a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Lynda Barry

The only reason we find structure in stories is because it’s there naturally in human interaction, and in the way that people tell stories. [/b]

Then the part about dasein.

When I work on a book, I usually start with a question. And I don’t sit around and go “I need to write a book. What’s a good question?” It will be a question that’s just clanging around in my head.

Or, here, “when I work on a thread.”

I live in constant fear of being fired or dropped for that dark part of my work I can’t control.

Here of course you’ll only get warned.
There’s no dungeon to send you to.

When an attractive but aloof (“cool”) man comes along, there are some of us who offer to shine his shoes with our underpants. There are thousands of scientific concepts as to why this is so, and yes, yes, it’s very sick but none of this helps.

For men and attractive women, double it at least.

In life there are always these things happening if you can just get the joke.

Until you’re the butt of it perhaps.

But when the thing that is scaring you is already Jesus, who are you supposed to pray to?

Buddha?

[b]Pete Seeger

The American Indians were Communists. They were. Every anthropologist will tell you they were Communists. No rich, no poor. If somebody needed something the community chipped in.[/b]

So, how far is that from the “noble savage”? Or, how far is that from the actual truth?

And there’s a wonderful parable in the New Testament: The sower scatters seeds. Some seeds fall in the pathway and get stamped on, and they don’t grow. Some fall on the rocks, and they don’t grow. But some seeds fall on fallow ground, and they grow and multiply a thousandfold. Who knows where some good little thing that you’ve done may bring results years later that you never dreamed of?

My seeds? Or, sure, your seeds.

Technology will save us if it doesn’t wipe us out first.

And that’s still too close to call.

According to my definition of God, I’m not an atheist. Because I think God is everything. Whenever I open my eyes I’m looking at God. Whenever I’m listening to something I’m listening to God.

Great, that again, he thought.

How can you save the world you have not seen if you can’t save the community you have seen?

Uh, you can’t?

This world is so full of hypocrisy, the only way you can be honest is to be a hermit.

Well, I’m practically that.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Man is the microcosm: I am my world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein[/b]

What’s that make “I” then?

“One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Not much that this isn’t. Right, Kids?

“The ancients, by their system of colonization, made themselves friends all over the known world; the moderns have sought to make subjects, and therefore have made enemies.” Jean-Baptiste Say

What’s that make us postmoderns then?

“Lived experience can never be fully resolved into concepts, but its dark tonality accompanies all conceptual thought.” Wilhelm Dilthey

Mine being particularly dark of course.

“The knife of historical relativism…which has cut to pieces all metaphysics and religion must also bring about healing.” Wilhelm Dilthey

Well, I’m doing what I can here.

“Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.” Vladimir Nabokov

Ever getting smaller all the time.

[b]Douglas Adams

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.[/b]

Hell, that could be our planet, right?

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.

Plus you’ve been clawed to bits.

“O Deep Thought computer," he said, “the task we have designed you to perform is this. We want you to tell us…” he paused, “The Answer.”
“The Answer?” said Deep Thought. “The Answer to what?”
“Life!” urged Fook.
“The Universe!” said Lunkwill.
“Everything!” they said in chorus.
Deep Thought paused for a moment’s reflection.
“Tricky,” he said finally.
“But can you do it?”
Again, a significant pause.
“Yes,” said Deep Thought, “I can do it.”
“There is an answer?” said Fook with breathless excitement.
“Yes,” said Deep Thought. “Life, the Universe, and Everything. There is an answer. But, I’ll have to think about it.”
Fook glanced impatiently at his watch.
“How long?” he said.
“Seven and a half million years,” said Deep Thought.
Lunkwill and Fook blinked at each other.
“Seven and a half million years…!” they cried in chorus.
“Yes,” declaimed Deep Thought, “I said I’d have to think about it, didn’t I?"

So much for AI. Oh, and the answer was 42.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: I refuse to prove that I exist, says God, for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.
But, says Man, The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.
Oh dear, says God, I hadn’t thought of that, and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

I know, if only it were that simple.

What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can’t move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn’t been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won’t be troubling you much longer.

I know, if only it were that simple.

Beethoven tells you what it’s like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human. Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe.

Next up: Bob Dylan and the Beatles.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.” Vladimir Nabokov[/b]

Of course, if you’re a cat, it can get you killed.

“Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.” William Faulkner

On the other hand, when you die, only for all the rest of us.

“Philosophy consists mostly of kicking up a lot of dust and then complaining that you can’t see anything.” Gottfried Leibniz

It’s like a fucking tornado here.

“Take what you need, do what you should, you will get what you want.” Gottfried Leibniz

After all, who hasn’t?

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.” Bertolt Brecht

What’s that make philosophy then? Serious philosophy of course.

“Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.” Marcel Proust

Now that’s a hard truth, isn’t it?

[b]Bob Dylan

If I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself. [/b]

Of course that doesn’t work for the likes of you and I.

Black is the Color and none is the number

Yep, that’s still the same.

Got no religion. Tried a bunch of different religions. The churches are divided. Can’t make up their minds and neither can I.

Not much more perfectly normal than that.

Don’t know which one is worse, doing your own thing or just being cool.

Never been cool myself. Why? Just lucky I guess.

Everybody’s wearing a disguise
To hide what they’ve got left behind their eyes

If you’ve got anything left there at all.

It’s not a house, it’s a home

But then it burned down.

[b]Blake Crouch

We’re all made of the same thing—the blown-out pieces of matter formed in the fires of dead stars.[/b]

Of course this gets really, really old after a while.

We see it macro, like one big story, but when you’re in it, it’s all just day-to-day, right? And isn’t that what you have to make your peace with?

Of course this gets really, really old after a while.

The endorphin kick from the ping of a received text or a new e-mail.

Anyone know if that’s a real thing?

Perfection was a surface thing. The epidermis. Cut a few layers deep, you begin to see some darker shades.

Not much that isn’t applicable to.

Which brings me back to Michael Crichton. He didn’t just play with big ideas in his books. He used those ideas to explore questions that felt immediate, meaningful, emotionally powerful—to everyone. You didn’t have to be a sci-fi reader to understand what he was talking about, or to care, deeply, about the suspenseful tale he was spinning.

Anyone here dare to disagree?

They didn’t live anymore in a world where life was to be colorful and celebrated. Life had become something you clung to, that you bit down hard on against the pain, like the rubber block in a session of electroshock therapy.

You’ve either been there or you haven’t. Me, I’ve sort of been.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Your mind will give back to you exactly what you put into it.” James Joyce[/b]

Ouch! Right, Kid?

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” Marcel Proust

You know, if you’re lucky.

“Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.” Theodor Adorno

Or what I call the objectivist.

“In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.” Theodor Adorno

See, I told you!!

“People know what they want because they know what other people want.” Theodor Adorno

Because other people tell them as likely as not.

"The power of the culture industry’s ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness” Theodor Adorno

Well, not counting the Deep State of course.

[b]Tori Amos

And is it right, butterfly, they like you better framed and dried?[/b]

My guess: The butterfly has no choice in the matter at all.

You’re just an empty cage girl, if you kill the bird.

Unless that’s the whole point.

I wanna smash the faces of those beautiful boys, those Christian boys.

Sure, if you have a good reason.

Girls you’ve gotta know when it’s time to turn the page.

Or even burn the book.

Somebody will come backstage and go, ‘You saved me.’ And I will have to say, ‘Stop right there. You saved yourself.’

Come on, why not a little or a lot of both?

The music is the magic carpet that other things take naps on.

I hear that.

[b]Neal Stephenson

That is the kind of beauty I was trying to get you to see,” Orolo told me. “Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.[/b]

In other words, for each of us, one by one, that’s either the good news or the bad news.

Maybe we should go back and get their guns, Marlon suggested.
That’s how it would work in a video game, Csongor said, which was his way of agreeing.

A Kid thing in other words.

But what little I’d heard had left me amazed by how clever people were at finding ways to make each other crazy and miserable.

My guess: Not just on this planet.

The same thrust, pushing against a greatly reduced burden, would then yield acceleration that Lio had cheerfully described as ‘near-fatal.’ But it’s okay, he’d said, you’ll black out before anything really bad happens to you.

No, not always, right?

Rife’s key realization was that there’s no difference between modern culture and Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV—which is sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power elite—the people who go into the Meatverse, basically----who understand that information is power, and who control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer languages.

History: The more things changed…

Izzy was full of people who were skewed toward the Asperger’s end of the social spectrum, and there was no better way to get them to start talking than to ask them a technical question.

Not all that different for some many most here, is it?

[b]Miles Davis

A lot of people ask me where music is going today. I think it’s going in short phrases. If you listen, anybody with an ear can hear that. Music is always changing. It changes because of the times and the technology that’s available, the material that things are made of, like plastic cars instead of steel. So when you hear an accident today it sounds different, not all the metal colliding like it was in the forties and fifties. Musicians pick up sounds and incorporate that into their playing, so the music that they make will be different.[/b]

You know, technically. The place I never, ever go listening to music.

I think every Negro over fifty should get a medal for putting up with all that crap.

Of course we don’t call them that today, he noted.

Sometimes, if you ask people to “go downstairs and get me this or that,” they’ll say, “It’s rainin” or “It might rain,” or “There’s some bumpy roads on the road,” or bla-bla-bla. They give you all those excuses, so when they do something which is easy, you’re supposed to say, “Damn, you did that?”

In all the races of course.

I mean, it makes me sick when I see a white man sitting there smiling at me being entertaining, man. When I know what he’s gonna do after he gets through. You know, when you see that thing on their face - like: “Entertain me.” You know what I mean? Even the black guy that’s trying to be white - even he can have that crap on his face.

Athletes too of course.

Bebop didn’t have the humanity of Duke Ellington. It didn’t even have that recognizable thing. Bird and Diz were great, fantastic, challenging — but they weren’t sweet.

If he says so.

If you understood everything I say, you’d be me!

It would have to be that way, wouldn’t it?

[b]Jodie Foster

All of the thinking and planning that you do to get there, and then, in one minute, in one second, it just doesn’t matter. It goes out the window. You either got it or you didn’t. There is something kind of refreshing about that. [/b]

Either that or downright fucking infuriating.

Otherness is a big thing for me. I’m always drawn to characters that live lives that I couldn’t lead.

You get to make-believe them as it were.

Where I have problems is when I am in the midst of doing something that I am completely focused on, and then I am asked to buy shoes or something.

Buy shoes?!

Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock do romantic comedies. I do dark dramas.

Enough said in other words.

I love the way L. A. leaves you alone.

Works that way in Baltimore too.

I’m a technician. I don’t go for the get-into-the-role stuff. I read the lines and play the scenes.

Who’d a thunk it?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"When all else fails, philosophize.“ J. M. Coetzee[/b]

Serously, for example.

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense.” Frank Herbert

And the deeper some go, the more logical it is.

“What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also.” Julius Caesar

Objectivism in a nutshell, isn’t it?

“In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.” Voltaire

And, increasingly, the science of government as well.

“How glorious it is - and also how painful - to be an exception.” Alfred de Musset

Any exceptions here?

“There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.” Fyodor Dostoevsky

Not you though, right?

[b]Sofia Coppola

When you direct is the only time you get to have the world exactly how you want it. [/b]

Unlike, for example, posting here.

My movies are not about being, but becoming.

Or: My posts are not about being, but becoming.
Unlike, no doubt, yours.

The unexpected connections we make might not last, yet stay with us forever.

Really, really unexpected ones for me.

Forget the audience, make what you want to see.

Not unlike what we do here.

It seems that the greatest difficulty is to find the end. Don’t try to find it, it’s there already.

Or, sure, wait for it to find you.

I really wanted to emphasize the idea of the women being isolated and abandoned . . . and they weren’t raised to take care of themselves, so they had to learn to survive.

And then some in the movies.

[b]Morgan Spurlock

More than a billion adults worldwide are now overweight - and at least 300 million of them are clinically obese. Childhood obesity is already epidemic in some areas and on the rise in others. Worldwide, an estimated 17.6 million children under five are said to be overweight.[/b]

We can never have enough statistics, right?

I think that when you have somebody who really is kind of forced to see the world through someone else’s eyes, I think it really is eye opening.

My own point, isn’t it?

Well, even to this day, if I smell a Big Mac, I’m like Pavlov’s dog. My mouth starts watering immediately, like, ‘Man, that is so good,’ but I can’t take a bite of it.

I’m down to about 10 a year myself.

People were always pointing the finger at the fast food industry. And I was a big fan of personal responsibility - you know, no one is forcing you to eat. We’re not geese being stuffed with corn.

Not counting most in Trumpworld of course.

I think most Muslims are incredibly upset with the state of America’s foreign policy today and the state of the world.

Of course that goes both ways.

Seventy-five percent of Americans don’t even have passports. We don’t even think about traveling beyond our borders.

Or, for some, the neighborhood.

[b]Margaret Atwood from The Testaments

I was buying time. One is always buying something.[/b]

Or selling it.

You take the first step, and to save yourself from the consequences, you take the next one. In times like ours, there are only two directions: up or plummet.

Or, for some, way, way up and way, way down.

Still, I wanted to believe; indeed I longed to; and, in the end, how much of belief comes from longing?

You tell me, Mr. Objectivist.

It’s better that way, and I am a great proponent of better. In the absence of best.

So, is the absence of best here?

Giving up was the new normal, and I have to say it was catching.

So don’t forget to vote.

I, too, was once like you: fatally hooked on life.

Nope, can’t remember that far back myself.

[b]Nein

Go ahead: worry about the future. But let’s not forget: there’s less of it every day.[/b]

So, worry about that instead.

When, one wonders, will the TV meteorologists pivot from “an unusually beautifully warm October day” to “really, folks, we’re all going to die.”

Keep us posted.

Remember, friends: It’s not the poverty of your imagination. It’s the profundity of your indifference.

Anyone here not learn that yet?

Remember, friends, there’s no need to find a costume for Halloween. Your true horror is on the inside. And anyone who loves you will know it.

Trick or treat.

Monday. Marx said there would be days like this.

That’s tomorrow by the way.

Some call it happiness. Others: Anxiety Deficit Disorder.

Well, that settles that.

[b]Robert M. Pirsig

In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty…[/b]

That would explain my own gasping, he thought.

The pencil is mightier than the pen.

What’s that make the keyboard then?

Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?

Let’s think of something.

Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.

Or, for some, circleness.

The more you read, the more you calm down.

Not counting the more you read here.

We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.

Imagine then where we’ d be without philosophers.

[b]Werner Twertzog

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

Hurricane The Donald?

Americans: You do not need a standing desk. You need a desk that teeters on the edge of an open grave for the day when you stop working.

Sure, why not, he thought.

Humans seldom have faced such disruption. The great unraveling of the planet–and long-established nations, institutions, and economic structures–will be terrifying for most and exhilarating for some. Which side are you on?

You know, someday.

No, The New York Times, neither Toni Morrison nor Harold Bloom won the culture wars. English is dead. German is dead. Reading is dead. And soon, your newspaper will be a hedge fund.

You know, someday.

Longevity means losing everything, in stages.

Until entire chunks break off.

I do not want to watch a “movie.” I want an experience that will destroy everything I once believed about human nature, and God. For $11.00.

Sort of like coming here. For free.

[b]Julian Assange

What are the differences between Mark Zuckerberg and me? I give private information on corporations to you for free, and I’m a villain. Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he’s Man of the Year. [/b]

So, which one is the scumbag?

You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can’t lead to a good conclusion.

And whose truth might that be?

Power is a thing of perception. They don’t need to be able to kill you. They just need you to think they are able to kill you.

Well, not counting us of course.

If wars can be started by lies, they can be stopped by truth.

You know, the unjust wars.

We all only live once. So we are obligated to make good use of the time that we have and to do something that is meaningful and satisfying. This is something that I find meaningful and satisfying… I enjoy helping people who are vulnerable. And I enjoy crushing bastards.

Much as I enjoy crushing objectivists!!

Every War in the past 50 Years is a Result of Media Lies.

He means the corporate media complex of course.