a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen

But while science fiction imagined time travelers as moving forward or backward in time, this timepiece demonstrated a different chronology. The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles.[/b]

Not unlike much of the logic here, he thought.

Not for the first time, I longed to tell someone that I was one of them, a sympathizer with the left, a revolutionary fighting for peace, equality, democracy, freedom, and independence, all the noble things my people had died for and I had hid for.

Not unlike those on the right.

But to a bureaucrat paper was never just paper. Paper was life!

Now it’s all ones and zeros.

One did not depend on marines for good table manners. One depended on them to have the right instincts when it came to matters of life and death.

Not that we should leave out the wrong instincts of course.

I was finally left with nothing but myself and my thoughts, devious cabdrivers that took me where I did not want to go.

Also, whether I could afford the fare or not.

The unseen is almost always underlined with the unsaid.

Either that or said to be seen from a particular point of view: ours not yours.

[b]so sad today

look, i hate myself as much as the next guy[/b]

Or, rather, she thinks she does.

bucket list:
go back to bed

Short and sweet.

i liked you better when you were imaginary

Really, imagine that of, say, me.

can I count on you to let me down?

Sure, if you pay me enough.

when i’m by myself i’m almost ok

I come close to that myself.

no i can’t just “get out of bed”

Cue the snooze button.

[b]Neil Gaiman

You are the nearest thing I have to life. You are the only thing I have left, the only thing that isn’t bleak and flat and gray. I could be blindfolded and dropped into the deepest ocean and I would know where to find you. I could be buried a hundred miles underground and I would know where you are.[/b]

Among other things, how dumb is that?

America was, to them, the place that good people went to when they died. They were prepared to believe just about anything could happen in America.

Among other things, how dumb is that?

I don’t think it would be fun to write after inhaling art fumes. (What are art fumes?) No, I just make stuff up. It’s easier that way.

I’ll inhale your fumes if you’ll inhale mine.

When we consider that each of us has only one life to live, isn’t it rather tragic to find men and women, with brains capable of comprehending the stars and the planets, talking about the weather; men and women, with hands capable of creating works of art, using those hands only for routine tasks; men and women, capable of independent thought, using their minds as a bowling-alley for popular ideas; men and women, capable of greatness, wallowing in mediocrity; men and women, capable of self-expression, slowly dying a mental death while they babble the confused monotone of the mob?

Sure, maybe.

Books smell and feel better. They have that wonderful thingness of turning the pages.

On the other hand, why bring that up here?

You don’t discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is the gateway drug to other books you may prefer them to read. And not everyone has the same taste as you.

Not counting those who read the really wrong things.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Belief means not wanting to know what is true.” Friedrich Nietzsche[/b]

So, do you believe this?

“The vanity of others runs counter to our taste only when it runs counter to our vanity.” Friedrich Nietzsche

True, there’s always often that part.

“I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Well, not counting the hedonists perhaps.

“There is frequently more to be learned from the unexpected questions of a child than the discourses of men.” John Locke

Any examples of this from the folks here?

“I have no reason to suppose that he, who would take away my Liberty, would not when he had me in his Power, take away everything else.” John Locke

Self-righteously even.

“The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.” Epictetus

Not counting ILP of course.

[b]Dave Eggers

There’s nothing to be gained from passive observance, the simple documenting of conditions, because, at its core, it sets a bad example. Every time something is observed and not fixed, or when one has a chance to give in some way and does not, there is a lie being told, the same lie we all know by heart but which needn’t be reiterated.[/b]

If only we had an actual context, he thought.

It all meant something. Until it didn’t.

Or: It all meant nothing. Until it didn’t.

I cannot count the times I have cursed our lack of urgency.

Or: I cannot count the times I have cursed our reckless urgency.

We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, like, say, masturbatory habits, we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our pasts and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself.

And then there are the folks on Jerry Springer.

Live long enough and you’ll disappoint everyone.

I think I already have, he thought.

I mean, all this stuff you’re involved in, it’s all gossip. It’s people talking about each other behind their backs. That’s the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication. And besides that, it’s fucking dorky.

Wow, this will stop them!

[b]Philip Larkin

Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.[/b]

And then someday to another planet.

You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like ‘Finnegans Wake’ and Picasso.

Let’s start a new thread for that here.

I wouldn’t mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.

If, after reading that, China would have you.

Most things may never happen: this one will.

My guess: For better or for worse.

Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.

How insulted should, say, Bjork be?

Sex is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles.

Love for example.

[b]David Hockney

All painting, no matter what you are painting, is abstract in that it’s got to be organized.[/b]

And this means exactly…what?

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He’s not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he’s really needed.

And this means exactly…what?

It is very good advice to believe only what an artist does, rather than what he says about his work.

My advice: Let’s not talk about it at all.

When you are older, you realise that everything else is just nothing compared to painting and drawing.

Obviously: Define “nothing”.

Loads of people, particularly artists, hate pretty pictures. Now I’ve never met anyone who didn’t like a pretty face.

Nothing subjective about that.

A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.

Anyone here actually believe that?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“God has entrusted me with myself.” Epictetus[/b]

Of course anyone can claim that.

“No man was ever wise by chance.” Seneca

Or foolish for that matter.

“Art and revolt will die only with the last man.” Albert Camus

So, what are the odds it will be one of us?

“There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.” Albert Camus

Fascism for example.
Well, for some.

“Life has no meaning, the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.” Jean-Paul Sartre

He means essentially.

“To know what life is worth you have to risk it once in a while.” Jean-Paul Sartre

I’m through with that, he thought.

[b]William F. Buckley Jr.

A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!”[/b]

And then, once in power, “full speed ahead!”

I had much more fun criticizing than praising.

Not unlike, for example, Gore Vidal?

Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive.

The idealism of others in particular.

The more complicated and powerful the job, the more rudimentary the preparation for it.

So, shall we cue Don Trump in this regard?

Conservatives should be adamant about the need for the reappearance of Judeo-Christianity in the public square.

You can’t help but wonder what he thinks about that now. If you get my drift.

I catch fire and find the reserves of courage and assertiveness to speak up. When that happens I get quite carried away. My blood gets hot my brow wet I become unbearably and unconscionably sarcastic and bellicose I am girded for a total showdown.

Indeed, imagine then his reaction to “dasein conflicting, goods and political economy…in a No God world”.

[b]David Sedaris

You can’t brace yourself for famine if you’ve never known hunger.[/b]

Go ahead, try.

I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself.

Who the hell started that anyway?

Their house had real hardcover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read.

So to speak let’s say.

I won’t put in a load of laundry, because the machine is too loud and would drown out other, more significant noises - namely, the shuffling footsteps of the living dead.

Of course that goes without saying.

And when Hugh would grow progressively Gandhi on me, I’d remind him that these were pests—disease carriers who feasted upon the dead and then came indoors to dance upon our silverware.

Point taken?

I’ve become like one of those people I hate, the sort who go to the museum and, instead of looking at the magnificent Brueghel, take a picture of it, reducing it from art to proof. It’s not “Look what Brueghel did, painted this masterpiece” but "Look what I did, went to Rotterdam and stood in front of a Brueghel painting!”

There must be the equivalent of that here. Right, Kids?

[b]Werner Twertzog

Hurricanes should be named for notorious climate-change deniers.[/b]

Hurricane Don?

No, I shall not “rock” the sockless, skinny-jeans look, for fall, as you well know.

Then that makes two of us.

Most anteaters are misanthropes, as we all know.

Well, why wouldn’t they be?

It is important to let the natives know that you, personally, will kill Kinski.

You know, if you have the balls.

If you thought bowling alone was sad, just wait.

Let’s pin down things even sadder.

Solving global warming is quite simple: human extinction, which will attend to itself in due course. Nature will reconstitute itself in a few hundred million years: nothing really, in geological time.

Ever the optimist, isn’t he?

[b]Arthur Rimbaud

Whose hearts must I break?
What lies must I maintain?
Through whose blood am I to wade?[/b]

On the other hand, it’s only from the cradle to the grave.

The wolf howled under the leaves
And spit out the prettiest feathers
Of his meal of fowl:
Like him I consume myself.

Tell him that.

Now I am an outcast. I loathe my country. The best thing for me is a drunken sleep on the beach.

Unless of course you have access to heroin.

True life is elsewhere

Until you arrive and it’s not even there.

The first study for the man who wants to be a poet is knowledge of himself, complete: he searches for his soul, he inspects it, he puts it to the test, he learns it. As soon as he has learned it, he must cultivate it! I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses. All shapes of love suffering, madness. He searches himself, he exhausts all poisons in himself, to keep only the quintessences. Ineffable torture where he needs all his faith, all his superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed one–and the supreme Scholar! For he reaches the unknown! …So the poet is actually a thief of Fire!

I’ll think about it, okay?

Morality is the weakness of the mind.

He means in this world.

[b]Susan Faludi

When the enemy has no face, society will invent one.[/b]

At least one.

The “feminine” woman is forever static and childlike. She is like the ballerina in an old-fashioned music box, her unchanging features tiny and girlish, her voice tinkly, her body stuck on a pin, rotating in a spiral that will never grow.

And then one day she’s a Playboy Bunny.

Are you still as angry as you used to be? Julia, the World War II resistance fighter, asked Lillian Hellman in the biographical movie Julia. I like your anger….Don’t you let anyone talk you out of it.

Of course no one ever did.

The camera only documented what had been there all along, a marriage whose foundations, constructed from the cheap materials of convention and fear, had been buckling for years.

Of course they didn’t have Youtube back then.

All of women’s aspirations – whether for education, work or any form of self-determination – ultimately rest on their ability to decide whether and when to bear children.

That’s the biological part, isn’t it?

Here was a Jewish man-turned-woman making fun of Jewish men for not being manly enough.

Now that’s ironic.

[b]God

I look down on you. Satan looks up to you. And there you have it.[/b]

We’re all likely to be fucked then.

All dogs go to heaven. And from now on, that’s it.

He meant cats of course.

The performance of your favorite sports team is something about which I care tremendously.

Trust me: Not counting the [47-115] Baltimore Orioles.

Just because Jesus died for your sins doesn’t mean you should keep committing them, assholes.

Let’s see if that works.

If history has taught mankind one thing, I’d be stunned.

Especially if Trump is re-elected.

A few of you will end up killing all of you.

God willing of course.

[b]Barbara W. Tuchman

Books are the carriers of civilization…They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.[/b]

Of course this tells us practically nothing about any particular book.

Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.

On the other hand, among others, Adolph Hitler no doubt approved of himself.

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

Tell that to the military industrial complex.

Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced.

Trust me: For better or for worse.

Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.

And then on to the next war.

The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.

And that’s before Hitler and the Nazis.

[b]José Saramago

Every second that passes is like a door that opens to allow in what has not yet happened, what we call the future, but, to challenge the contradictory nature of what we have just said, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the future is just an immense void, that the future is just the time on which the eternal present feeds.[/b]

Sure, you can say almost anything at all about time.

That we’re going to die is something we know from the moment we are born, That’s why, in some ways, it’s as if we were born dead.

From the moment we are born? Probably not.

It is an unwavering rule for those in power that, when it comes to heads, it is best to cut them off before they start thinking, afterwards, it might be too late.

But [one hopes] only as a last resort.

…there is nothing in this world that belongs to us in an absolute sense…

Let’s think of one.

One can show no greater respect than to weep for a stranger.

We’ll need a context of course.

You have no idea what it is like to watch two blind people fighting.

To the best of my knowledge, not even in the movies.

[b]Existential Comics

If you boil a frog slowly enough, you won’t even realize that you are doing something cruel and inhumane.[/b]

Of course there’s only one way to find out…

The thing I legitimately don’t get about evolution is that we find like every other animal baby cuter than human babies.
Baby cat? Cuter.
Baby elephant? Cuter.
Baby kangaroo? Cuter.
Baby bear? Cuter.
Baby raccoon? Cuter. Not even close.
Explain this, science man. You can’t.

Not only that but [as we all know] some human babies are downright ugly.

The most iconic line in each medium:
Literature: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
Plays: “To be, or not to be, that is the question.”
Movies: “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
Video games: “You have died of dysentery.”

Explanation please.

What I love about America is that there are like 400 different kinds of salsa in the grocery store isle, and they are all shit.

Actually, it’s probably closer to just 200 different kinds.

zombies are just vampires from the peasant caste

And not just in India.

The sciences are important because we need the ability to describe how things are. The humanities are important because we need the ability to imagine how things might be.

Even ought to be.

[b]Ayn Rand from The Fountainhead

I don’t build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build![/b]

Or, here, one supposes, I don’t post in order to have readers. I have readers in order to post!

Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn’t a single muscle which doesn’t serve its purpose; that there’s not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man.

Until you get to his nipples.

The pressure disappeared with the first word he put on paper. He thought–while his hand moved rapidly–what a power there was in words; later, for those who heard them, but first for the one who found them; a healing power, a solution, like the breaking of a barrier. He thought, perhaps the basic secret the scientists have not discovered, the first fount of life, is that which happens when a thought takes shape in words.

Hell, some all but live in a world of them.

It‘s so much easier to pass judgment on a man than on an idea. Though how in hell one passes judgment on a man without considering the content of his brain is more than I’ll ever understand.

Perhaps, but, for her kind, it always comes down to my judgment or you’re a fucking idiot.

Roark was usually disliked, from the first sight of his face, anywhere he went.

Her obsession with “looks”. In order to be an objectivist one must look like one.

I hate incompetence. I think it’s probably the only thing I do hate.

And luckily for her [in loving to hate it] it’s everywhere.

[b]Herta Müller

Who can take a single step with his head?[/b]

Among other things, how profound is this?

Better to be at home in room and garden with ugly people than belong to strangers.

Especially ugly strangers.

The gym instructor was the first to raise his hand. All the other hands flew up after his. While raising their hands, everybody looked at the raised hands of the others. If someone’s own hand wasn’t as high as the others’, he would stretch his arms a little farther. People kept their hands up until their fingers grew tired and started to droop and their elbows began to feel heavy and pull downward. Everyone looked around, and since no one else’s arm was lowered, they straightened their fingers again and extended their elbows. Sweat stains showed under the arms; shirts and blouses came untucked. Necks were stretched, ears turned red, lips parted and stayed half-open. Heads kept still, while eyes slid from side to side.

Let’s decide: Genes more or less than memes?

Nothing had anything to do with me. I was locked up inside myself and evicted from myself. I didn’t belong to them and I was missing me.

Obviously: you commit suicide.

And I’m different without you. You’re the only one who thinks you’re never different.

Well, the only one besides me.

I do a lot of counting. Cigarette butts, trees, fence slats, clouds, or the number of paving stones between one phone pole and the next, the windows along the way to the bus stop in the morning, the pedestrians I see from the bus between one stop and the next, red ties on an afternoon in the city. How many steps from the office to the factory gate. I count to keep the world in order, I said.

Hey, whatever works, right?

[b]Sad Socrates

Every day I care less and less that you’re dying.[/b]

And, no doubt, you about me.

There’s always another generation to fool.

Still, Trump’s clinched a spot all his own here.

Might fuck myself later.

Might let you.

I am what you are trying to be.

Or, with me, not to be.

Feels like it’s time to die again.

Another day in other words.

I was the low point of my day.

Though now it’s you.