a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Colson Whitehead

Later he decided the specifics were not important, that the true lesson of accidents is not the how or the why, but the taken-for-granted world they exile you from.[/b]

That or finding out it wasn’t an accident at all.

Tipple sold his success much more effectively than he did. How to get excited about, take pride in something that came so naturally? It was like being honored for breathing.

Still, he thought, in this world a buck’s a buck.

No, Fulton was colored. She understands this luminous truth. Natchez did not lie about that: she has seen it in the man’s books, made plain by her new literacy. In the last few days she has learned how to read, like a slave does, one forbidden word at a time.

Some still being more forbidden than others.

The Declaration of Independence is like a map. You trust that it’s right but you only know by going out and testing it yourself.

Then [as with Constitution] being or not being a strict constructionist.

Live every minute as if you are late for the last train.

Or, if you are particularly in a hurry, the last flight.

It was nigh impossible to understand Howard’s speech under normal circumstances. He favored a pidgin of his lost African tongue and slave talk. In the old days, her mother had told her, that half language was the voice of the plantation. They had been stolen from villages all over Africa and spoke a multitude of tongues. The words from across the ocean were beaten out of them over time. For simplicity, to erase their identities, to smother uprisings. All the words except for the ones locked away by those who still remembered who they had been before. “They keep 'em hid like precious gold,” Mabel said.

Not of much use now one suspects. But point taken.

[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen

Despite the chronic shortages of almost every good and commodity, there was no shortage of paper, since everyone in the neighborhood was required to write confessions on a periodic basis.[/b]

Imagine them reading mine!

…people who do not get the joke are dangerous people indeed…

My guess: It depends on the joke.

There is always something. That is confession’s nature.

Or, as I prefer to put it, “there’s always never nothing.”

Disarming an idealist was easy.

Next up: Arming one.

What was it like to live in a time when one’s fate was not war, when one was not led by the craven and the corrupt, when one’s country was not a basket case kept alive only through the intravenous drip of American aid?

Can someone here tell us?

This was what few people realize—it’s hard work to beat somebody. I have known many an interrogator who has strained a back, pulled a muscle, torn a tendon or a ligament, even broken fingers, toes, hands, and feet, not to mention going hoarse.

Of course it’s almost certainly easier than getting the beating.

[b]Werner Twertzog

We must, of course, destigmatize nonexistence.[/b]

Like that will make it go away.

By 2024 U.S. political party membership will be determined by DNA testing. As we all know.

Gee, I wonder what mine will reveal? A party of one I suspect.

It is never an option to define someone as beyond the pale of humanity. Excepting Kinski.

Surely we can, uh, trump that.

The apocalypse is being crowdsourced.

God from our end, the Devil from theirs.

Toxic masculinity is the primary cause of climate change, as we all know.

As in, “fuck Mother Nature!”

Halloween is important, but let us not forget the potential, every day, for horror.

No problem. What’s up for today?

[b]Mario Vargas Llosa

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.[/b]

How preposterous is that, he thought.

Science is still only a candle glimmering in a great pitch-dark cavern.

How preposterous is that, he thought.
Though, sure, maybe.

Revolution will free society of its afflictions, while science will free the individual of his.

Not that this has ever actually happened yet.

Death isn’t enough. It doesn’t remove the stain.

First, of course, show us the stain.

It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.

Not unlike a life itself.

…writing fiction is the best thing there is because absolutely everything is possible!

Like getting paid to.

[b]Dave Eggers

This was a new skill she’d acquired, the ability to look, to the outside world, utterly serene and even cheerful, while, in her skull, all was chaos.[/b]

It’s all but normal now.

We would oppose the turning of the planet and refuse the setting of the sun.

They would be disappointed. For example, 365 days a year.

And worse, you’re not doing anything interesting anymore. You’re not seeing anything, saying anything. The weird paradox is that you think you’re at the center of things, and that makes your opinions more valuable, but you yourself are becoming less vibrant. I bet you haven’t done anything offscreen in months. Have you?

No, he thought, but, increasingly, I’m convinced that someday I might. Well, if I don’t die first.

The key thing is managed awareness of your role in the world and history. Think too much and you know you are nothing. Think just enough and you know you are small, but important to some. That’s the best you can do.

Here especially.

Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

And good philosophers?

But of course there’s no logic to San Francisco generally, a city built with putty and pipe cleaners, rubber cement and colored construction paper. It’s the work of fairies, elves, happy children with new crayons.

For example: youtu.be/kZcyRLtwUVY

[b]God

When I start talking to you, you should start talking to a mental health professional.[/b]

Anyone here ever tried that? How’d it go?

I just tried banging on the side of the planet a few times but it didn’t fix anything.

Caused a few earthquakes though.

The problem with government of the people, by the people and for the people is the people.

That can’t be good. Coming from the one who created us.

I have lost control of the situation.

And not just in Washington D.C.

I’m not a parody account, you’re a parody species.

And that’s just on this planet.

Sooner or later you’re all going to die. I can’t stress this enough.

Meaning that Heaven and Hell are expanding all the time. Into what though?

[b]Philip Larkin

I’d like to think that people in pubs would talk about my poems.[/b]

Sure, when they’re not discussing dasein and conflicting goods.

In times when nothing stood
but worsened, or grew strange
there was one constant good: she did not change.

Unfortunately [for most of us] she never existed.

I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others & myself…

Of course I’m smack dab in the middle of it myself.
Doesn’t surprise you though, does it?
So, will it surprise you?

…books are a load of crap…

What’s that make posts then?

Birthdays are a time when one stock takes, which means, I suppose, a good spineless mope.

Trust me: Some birthdays more than others.

Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.

Or, for some of us, masturbation.

[b]David Hockney

We grow small trying to be great.[/b]

My guess: Not all of us.

When you’re very young, you suddenly find this marvellous freedom. It’s quite exciting, and you’re prepared to do anything.

Great, he thought, thanks for reminding me.

There would be no bohemia without smoking.

Dope, for example.

The mind is the limit. As long as the mind can envision the fact that you can do something, you can do it, as long as you really believe 100 percent.

Complete bullshit of course.

I’m coming around to the view that there’s only a personal view of the world.

Like there could possibly be any other.

Any artist will tell you he’s really only interested in the stuff he’s doing now. He will, always. It’s true, and it should be like that.

Right, like there is any way he could possibly know this.

[b]William F. Buckley

Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.[/b]

Unlike conservatives who insist that only their own point of view even counts.

Liberals don’t care what you do so long as it’s compulsory.

Right, like conservatives don’t harrangue us with their own dogmas.

Conservatism aims to maintain in working order the loyalties of the community to perceived truths and also to those truths which in their judgment have earned universal recognition.

Not unlike, for example, liberalism.

Modern formulations are necessary even in defense of very ancient truths. Not because of any alleged anachronism in the old ideas – the Beatitudes remain the essential statements of the Western code – but because the idiom of life is always changing.

Anone here care to bring this down to earth?

We find that in the absence of demonstrable truth, the best we can do is to exercise the greatest diligence, humility, insight, intelligence, and industry in trying to arrive at the nearest values to truth.

Anone here care to bring this down to earth?

Pentagon ought to win the Nobel Peace Prize every year, because the U.S. military is the world’s foremost guarantor of peace.

Now, doesn’t this speak volumes regarding just how idiotic the man could be? Or would someone here like to defend that point of view?

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Are your children texting about philosophy?
LMAO = Leibniz misread Aristotelian ontology
IMHO = Idealism makes Heidegger ornery
FWIW = Foucauldians won’t instrumentalize Wittgenstein
ROTFL = Rationalists obviously truly fear Lucretius[/b]

How idiotic or clever is this?

Classical aesthetics: Truth is beauty
Romantic aesthetics: Beauty is truth
Modernist aesthetics: What are you looking at?

Postmodern aesthetics: Who the fuck cares?

Hegel: I can only go on not being what I am not going to not have been
Kierkegaard: I can only go on sacrificing what I am in order to become what I will never have been
Sartre: I can only go out for so many coffees

Well, at least Jean Paul is down to earth.

French philosophy: Mind or body?
German philosophy: Will or whim?
British philosophy: Causal or casual?
American philosophy: Coke or Pepsi?

It’s still Coke, right?

When the apocalypse comes
Schopenhauer: you’ll wish it had arrived much earlier
Camus: you’ll realize it’s been here all along
Kafka: it’ll turn out to have been one day too late

On the other hand, what if it doesn’t come at all?

philosophy student: I thought we’d learn about truth!
art student: I thought we’d learn about beauty!
law student: I thought we’d learn about justice!
economics student: You want the truth? Beauty and justice won’t make you rich!

Let alone get you elected president.

[b]David Sedaris

What I really hated, of course, was my mind. There must have been an off switch somewhere, but I was damned if I could find it.[/b]

There’s really only one off switch of course. Unless you count all the others.

In other parts of the country people tried to stay together for the sake of the children. In New York they tried to work things out for the sake of the apartment.

Priorities in other words.

In Japanese and Italian, the response to “How are you?” is “I’m fine, and you?” In German it’s answered with a sigh and a slight pause, followed by "Not so good.”

Let’s confirm this.

There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmallows.

Really, what if that explains it?

The word phobic has its place when properly used, but lately it’s been declawed by the pompous insistence that most animosity is based upon fear rather than loathing…I hate computers. My hatred is entrenched, and I nourish it daily. I’m comfortable with it, and no community outreach program will change my mind.

Like we can actually live without them now.

I’d always thought that I understood this, but lately I realize that what I call “understanding” is basically just fantasizing.

If not actual insanity.

[b]Existential Comics

Person who gets all the credit:
Movies: director.
Plays: writer.
Musical: composer.
Musician: performer.

Person who gets no credit:
Movies: writer.
Plays: director.
Musical: director.
Musician: composer.[/b]

Let’s explain why that’s true.

Computers are cool and all, but I still feel like the microwave is the most futuristic thing we’ve made. You put your food in, and magic invisible lasers just make it hot in like 10 seconds. WTF?

Is it even possible to doubt this?

What did I learn from philosophy?
From Aristotle: how to be virtuous.
From Epictetus: how to deal with loss.
From Descartes: how to be skeptical. From Sartre: how to be free.
From Russell: how to ground math in logic so you can be sure 2+2=4, only for a paradox to destroy it all.

That’s still four things more than I learned.

Moral relativism is bad because it gives us no ground to say that Tom Brady sucks and the Patriots should lose every game forever from now on.

My guess: That’s literally the least of it.

Should we all own guns in case the government gets too tyrannical? Maybe.
Should we all own guillotines in case the private sector gets too tyrannical? Absolutely.

He really, really hates capitalism.

The reason ghosts are so scary is because it means that we might have to live forever.

True, he thought, but I’ll roll the dice.

[b]Arthur Rimbaud

I am alone in possessing a key to this barbarous sideshow.[/b]

Lots of poets think that. And that’s before they get to the even more barbarous main event.

Satan, you clown, you want to dissolve me with your charms. Well, I want it. I want it! Stab me with a pitchfork, sprinkle me with fire!

Not the real Satan of course.

Stronger than alcohol, vaster than poetry,
Ferment the freckled red bitterness of love!

Let’s help each other to actually find it.

Is it possible to become ecstatic amid destruction, rejuvenate oneself through cruelty?

I’ll bet for some of you it has.

What an old maid I’m getting to be. lacking the courage to be in love with death!

It sort of just creeps up on you.

Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am an animal, a nigger. But I can be saved. You are fake niggers; maniacs, savages, misers, all of you.

Imagine him saying that today.

[b]Barbara W. Tuchman

An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914-18, disillusion is deep and moves on to self-doubt and self-disgust.[/b]

And now the election of Don Trump.

Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.

Or me, myself and I as we call it today.

One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.

Today, at the very least, we can triple it.

…the seven “liberal arts”: Grammar, the foundation of science; Logic, which differentiates the true from the false; Rhetoric, the source of law; Arithmetic, the foundation of order because “without numbers there is nothing”; Geometry, the science of measurement; Astronomy, the most noble of the sciences because it is connected with Divinity and Theology; and lastly Music.

She means firstly music of course. You know, if we lived in a perfect world.

No one is so sure of his premises as the man who knows too little.

Here we call them Kids.

The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five to tenfold.

Of course that was before the advent of fake news. At Fox, the multiples are now off the chart. And, okay, maybe at MSNBC too.

[b]tiny nietzsche

if you don’t wake up tomorrow, there’s always the day after[/b]

Maybe for example.

don’t hate yourself, hate what you’ve become

Unless of course you’ve become yourself.

in space, there is no five second rule

On the other hand, isn’t Earth in space?

I’m at the point in the movie where I wonder what the fuck I’m doing with my life

My guess: Somewhere between the opening and the closing credits.

the sun will come out when it’s ready, it doesn’t care what time you think it is

Twice a year around here.

drugs mean never having to say you’re dying

Obviously: define “never”.

[b]José Saramago

…just like everything else in life, let time take its course and it will find a solution.[/b]

True, but don’t expect it to always be a good one.

…that is what we say when we do not wish to play the weakling, we say Fine, even though we may be dying, and this is commonly known as taking one’s courage in both hands…

Of course it won’t fool all of the people all of the time.

…there are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.

Yeah, it can get that bad.

Life is like that, full of words that are not worth saying or that were worth saying once but not any more, each word that we utter will take up the space of another more deserving word, not deserving in its own right, but because of the possible consequences of saying it.

And who the hell really knows why that’s true.

We’ve all had our moments of weakness, and if we manage to get through today without any, we’ll be sure to have some tomorrow.

Does it work that way for strength? Maybe more, maybe less?

We all know that each day that dawns is the first for some and will be the last for others, and that for most people it will be just another day.

Let’s think about that some more.

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.[/b]

Right, in this world.

The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.

Of course there’s still the part where we don’t know that.

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.

Just don’t expect that to always be enough. If it ever is.

There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it’s true, but you haven’t told anyone yet.

If there’s anyone you actually want to tell.

In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.

So, all you Americans, don’t forget to vote!

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

In fact, not even a relative sometimes.

[b]so sad today

i’m not bad at masturbating[/b]

He thought, prove it!

hi, i’m an existential hole

Great, he winced, another hole.

i don’t need to sleep forever just for 1000 years

Forever [eventually] is much more likely. If you call that sleep.

help me not be myself

Okay, but it will cost you.

i only give 5 fucks but they’re all very obsessive

What, he wondered, does it actually mean to give a fuck? Obsessively or not.

i’m probably going to end up just being nothing

At all as likely as not.

[b]Lidia Yuknavitch

In water, like in books—you can leave your life.[/b]

Most times though it finds you again.

That image of Joan of Arc burning up in a fire burned inside me like a new religion. Her face skyward. Her faith muscled up like a holy war. And always the voice of a father in her head. Like me. Jesus. What is a thin man pinned to wood next to the image of a burning woman warrior ablaze? I took the image of a burning woman into my heart and left belief to the house of father forever.

Don’t count Jesus out though. He’s not still on top for nothing.

Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order. Events don’t have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations.

In either direction though you can go too far.

I am a woman who talks to herself and lies.

I’m not a woman who does much the same.

I don’t have any problem understanding why people flunk out of college or quit their jobs or cheat on each other or break the law or spray-paint walls. A little bit outside of things is where some people feel each other. We do it to replace the frame of family. We do it to erase and remake our origins in their own images.

Not counting all the times we don’t know why we do it.

He treated my scarred as shit past and body as chapters of a book he wanted to hold in his hands and finish.

But only if you let him.

[b]Lillian Hellman

A man should be jailed for telling lies to the young.[/b]

Instead, we elect him president.

Freedom costs you a great deal.

If you can count that high.

But maybe half a lie is worse than a real lie.

We’ll have to hear it first.

It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour.

Providing of course they have one.

The world is out of shape when there are hungry men.

Then there’s this part: worldhunger.org/world-child-hunger-facts/

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.

I’d certainly like to believe that mine is.