a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Daniel Day-Lewis

The more articulate somebody is, the more suspicious I am of them. I like to feel that the important things remain unsaid.[/b]

My guess: you can take this too far.

Acting is about people. Other people. Otherwise, you’re not acting, you’re doing monologues.

Like me, posting here, right?

I am more greatly moved by people who struggle to express themselves…I prefer the abstract concept of incoherence in the face of great feeling to beautiful, full sentences that convey little emotion.

Fortunately, in being philosophers, that’s not a concern of ours.

I live in a landscape, which every single day of my life is enriching.

Can you say that?

I suppose I have a highly developed capacity for self-delusion, so it’s no problem for me to believe that I’m somebody else.

Some are just lucky that way.

I didn’t like the idea of being foolish, but I learned pretty soon that it was essential to fail and be foolish.

Yo, Kids!

[b]Werner Twertzog

In the US one has no right to healthcare or freedom of expression if it displeases your employer.[/b]

You know, the capitalists insist, for the good of society.

The Germans have no word for Schadenfreude, I am told.

Luckily, they have one for Being There. Or, for some, “being there”.

God, grant me serenity, and thirty-seven million dollars.

Most would settle for thirty seven thousand. You know, right about now, Mr. McConnell.

The self is a myth and happiness is an illusion, as we all know.

It’s actually the other way around.

Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches.

Of course your fraction may vary.

I know little about Ted Nugent, but I would like to know even less.

Just let me know when the bastard is dead.
Also, Henry Kissinger.

[b]John Cage

Discord occasions a momentary distress to the ear, which remains unsatisfied, and even uneasy, until it hears something better. I am convinced…that provided the ear be at length made amends, there are few dissonances too strong for it. Disharmony, to paraphrase Bergson’s statement about disorder, is simply a harmony to which many are unaccustomed.[/b]

What is this if not music as an intellectual contraption?

We’re breaking all of the rules, even our own rules, and how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.

I certainly do that here. Unlike, for example, you, Mr. Objectivist.

It is not futile to do what we do. We wake up with energy and we do something. And we make, of course, failures and we make mistakes, but we sometimes get glimpses of what we might do next.

Of course here things really may be futile. Well, my things anyway.

Why do you not do as I do? Letting go of your thoughts as though they were the cold ashes of a long dead fire?

How about you and I? Here for instance.

Our business in living is to become fluent with the life we are living, and art can help this.

Fortunately, some of us have no idea what this means.

Let no one imagine that in owning a recording he has the music. The very practice of music is a celebration that we own nothing.

Let’s figure out if there is a philosophical equivalent of this.

[b]Terry Eagleton

It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself.[/b]

Or, if you’re an objectivist, not important at all.

If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.

Okay, but I get to pick them.

To claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it.

Or something like that.

Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of ‘68, a way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blending the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath.

“At the level of language”: See, I told you.

If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way.

Shit, it would have to be that way.

What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology.

Yo, Mr. Objectivist.

[b]Existential Comics

When they fearmonger on left wing radicals “destroying Western Civilization”, remember we destroyed it before when we:

• educated the peasants
• abolished the monarchy
• established democracy
• secularized government
• let women vote
  Destroying Western Civilization is good.[/b]

Well, let’s say that it might not be bad.

cats already know the meaning of life but they won’t tell us because they want us to suffer

Yo, Ecmandu!

one thing that billionaires don’t seem to understand is that nobody cares what they think about socialism

Well, not counting the white working class in Trumpworld.

What I learned from:
Socrates: how to curious.
Epicurus: how to be happy.
Sartre: how to be free.
Hegel: how to write very long sentences that people don’t understand.

Hegel to him, Meno to me.
Well, on the philosophy board threads, anyway.

The reason analytic philosophers never came up with anything analogous to existentialism is because they are all a bunch of nerds, and nerds don’t give a shit about stuff like the meaning of life.

Let alone the meaning of this.

According to Jean-Paul Sartre, who is an expert on human freedom, there is actually no philosophical reason why you have to answer emails at all.

Tell that to Simone de Beauvoir.

[b]Ottessa Moshfegh

I counted the seconds passing. Time could go on forever like this, I thought again. Time would. Infinity loomed consistently and all at once, forever, with or without me. Amen.[/b]

A prayer, perhaps?

If you want something and can’t have it, want something else.

My guess: It’s almost always more complicated than that.

I learned the long way about love, tried every house on the block before I got it right. Now, finally, I love alone.

Well, the alone part maybe.

I rarely interacted much with anyone back then who wasn’t retarded. When I did, it struck me how pompous and impatient they were, always measuring their words, twisting things around. Everybody was so obsessed with being understood. It made me sick.

Yo, Kids!

People would be so much more at ease if they acted on impulse rather than reason. That’s why drugs are so effective in curing mental illness—because they impair our judgment. Don’t try to think too much.

Well, not counting those who take this too far.

It’s easy to tell the dirtiest minds—look for the cleanest fingernails.

We should be able to do that here. Only in regard to the dumbest minds.

[b]Karl Kraus

A plagiarist should be made to copy the author a hundred times.[/b]

Consider plagiarizing me an obligation.

Most critics write critiques which are by the authors they write critiques about. That would not be so bad, but then most authors write works which are by the critics who write critiques about them.

Cite one example. I dare you.

Family life is an encroachment on private life.

Shhh. Let’s keep this to ourselves, Jess.

Since the day man first tried to conquer space, the earth has been mobilizing.

Cite one example. I dare you.

Since the day man first tried to conquer space, the earth has been mobilizing.

Cite one example. I dare you.

Medicine: “Your money and your life!”

Let’s change this. You know, if it can be.

[b]Jeffrey Eugenides

Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.[/b]

I said to my reflection in the mirror
Though not you, right?

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

Anyone here ever write one?

I don’t know what you’re feeling, I won’t even pretend.

Well, that’s a start anyway.

I’m hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.

Same with your posts here, right Kid?

Usually my ideas are small.

Wow, what’s that make yours then, Kid?!

In the end, it wasn’t death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.

“Next!”, said the Grim Reaper.

[b]Doth

I am fully prepared to die trying to pet a wolf.[/b]

Or, for others: I am fully prepared to die trying to fuck a wolf.

It’s a perfect night to slip into something more comfortable, like the darkness.

Buck naked of course.

Please, just be the best human you can before your body becomes dirt.

Or ashes as the case may be.

Be the reason why a priest clutches his bible when you walk by.

Piece of cake, right?

As your goth therapist the key to happiness is getting lost in a fog-covered forest & never being seen again.

Or, again, for most of us, a fog-covered urban jungle.

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

Plus there’s that astrology stuff.

[b]Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Words are seeds, Casiopea. With words you embroider narratives, and the narratives breed myths, and there’s power in the myth. Yes, the things you name have power.[/b]

Well, not our words, of course.

Dreams are for mortals.
Why?
Because they must die.

Nightmares too.

The things you name grow in power.

For example, in your head.

Ah, there is none more fearful of thieves than the one who has stolen something, and a kingdom is no small something.

Let’s call this a kingdom.

I follow the direction of the wind, and I cannot be blamed if a new wind begins to blow.

After all, among other things, it’s “beyond my control”.

It wasn’t fair. But there wasn’t an “after” in stories, was there? The curtain simply fell. She was not in a fairy tale, in any case. What “after” could there be?

Well, death of course.

[b]John Dos Passos

I never see the dawn that I don’t say to myself perhaps.[/b]

And then one day: I never see the dawn that I don’t say to myself forget it.
Either that or fuck it.
And then maybe, if you’re lucky, you fall back to sleep.

I’ve always thought you should concentrate on paddling your own canoe.

Or even making it.

A curious thing about atrocity stories is that they mirror, instead of the events they purport to describe, the extent of the hatred of the people that tell them.

Yo, Joker!
Among others here of course.

The terrible thing about having New York go stale on you is that there’s nowhere else. It’s the top of the world.

Not counting Mayberry perhaps.

The people of this country are too tolerant. There’s no other country in the world where they’d allow it… After all we built up this country and then we allow a lot of foreigners, the scum of Europe, the offscourings of Polish ghettos to come and run it for us.

Of course that’s debatable, isn’t it?

A writer … whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow’s generation.

I know: How scary is that.

Man seems to be an animal whose capacity for lies is only equalled by his credulity…

This may well be the most perfect description of Trumpworld: the lies he tells, the lies they believe.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Is Twitter a waste of time?
Kant: What is “time”?
Bataille: What is “waste”?
Schelling: What is “is”?
Heidegger: What is “of”?
Wittgenstein: What is “a”?
Camus: Yes.[/b]

Camus, right?

English poetry: I’m in love
Italian poetry: I was in love
American poetry: I thought I was in love
German poetry: I traded love for demonic powers

Among other things, he thought, who cares?

[b]By the time you reach your 30s, you should have:

1. realized you’re not Leibniz
2. started pretending to understand Hegel
3. developed at least 3 sarcastic quips for when people ask why you study philosophy
4. started 2 failed podcasts about Spinoza[/b]

Among other things, he thought, who cares?

Read Schopenhauer to understand Nietzsche.
Read Hegel to understand Schopenhauer.
Read Kant to understand Hegel.
Then read Spinoza to understand that you don’t understand anything.

Of course Spinoza never read me.

French lit: Why didn’t she love him?
British lit: Why didn’t she marry him?
American lit: Why didn’t she meet him?
Russian lit: Ice axe.

Let’s run this by Putin.

I have a Schrödinger’s cat joke but I don’t have a Schrödinger’s cat joke.

I’m laughing but not laughing.

[b]Helene Cixous

Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort.[/b]

She thinks.

You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.

Unless of course you’re ophidiophobic.

We must learn to speak the language women speak when there is no one there to correct us.

Tried that once myself.

I am not innocent. Innocence is a science of the sublime. And I am only at the very beginning of the apprenticeship.

Guilty as charged.

There is no greater love than the love the wolf feels for the lamb-it-doesn’t-eat.

Like there is such a wolf.

It is said that life and death are under the power of language.

Well, that and all the rest of biology.

[b]God

Now that Trump has pretty well-established that libel laws don’t apply to Twitter, I feel more comfortable discussing the many times I saw Geraldo Rivera having sex with underage girls on Jeffrey Epstein’s sex island.[/b]

See Him in court, right Geraldo!

Right now it’s much easier to believe in Me than believe in reality.

Fuck it, why not.

Why do bad things happen to good people?
Simple.
To even out the good things that happen to bad people.

Finally, an answer.

If you could ask Me one question, what would it be?
Keep in mind, I won’t be answering it.

Let’s come up with one He’ll have to.

There is a 0% chance this weekend ends without the President insulting John Lewis.
0%.

Well, did he?

Thanks for the concern all, but I’m just taking time off to write My newest testament while on a working vacation on Bethselamin.
I will return angrier, wittier, and more ineffective than ever in September, just in time for lack-to-school.
In My absence, no one is in charge.

Jesus Christ, August without God?!

[b]Clarice Lispector

To think is an act. To feel is a fact.[/b]

Your context or mine?

Do you know that hope sometimes consists only of a question without an answer?

Of course your hope might be different.

Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?

Let’s synchronize our time frames and get back to this.

I do not know much. But there are certain advantages in not knowing. Like virgin territory, the mind is free of preconceptions. Everything I do not know forms the greater part of me: This is my largesse. And with this I understand everything. The things I do not know constitute my truth.

See, I told you. Repeatedly, in fact.

I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.

Fuck that, he thought. Repeatedly, in fact.

Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.

Though not in English of course.

[b]Erich Maria Remarque

But probably that’s the way of the world - when we have finally learned something we’re too old to apply it - and so it goes, wave after wave, generation after generation. No one learns anything at all from anyone else.[/b]

Okay, but how exaggerated?

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.

I knew a few of them. And a few of them knew me.

Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.

Unless your life is a novel.

To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There’s much too little forgetting.

On the other hand, tell that to your brain.

No matter how improbable an assertion is, if it is made with enough assurance it has an affect.

Depending on, among other things, the credulity of your audience.

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.

He knew that he was.

[b]Daniel Day-Lewis

I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.[/b]

Brutally honest enough for you?

I see a lot of movies. I love films as a spectator, and that’s never obscured by the part of me that does the work myself. I just love going to the movies.

Sublimely honest enough for you?

For as long as I can remember, the thing that gave me a sense of wonderment and renewal… has always been the work of other actors.

Sure, that can work here too. No, seriously.

You can never fully put your finger on the reason why you’re suddenly, inexplicably compelled to explore one life as opposed to another.

Want me to explain that? Or will you give it a try?

Making a film, setting it up and getting it cast and getting it together, is not an easy thing.

Anyone here from Hollywood disagree?

The one thing that I appear to have been given, bearing in mind that I am capable of being very, very scatty and extremely lazy, is the ability to concentrate on something I choose to give my time to.

Scatty: absentminded and disorganized.
Now you know.

[b]tiny nietzsche

it laughs when I hurt[/b]

Probably you, right?

too drunk to fibonacci sequence

Not drunk enough to care.

who can you alienate if you can’t alienate yourself?

Don’t get me started.

mercury is in despair

Yo, Fixed. Should we be worried?

my horoscope says don’t

Don’t what he dared to ask.

rock, paper, secret police

Coming to a city near you.

[b]John Cage

In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.[/b]

I’ll tell me my case, you tell me yours.

An artist conscientiously moves in a direction which for some good reason he takes, putting one work in front of the other with the hope he’ll arrive before death overtakes him.

Philosophers [sort of] too.

The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation.

Is that scary or what?

To see, one must go beyond the imagination and for that one must stand absolutely still as though at the center of a leap.

Let’s translate this into English.

As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.

You know, until that bumps into the real world.

A mind that is interested in changing…is interested precisely in the things that are at extremes. I’m certainly like that. Unless we go to extremes, we won’t get anywhere.

So, tell me where you draw the line and I’ll tell I draw it.

[b]tiny nietzsche

all my hexes live in texas[/b]

Anything for a rhyme!

please leave the nihilist, reinforce his belief that life is meaningless

Or stay and reinforce it all the more.

your boyfriend wants to put a snowboard rack on your car and you don’t even like him that much

This ever happen to you?

it takes a village to burn it down

This ever happen to yours?

leaving the television on around the clock is not an answer for despair, it is the question

As longer as it’s one ot the other.

I’m often mistaken for a pile of rocks

Don’t you hate that?