a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Leonard Cohen

In Montreal spring is like an autopsy. Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth. Girls rip off their sleeves and the flesh is sweet and white, like wood under green bark. From the streets a sexual manifesto rises like an inflating tire, “the winter has not killed us again! [/b]

But then winter always comes back around again. Still, point taken.

Some people are graced with a flow; some people are graced with something less than a flow. I’m one of those.

I’m neither one of course.

Don’t call yourself a secret unless you mean to keep it.

Nope, never called myself that.

I’m never sure why I do anything, to tell you the truth.

If only from the womb to the tomb.

Suzanne had a room on a waterfront street in the port of Montreal. Everything happened just as it was put down. She was the wife of a man I knew. Her hospitality was immaculate. Some months later I sang it for Judy Collins over the telephone. The publishing rights were lost in New York City, but it is probably appropriate that I don’t own this song. Just the other day I heard some people singing it on a ship in the Caspian Sea.

You know the one…
youtu.be/svitEEpI07E
youtu.be/F3WOAqtRRvQ

Let judges secretly despair of justice: their verdicts will be more acute. Let generals secretly despair of triumph; killing will be defamed. Let priests secretly despair of faith: their compassion will be true.

Stuff you get from poets, right?

[b]tiny nietzsche

I’m not always sad. sometimes I’m ambivalent[/b]

I’m always ambivalent myself.

doesn’t matter. I probably don’t exist anyway

And then one day, oh my, you definitely don’t

the myth of syphilis

Or, sure, maybe not.

I tried to google something in my mind and apparently that’s not a thing yet

Let’s make it one.

we’re on the good ship go fuck yourself

We are the good ship go fuck yourself.

it’s hard to write a memoir when you’ve intentionally blocked everything out

Making it all the easier for us to read.

[b]Neal Stephenson

Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America’s like this big old clanking smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight.[/b]

Let’s just say it’s probably not completely wrong.

This “sir, yes sir” business, which would probably sound like horseshit to any civilian in his right mind, makes sense to Shaftoe and to the officers in a deep and important way. Like a lot of others, Shaftoe had trouble with military etiquette at first. He soaked up quite a bit of it growing up in a military family, but living the life was a different matter. Having now experienced all the phases of military existence except for the terminal ones (violent death, court-martial, retirement), he has come to understand the culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it becomes possible for groups of men to live together for years, travel to the ends of the earth, and do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing each other or completely losing their minds in the process.

Well, at least until they started drafting them. And the fragging commensed.
You know where.

We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.

Memes as some call them.

This Snow Crash thing–is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?
Juanita shrugs. What’s the difference?

Here it might even be a philosophy.

This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.

Hell, I was almost one of them myself.

Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he’ll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas Fucking Edison.

Let’s make sense of this.

[b]Michelangelo Antonioni

We live in a society that compels us to go on using these concepts, and we no longer know what they mean. [/b]

Let’s cite a few examples.

Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.

You know, being generous.

Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer.

Hell, I could have told you that.

I simply know what the actor’s attitude should be and what he should say. He doesn’t, because he can’t see the relationship that begins to exist between his body and the other things in the scene.

On the other hand, tell them that.

Violence is not the only means of persuasion.

Until it is.

All the characters in my films are fighting these problems, needing freedom, trying to find a way to cut themselves loose, but failing to rid themselves of conscience, a sense of sin, the whole bag of tricks.

What they get however is freedom dictated to them by the director and the script.

[b]tiny nietzsche

victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan. hear that, victory? your mother’s a whore[/b]

That is one way to look at it.

you know, I’m something of a nihilist myself

A dilenttante nihilist? Don’t be fooled.

I’ve always relied on the disillusionment of postmodernism

Sure, go ahead, rely on it yourself.

always be deleting

Unless of course [like here] they won’t let you.

your mom is the most important meal of the day

Try not to take that the wrong way.

I got tested for postmodernism. the results were inconclusive

I scored a 100 myself.

[b]Lisa Scottoline

She had lived long enough to learn that families didn’t dissolve or reconfigure neatly, but left debris lying everywhere, and it was human debris. And sometimes, like tonight, she felt as if she were tripping over the bodies.[/b]

Debris. That’s me alright.

She’d believed in forever in her twenties, when Gray had said it, meaning every word, and she’d believed in forever in her thirties, when William had said it, lying through his teeth. But she’d lived long enough to know that forever couldn’t be guaranteed to anyone. Even tomorrow couldn’t be relied upon.

And then, eventually, any minute now.

Don’t think on what they say, because you don’t have to get yourself right with them. You have to get yourself right with you.

You know, if you’re still foolish enough to believe you can.

…life wouldn’t be as much fun if we knew where its treasures were hidden. Sometimes you had to search for them. Sometimes you had to fight for them. And sometimes, they were at your feet.

Like fun is the point of it.

Celebrities are our heroes and heroines now, discussed the next day over latte or lunch. We have such a strong need to talk to each other, to have some commonality of story, that we’re finding it in celebrities. In effect, we’re turning reality into fiction. Using actors and actresses, just off duty. And how is this working for us? Not great. It leaves us with a perennially empty feeling. We find the celebrities empty, and at some level, we find ourselves empty for paying them so much attention.

I know, he thought, let’s change that.

See the child, not the cancer. Then you’ll be happy when you visit, not sad.

Just don’t expect this to always work.

[b]Sarah Blake

every story - love or war - is a story about looking left when we should have been looking right.[/b]

She means right instead of left.

It is the story that lies around the edges of the photographs, or at the end of newspaper account. It’s about the lies we tell others to protect them, and about the lies we tell ourselves in order not to acknowledge what we can’t bear: that we are alive, for instance, and eating lunch, while bombs are falling, and refugees are crammed into camps, and the news comes toward us every hour of the day. And what, in the end, do we do?

Move on to dinner?

Sand was dribbling out of the bag of her attention, faster and faster.

And then, when the bag is empty, you die.

It began, as it often does, with a woman putting her ducks in a row.

It ended, as it often does, with a man shooting them down.

She imagined she could pull Time like taffy, stretching it longer and longer between her hands until the finest point had been reached, the point just before breaking, and she could live there. A point at the center of time with no going forward, no going back. Clasped in this way, without speaking, walking into no discernible ending, she could almost believe they tread on time.

That sound you hear is time snickering. If not snorting.

We can’t change what is coming. Something is always coming.

And even when we can there’s always something else.

[b]Zoë Heller

It’s similar to the way you feel cuddling an infant or a kitten, when you want to squeeze it so hard you’d kill it…[/b]

Though [hopefully] you never actually do.

All my life I have been the sort of person in whom people confide. And all my life I have been flattered by this role - grateful for the frisson of importance that comes with receiving important information. In recent years, however, I have noticed that my gratification is becoming diluted by a certain weary indignation. They tell me because they regard me as safe. All of them, they make their disclosures to me in the same spirit that they might tell a castrato or a priest - with a sense that I am so outside the loop, so remote from the doings of the great world, as to be defused of any possible threat. The number of secrets I receive is in inverse proportion to the number of secrets anyone expects me to have of my own. And this is the real source of my dismay. Being told secrets is not - never has been - a sign that I belong or that I matter. It is quite the opposite: confirmation of my irrelevance.

My own sign was different. But point taken.

It’s always a disappointing business confronting my own reflection. My body isn’t bad. It’s a perfectly nice, serviceable body. It’s just that the external me- the study, lightly wrinkled, handbagged me- does so little credit to the stuff that’s inside.

Must be millions and millions who have gone there.

I’m a child in that respect: able to live, physically speaking, on a crumb of anticipation for weeks at a time, but always in danger of crushing the waited for event with the freight of my excessive hope.

Nothing childish about that, right?

In the end, I suspect, being female will do nothing for Sheba, except deny her the grandeur of genuine villainy.

It didn’t deny it to her though. Well, if you’re inclined to see her that way.

There it was again - the perverse refusal to acknowledge my hostility. She seemed to me like some magical lake in a fairy tale: nothing could disturb the mirror-calm of her surface. My snide comments and bitter jokes disappeared soundlessly into her depths, leaving not so much as a ripple.

Or, for some, not in the least perverse.

[b]so sad today

sorry to hear about your positive attitude[/b]

But don’t let it happen again.

wanna come over and not exist together

Actually, why don’t you come over and not exist together here.

is this nauseous feeling life or death

Yes.

cause of death: your positive attitude

No, that’s a real thing.

positive thinking won’t change the fact that we’re going to die

Unless you positively want to.

i’m tired of being brave and i’m not even brave

It’s actually harder than it sounds.

Do one of Oscar Wilde, dude.

[b]Ted Chiang

She, like many, had always thought that mathematics did not derive its meaning from the universe, but rather imposed some meaning onto the universe. [/b]

Anyone here know for sure?

Of course, everyone knew that Heaven was incomparably superior, but to Neil it had always seemed too remote to consider, like wealth or fame or glamour. For people like him, Hell was where you went when you died, and he saw no point in restructuring his life in hopes of avoiding that.

Close enough?

The prospect of living without interference, living in a world where windfalls and misfortunes were never by design, held no terror for him.

You know, being an Uberman.

A twinkle appeared in Gary’s eyes. ‘I’ll bet I know what you’re talking about.’ He snipped a potsticker in half with his chopsticks. ‘You’re used to thinking of refraction in terms of cause and effect: reaching the water’s surface is the cause, and the change in direction is the effect. But Fermat’s principle sounds weird because it describes light’s behavior in goal-oriented terms. It sounds like a commandment to a light beam: “Thou shalt minimize or maximize the time taken to reach thy destination.”

Nope, no twinkle in mine, he thought. Thou has nothing to do with it.

Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don’t need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community’s understanding of itself. So it wouldn’t be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.

Not unlike history for everyone else. Written down or not.

Though I am long dead as you read this, explorer, I offer to you a valediction. Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same.

As you might well imagine, that would be completely lost on this explorer.

[b]Mark Manson

The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.[/b]

Is this as idiotic as I think it is? Or as brilliant as you think it is?

Don’t hope for a life without problems, the panda said. There’s no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.

On the other hand, name one.

Being wrong opens us up to the possibility of change. Being wrong brings the opportunity for growth.

Being right too.

You cannot be a powerful and life-changing presence to some people without being a joke or an embarrassment to others.

Let’s prove this.

Challenge yourself to find the good and beautiful thing inside of everyone. It’s there. It’s your job to find it. Not their job to show you.

Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.

That and being indifferent.

Been there, done that: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=179454&p=2364884&hilit=oscar+wilde#p2364884

We’re psychically linked, biggs. Two seconds before you posted that last one earlier, I had written:

“Why you gotta be like that, man? I swear to god (or his absence thereof) that if you don’t do one on Oscar Wilde, I’ll never read another one of your posts as long as I philosophize”

… and presto. You beat me by a matter of seconds.

[b]Taylor Jenkins Reid

I think I’m heading into a time in my life where words and labels will lose their meaning. It will only be the intent behind them that will matter.[/b]

Not that anyone will ever grasp it.

I punched someone in the library stacks, somewhere between 972.01 and 973.6

That’s between “Mexico, Central America, West Indies, Bermuda” and the “United States”

She liked to ignore the fact that I had made love to men and enjoyed it. She liked to ignore it until the very moment she decided to be threatened by it. That seemed to be her pattern. I was a lesbian when she loved me and a straight woman when she hated me.

Sounds about right. Well, for someone who knows absolutely nothing about it.

You won’t realize just how young you are until you aren’t that young anymore.

My guess: Somewhere between birth and death.

The truth often lies, unclaimed, in the middle.

Our own truth as often as not.

Confidence is being okay being bad, not being okay being good.

It takes practice though. Few of us are naturals.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Language transcends us and yet we speak.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty[/b]

Well, it is, after all, a biological imperative.

“Religion is the possibility of the removal of every ground of confidence except confidence in God alone.” Karl Barth

Otherwise known as blind faith.

“All wrong-doing arises because of mind. If mind is transformed can wrong-doing remain?” Buddha

And this guy is revered?!

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Kurt Vonnegut

If only until the day we die.

“The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.” Thucydides

Wow, that can’t be good.

“Ignorance is bold, and knowledge is reserved.” Thucydides

Sure, they had Kids back then too.

[b]Joni Mitchell

Some turn to Jesus and some turn to heroin.[/b]

If not the other way around.

The God of the Old Testament is the depiction of evil.

At least until Christ died for his sins.

Nietzsche was a hero, especially with Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He gets a bad rap; he’s very misunderstood. He’s a maker of individuals, and he was a teacher of teachers.

Well, I guess that settles that, right?

Americans have decided to be stupid and shallow since 1980.

Isn’t that when the White House went Hollywood?

That’s one thing that’s always, like, been a difference between, like, the performing arts, and being a painter, you know. A painter does a painting, and he paints it, and that’s it, you know. He has the joy of creating it, it hangs on a wall, and somebody buys it, and maybe somebody buys it again, or maybe nobody buys it and it sits up in a loft somewhere until he dies. But he never, you know, nobody ever, nobody ever said to Van Gogh, ‘Paint a Starry Night again, man!’ You know? He painted it and that was it.

He wondered: is this important to know?

I don’t know how to sell out. If I tried to sell out I don’t think I could.

He wondered then if she ever did.

[b]Jennifer Weiner

I think every person who is single should have a dog. I think the government should step in and intervene: If you’re not married or coupled up, whether you’ve been dumped or divorced or widowed or whatever, they should require you to proceed immediately to the pound nearest you and select an animal companion.[/b]

Another liberal, right?

I don’t trust happiness. I turn it over as if it were a glass at a flea market or a rug at a souk, looking for chipped rims or loose threads.

Why trust any emotion at all, he thought.

Love, I said, is the rug they pull out from under you. Love is Lucy always lifting the football at the last second so that Charlie Brown falls on his ass. Love is something that every time you believe in it, it goes away. Love is for suckers, and I’m not going to be a sucker ever again.

You know, being optimistic.

You should be concerned about the state of your soul, not the state of your bank account.

Remember when that was actually true?

The condom broke. I know how stupid that sounds. It’s the reproductive version of the dog ate my homework.

Who cares if it’s true?

Found, I told myself. Try to get found.

How is that different from, say, trying not to get lost?

[b]Woody Allen

If you’re born with a gift, to behave like it’s an achievement is not right.[/b]

And he should know.

Eternity is really long, especially near the end.

Has anyone ever actually made it that far?

My relationship with death remains the same—I’m strongly against it.

Let’s see if that will make a difference.

I love nature, I just don’t want to get any of it on me.

He hates it in other words.

Is Knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know?

Because nature either compels us to or not.

If my films make one more person miserable, I’ll feel I have done my job.

Or here: If my posts make one more person miserable, I’ll feel I have done my job.

[b]Daniel Kahneman

The evidence of priming studies suggests that reminding people of their mortality increases the appeal of authoritarian ideas, which may become reassuring in the context of the terror of death.[/b]

Priming studies? Still, it does have that “ring of truth”.

…a stable relationship requires that good interactions outnumber bad interactions by at least 5 to 1.

Probably explains why I’ve never had one, he thought.

You have no compelling moral intuitions to guide you in solving that problem. Your moral feelings are attached to frames, to descriptions of reality rather than to reality itself.

In other words, here, dasein is just understood.

The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed.

In other words, here, dasein is just understood.

As cognitive scientists have emphasized in recent years, cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain.

I know, let’s bring this down to earth.

We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.

Depending on, well, you know what.