutely nothing about the debate.

Except that it may well end up changing everything.

[b]How to improve your critical thinking skills:

1. Question everything.
2. Read a broad array of sources.
3. Challenge your own biases first.
4. Don’t accept easy answers.
5. Always remember that Karl Marx was right about everything.[/b]

Let’s pin down who was really right about everything.

Existentialists don’t want to admit it, but Zinedine Zidane headbutting that guy in the World Cup final was the most pure expression of authentic existential freedom to ever occur in history.

You tell me: youtu.be/vF4iWIE77Ts
Personally, I’m not convinced.

Why is it that when I shop for fruit there is like banana, pineapple, strawberry, mango, orange, and then 200 specific patented versions of apples.

Yeah, what the fuck is going on here?

The question is, does the set of all sets that do not contain sets which contain sets that don’t cause logical paradoxes contain a set which doesn’t not cause a paradox or not?

Clearly: Maybe.

[b]Dave Eggers,

But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.[/b]

And, with any luck, you never come back.

Still though, I think if you’re not self-obsessed, you’re probably boring.

Nope, never been that. The latter, I mean.

All I ever wanted was to know what to do.

And not just philosophically, he added.

We lose weeks like buttons, like pencils.

Not only that but we never get them back again.

You invite things to happen. You open the door. You inhale. And if you inhale the chaos, you give the chaos, the chaos gives back.

If only for 70 odd years.

Humans are divided between those who can still look through the eyes of youth and those who cannot.

You know, for those who actually want to.

[b]C. G. Jung

They do not realize that a myth is dead if it no longer lives and grows. Our myth has become mute, and gives no answers.[/b]

Like my myths here, right?

Ideas are not just counters used by the calculating mind; they are also golden vessels full of living feeling. “Freedom” is not a mere abstraction, it is also an emotion.

And who really knows where one ends and the other begins.

It is not that present-day man is capable of greater evil than the man of antiquity or the primitive. He merely has incomparably more effective means with which to realize his propensity to evil.

Chief among them being this: insisting that [instead] it is for the greater good.

To be quite accurate, human nature is simply what it is; it has its dark and its light sides. The sum of all colours is grey — light on a dark background or dark on light.

Don’t expect many to agree.

And just as the typical neurotic is unconscious of his shadow side, so the normal individual, like the neurotic, sees his shadow in his neighbour or in the man beyond the great divide.

Me and my shadow walk into a bar…

In contrast to the subjectivism of the conscious mind the unconscious is objective, manifesting itself mainly in the form of contrary feelings, fantasies, emotions, impulses and dreams, none of which one makes oneself but which come upon one objectively.

And not just in a wholly determined universe.