a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Robert Musil

Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression.[/b]

You wouldn’t think so, would you?
Must be an intellectual thing.

… the novel is called upon like no other art form to incorporate the intellectual content of an age.

On the other hand, seen the best seller lists of late?

For only fools, fanatics, and mental cases can stand living at the highest pitch of soul; a sane person must be content with declaring that life would not be worth living without a spark of that mysterious fire.

How about this: I’ll help you find your soul if you’ll help me find mine.

The proverbial notion of historical distance consists in our having lost ninety-five of every hundred original facts, so the remaining ones can be arranged however one likes.

Going back, say, thousands of years.

… there is no such thing as a rational world and a separate irrational world, but only one world containing both.

Not to mention the other way around.

His answers were quite often like that. When she spoke of beauty, he spoke of the fatty tissue supporting the epidermis. When she mentioned love, he responded with the statistical curve that indicates the automatic rise and fall in the annual birthrate. When she spoke of the great figures in art, he traced the chain of borrowings that links these figures to one another.

That Mars/Venus thing again.

[b]John Sayles

I’ve always felt like I was on the margins. Once upon a time that’s what independent used to mean.[/b]

What’s it mean today? Also, what should it mean?

Assumptions allow the best in life to pass you by.

You know, if only down through the ages.

I don’t have a social agenda. I just don’t choose to ignore what’s in front of me.

In other words, a political agenda.

The hardest thing about movie acting is that if you’re playing a character who changes within the movie, you’ve got to do that, but you’ve got to do it out of sequence, because we never have gotten to shoot in sequence, and that’s really, really tough.

Wow, he thought, I guess that’s true.

We just said, ‘Okay, you’re in the movie. Bring what you would bring for a three-day weekend and I hope you like the way you look in it because once you’re on camera, that’s your wardrobe.’ But it worked; it worked and we were very surprised.

Return of the Secaucus 7, I’m guessing. As opposed to, say Eight Men Out.

I like to act. I work for scale. I don’t have an acting agent. I’m in the book.

Let’s work for scale here.

[b]Doth

What you do at night is between you & your anxiety[/b]

Yeah, it would have to be that way.

I respect the moon because it controls two of our most precious elements, oceans and wolves.

Well, the moon and…the stars?

Be the reason why she speaks a dead language in bed.

You know, other than Latin.

My sexual orientation is an overgrown greenhouse on a haunted estate during a thunderstorm.

Yo, LGBT!

Sex is cool but have you ever laid down in a graveyard just for practice.

Actually, no, not yet.

Be the reason why the lights flicker when you enter a room.

Do the lights flicker here when I post?

[b]John Cage

All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear I know nothing.[/b]

Not unlike ours here.

Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school? Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical? What if the ones inside can’t hear very well, would that change my question?

Let’s move on…

I never had a hat, never wore one, but recently was given a brown suede duck-hunting hat. The moment I put it on I realized I was starved for a hat. I kept it warm by putting it on my head. I made plans to wear it especially when I was going to do any thinking. Somewhere in Virginia, I lost my hat.

Next up: his suspenders.

Artists talk a lot about freedom. So, recalling the expression “free as a bird,” Morton Feldman went to a park one day and spent some time watching our feathered friends. When he came back, he said, "You know? They’re not free: they’re fighting over bits of food.

What some call, “the brute facticity of life”.

I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing.

Well, maybe later.

When we separate music from life we get is art.

Ever try that with philosophy?

[b]Terry Eagleton

It is easy to see why a diversity of cultures should confront power with a problem. If culture is about plurality, power is about unity. How can it sell itself simultaneously to a whole range of life forms without being fatally diluted?[/b]

The rest is, among other things, history.

All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that.

Tough one, eh?

It is true that some liberals and humanists, along with the laid-back Danes, deny the existence of evil. This is largely because they regard the word ‘evil’ as a device for demonising those who are really nothing more than socially unfortunate.

He wondered: What if it goes even deeper than that?

The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does.

My guess: there’s a reason for that.

There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.

There also seems to be something that does.

Evil may be ‘unscientific’ but so is a song or a smile.

Really, don’t get me started.

[b]God

Which is more oppressive to the human breath and spirit: a mask on the mouth or a knee on the neck? There’s a right answer here.[/b]

You know, if God’s a liberal.

…then Adam and Eve had kids. And their kids fucked each other and had kids. And those fucked each other and had kids. And you are the result.

Comments, anyone?

None of this makes any sense, it really doesn’t.

That can’t be good.

I’m no Hindu, but they have a concept called karma that I’ve really started getting into.

He’s no Buddhist either.

Once you die that’s it.

Now do you believe it?

The President of the United States is a fucking piece of shit.

Now do you believe it?

[b]Ottessa Moshfegh

People truly engaged in life have messy houses.[/b]

Cars too.

Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion.

Been there, haven’t you?

Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.

I finally figured this out. You know, unfortunately.

The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn’t exist yet.

Or is that the good news?

I was both relieved and irritated when Reva showed up, the way you’d feel if someone interrupted you in the middle of suicide.

For me it was Sharon.

It was lunacy, this idea, that I could sleep myself into a new life. Preposterous. But there I was, approaching the depths of my journey.

Cue the brandy.

[b]Karl Kraus

There is a cultural taste which tries very hard to get rid of the lice in a fur coat. There is another which tolerates the lice and thinks the coat can be worn with them in it. And finally there is a taste which regards the lice as the most important thing about the coat and consequently places the coat at the lice’s disposal.[/b]

What’s the moral of this story?

The real truths are those that can be invented.

Not unlike the lies.

I am not for women but against men.

Among other things, that’s perfect.

Humanity and bestiality: when will the former finally be uttered with the flavor of hate and the latter with the flavor of love? Does a lion tear his fellow lion to pieces?

Among other things, huh?

In case of doubt, decide in favor of what is correct.

Ask Mr. Objectivist in other words.

In a hollow head there is much room for knowledge.

Let’s stuff a few of them here.

[b]God

THE COVID 19

Trump
Bolsonaro
Modi
Khamenei
Duterte
Johnson
López Obrador
Erdoğan
Maduro
Xi
Morrison
Salman
Vučić
Jokowi
Duque
Putin
Piñera
Karen
Me[/b]

You tell me.

I know it feels like the world is starting to spiral out of control, but it was never in control.

He ought to know, He created it.

This hoax needs to stop killing people.

And what if it’s not a hoax?!

FACT:
Covid, like everything in the universe, only exists once you or someone close to you is personally affected by it.
Until then it is imaginary, and other people’s empirical observations of it can be dismissed as a hoax.

The very definition of logic.

This universe used to be really funny until it got all political.

And, I suspect, not just on this planet.

The most useful thing about people is their biodegradability.

Not counting the soul of course.

[b]Wim Wenders

Final cut is overrated. Only fools keep insisting on always having the final word. The wise swallow their pride in order to get to the best possible cut.[/b]

How might that be apllicable here?

The most important question for me when I begin working on a film is where to start.

And here begining a post: why to start.

The Yanks have colonized our subconscious.

The McYanks in particular.

There are a lot of things that dancers can do that actors cannot and actors can do that dancers cannot.

Or: There are a lot of things that scientists can do that philosophers cannot and philosophers can do that scientists cannot.

Before you say cut, wait 5 seconds.

Or: Before you click on submit, wait 5 seconds. At a minimum.

It’s a great lesson in modesty that you realize you’re illiterate in a field that you think you’re an expert in.

He’s talking about me, isn’t he?

[b]Karl Ove Knausgard

I’m not interested in the words or the meaning of the words. I’m interested in disappearing in it completely, to not be aware of yourself at all. That’s the way music works for me. It’s purely emotional. It goes straight to the heart. There are no explanations. That’s just it.[/b]

As it should be.

Saying what you believe others want to hear is, of course, a form of lying.

So you better be good at it.

And it’s a disquieting thought that not even the past is done with, even that continues to change, as if in reality there is only one time, for everything, one time for every purpose under heaven. One single second, one single landscape, in which what happens activates and deactivates what has already happened in endless chain reactions, like the processes that take place in the brain, perhaps, where cells suddenly bloom and die away, all according to the way the winds of consciousness are blowing.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Though not for lack of trying.

For me, personally, it is very important that the days are exactly the same, so I have routines. I do the same thing every day.

Me too. In fact I’m doing it now.

I have a longing for fiction — to try to believe in it and to disappear into it.

Actually, this is a real condition.

Shame tells you when you’ve gone too far. Then you try if it’s okay to go too far. And it might be so that shame was right. You can never, never know that.

With shame one size never fits all.

[b]tiny nietzsche

consensual abyss[/b]

Cue ecmandu?

find a mountain, find yourself a mountain to die on

Or, if it’s closer, a molehill.

don’t let science stand in the way of dying

Let alone philosophy.

most of the fatalists I know are just lazy

Could it really be that simple?

turns out it was me that was broken the whole time

Yo, dasein!

I sexually identify with mercury in retrograde

Yo, Jacob: refinery29.com/en-us/2020/0 … ng-effects

[b]Jeffrey Eugenides

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.[/b]

Unless of course to nature it’s all the same.

It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.

Here, today, in Baltimore, for example.

Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.

And then there’s my take on it.

There comes a moment, when you get lost in the woods, when the woods begin to feel like home.

Or, here, lost in the words.

Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It’s always there, though.

I know that mine is.

There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.

In fact, I once believed that myself.

[b]Shirley Jackson

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.[/b]

So, by all means, make things up.

A pretty sight, a lady with a book.

On the other hand, what book?

Am I walking toward something I should be running away from?

Well, don’t ask me.

I can’t help it when people are frightened, says Merricat. I always want to frighten them more.

I’ll need a context myself.

I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.

Could be the universe itself, right?

I’m going to put death in all their food and watch them die.

I’ve thought of that myself, of course.

[b]so sad today

dear god, if you exist, and if you are an omnipotent and benevolent force, please help me stop tweeting[/b]

Or, here, posting? Let’s give Him 24 hours.

ever just feel tired for your entire life

In other words, not yet.

i have trouble making decisions because i don’t see the point in anything

That’ll do it.

if you need me i’ll be trapped inside myself

After all, where else could we be?

kind of in the mood for death

But: Mine? Yours?

when i hear people talk i honestly feel like i’m from another planet

As, no doubt, some folks here actually are.

[b]Stefan Zweig

If you are going to sell yourself, you should at least get a good price.[/b]

So, what would you charge?

Besides, isn’t it confoundedly easy to think you’re a great man if you aren’t burdened with the slightest idea that Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante or Napoleon ever lived?

It never bothered you, right?

As one who knows many things, the humanist loves the world precisely because of its manifold nature and the opposing forces in itdo not frighten him. Nothing is further from him than the desire to resolve such conflicts and this is precisely the mark of the humanist spirit: not to evaluate contrasts as hostility but to seek human unity, that superior unity, for all that appears irreconcilable.

And look where we are now?

Fear is a distorting mirror in which anything can appear as a caricature of itself, stretched to terrible proportions; once inflamed, the imagination pursues the craziest and most unlikely possibilities. What is most absurd suddenly seems the most probable.

Next up: sheer terror.

On the whole, more men had perhaps escaped into the war than from it.

You know, whatever that means.

free, independent spirit who commits himself to no dogma and will not decide in favor of any party has no homestead on earth.

I know that I don’t.

[b]Eva Green

It’s quite hard to find a ballsy or complex character. So the roles I’ve taken are those. Lot’s of people put me in the dark category.[/b]

You tell me: youtu.be/YFXHfEqMcis

I feel sick if I have to do something for the money. I can’t breathe. I’m not proud of myself.

We’ll need details of course.

There’s this shop in New York I go to; it has bones and fossils and insects that are like works of art. I have a few on my wall.

Let’s find it.

If I can avoid doing stunts, I will. I don’t want to die just for a movie. It’s not worth it.

Plus, she’s not Tom Cruise.

I was very, very nervous about the naked scenes. I’m very shy and reserved. But it was Bertolucci and I have seen Last Tango. It’s not pornographic. He’s a master of eroticism. I stopped being self-conscious. You have to forget everything.

That works for me.

I wear no makeup in real life. I’m very simple. That may be why I go over the top for the red carpet. But otherwise, I’m very plain.

That works for me.

[b]sad socrates

Strive not for days of leisure, but of catharsis.[/b]

In other words, either the highly improbable or the simply impossible.

At least there are no bibles in hell.

Either that or the only book at all.

I am everything I haven’t been.

You know, so far.

White people just need to shut up for a few centuries right now.

Come on, what are the odds?

There used to be a time when there was no time and that was a good time.

Next up: oblivion.

Abolish the United States.

The South in other words.

[b]Bell Hooks

Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power - not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist.[/b]

Like me, right?

When we choose to love, we choose to move against fear, against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect, to find ourselves in the other.

Fuck that, he thought. And almost meant it.

What we do is more important than what we say or what we say we believe.

I know: What if that was actually true, my fellow philosophers.

To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.

No, really think about that.

Shaming is one of the deepest tools of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy because shame produces trauma and trauma often produces paralysis.

You know, back when that was still true, right?

What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.

Well, not counting all of the idiotic things that do.

[b]Malcolm McDowell

The definition of insanity in Texas is so insane that it’s impossible to be insane in Texas.[/b]

And he would know this…how? Though, sure, point taken.

One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place.

Hint, hint?

The most dangerous people are always clever, compelling, and charismatic.

Here? Let’s name names. You know, if there are any.

I am a professional actor and I don’t go about moralizing about what the character does. Otherwise, seriously, why be an actor? You’re not making some kind of social statement. That’s not what actors do. They may inadvertently do it, but it’s because of the script, not the acting.

Technically as it were.

Let’s not get too precious about it: actors are not heart surgeons or brain surgeons. We are just entertaining people.

So, what’s that make us then?

The great thing about Burgess’s work is the dichotomy of making the hero or anti-hero an immoral man. And that’s what makes it interesting. Because, you know, you are sucked into kind of liking this guy.

For others of course it’s Hannibal Lector.