a thread for mundane ironists

[iambiguous]

Kazimir Malevich

With the most primitive means the artist creates something which the most ingenious and efficient technology will never be able to create.

You tell me: https://www.google.com/search?source=un ... 42&bih=597

Only dull and impotent artists screen their work with sincerity. In art there is need for truth, not sincerity.

Let's make that true here too.
[like for most it isn't already]

Color is the essence of painting, which the subject always killed.

Let's explain over this.

When, in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field, the critics and, along with them, the public sighed: 'Everything which we loved is lost. We are in a desert .... Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!'

I'm with the public on this one. Sort of.

By suprematism I mean the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art.

And they don't sell that at Walmart.

I have broken the blue boundary of color limits, come out into the white; beside me comrade-pilots swim in this infinity.

Next up: breaking the yellow boundary.

[iambiguous]

Don DeLillo

To portray America over the past twenty years or so, I would think immediately of football, probably the Super Bowl in its sumptuous suggestion of a national death wish.

I loathe that fucking inane spectacle myself. Dasein I figure.

I've always felt that my subject was living in dangerous times.

Like there are any other times.

The genius of rock music is that it matched the cultural hysteria around it.

Of course look at it now.

The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don't really want to be here.

That or the yak yak yak comics.

If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.

Nothing always being something of course.

When I work I have a sculptor's sense of the shape of the words I'm making. I use a machine with larger than average letters: the bigger the better.

Remember when that was an option here?

[iambiguous]

Doth

Be the reason why a priest nervously does the sign of the cross when you walk by.

Or, sure, cowers on the ground in abject terror.

My body is not a temple, it’s at best a decaying old cabin with a horrifying backstory.

Wait until he gets to my age. And not many among us won't.

In honor of Charles Dickens I am also going to be poor this Christmas.

And now only 360 odd days until the next one.

In honor of Boxing Day punch a Nazi in the fucking face.

That's a Brit thing, right? So, if you're one of them, start punching. Unless, of course, you're the Nazi.

Let an ancient demon take over your anxiety for a while. You’ve earned it.

Me? I take over the ancient demon.

In honor of the winter solstice I will also be cold, distant & filled with darkness.

Not unlike the other 364 days.

[iambiguous]

Robert Rauschenberg

It's when you've found out how to do certain things, that it's time to stop doing them, because what's missing is that you're not including the risk.

Certain what things, he asked. And, once there, how much risk?

You can't make either life or art, you have to work in the hole in between, which is undefined.

Undefined. That works for me. You know, when it does work for me.

Even at this late date, I go into my studio, and I think 'Is this going to be it? Is it the end?' You see, nearly everything terrorizes me. When an artist loses that terror, he's through.

Next up: the philosopher loses it.

I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly, because they're surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.

Nope, never thought they were ugly myself. So, that's a good thing, right?

I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.

Like words, right? Here I mean.

Every time I've moved, my work has changed radically.

I smell bullshit.

[iambiguous]

Jamaica Kincaid

A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.

That again, he thought.

Had the Holocaust happened in Tahiti or the Congo, as it has; had it happened in South America, as it has; had it happened in the West Indies, as it has - you must remember that within fifty years of Columbus's arrival, only the bones remained of the people called the Arawaks, with one or two of them in Spain as specimens. Had the Holocaust committed under the Nazis happened somewhere else, we wouldn't be talking about it the way we talk about it.

A race thing let's call it.

I think a woman is powerless if she cannot freely claim the right to her reproductive capacity. Society can talk about anything it likes, except a woman's reproductive existence.

The unborn baby? Fuck it, he said. Just call it a clump of cells.

What I don't write is as important as what I write.

Just as, here, what I don't read is as important as what I do. In fact, truth be told, considerably more important.

Friendship is a simple thing, and yet complicated; friendship is on the surface, something natural, something taken for granted, and yet underneath one could find worlds.

I once had a friend myself. No, really.

The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark.

So, want to to hear about something of mine?

[iambiguous]

God

The worst part about getting hacked is now I have to erase and reset the universe.

We're ready if You are.

My resolution for 2021 is to be more Earth-friendly and environmentally-conscious by killing you all.

We're ready if You are.

I'm going to miss Trump losing.

Come on, would an omniscient and omnipotent Being note something like this?
Let's ask these guys: https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop ... 1&t=195805

Trump supporters should feel completely disillusioned by the electoral system and never vote again.

Well, not for 4 years anyway.

All I want for Christmas is you.
It's a lot scarier when I say it.

So, did He get anyone you know?

Santa Claus?
A bearded old man we ask things of, lie to our kids about, and lives somewhere "up there"?
Who comes up with this stuff?

No, seriously.

[iambiguous]

God

The worst part about getting hacked is now I have to erase and reset the universe.

We're ready if You are.

My resolution for 2021 is to be more Earth-friendly and environmentally-conscious by killing you all.

We're ready if You are.

I'm going to miss Trump losing.

Come on, would an omniscient and omnipotent Being note something like this?
Let's ask these guys: https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop ... 1&t=195805

Trump supporters should feel completely disillusioned by the electoral system and never vote again.

Well, not for 4 years anyway.

All I want for Christmas is you.
It's a lot scarier when I say it.

So, did He get anyone you know?

Santa Claus?
A bearded old man we ask things of, lie to our kids about, and lives somewhere "up there"?
Who comes up with this stuff?

No, seriously.

[iambiguous]

Olga Tokarczuk

A man's free to do what he wants with his life, until he falls foul of the banks.

And their cohorts in Washington.

There must be some sort of drugs. I’d like that. To stop me from feeling anything, or worrying, to let me sleep. Is that possible?

Smack, maybe?

'That’s too much. You can’t want all those things,’ he said.
‘Oh yes I can! And I’m the one to define what I can want,’ I shouted furiously.

Next up: options. Yep, no getting around them.

...the truest argument was an old one—the earth is round, let us not be too attached, then, to directions.

Right, like traveling from New York to Chicago just head South.

One has to tell people what to think. There is no alternative. Otherwise, someone else will do it.

You know, providing they'll listen.

Perhaps one could get used to it?
Learn to live with it, just as people live in the cities of Auschwitz or Hiroshima, without ever thinking about what happened there in the past.
They simply live their lives.

You know, like living with the assholes here.

[iambiguous]

God

In heaven Christmas songs play for a month every year. In hell they never stop.

Now, there's a reason to take that Kierkegaardian leap or to make that Pascalian wager.
And, sure, you bet your ass, I would if I could.

You better not shout.
You better not cry.
You better not pout.
I'm telling you why.
Donald Trump is going insane.

Twenty days and counting.
Or maybe not?

People with very different political views may make you furious but remember, people with only slightly different political views also make you furious. Come to think of it, your political views make you furious.

Not much that doesn't cover.

I'll never get over how stupid you are.

And we'll never get over being made in Your image.

Today is the shortest day of the longest year.
˙ǝɹǝɥdsᴉɯǝH uɹǝɥʇnoS ǝɥʇ uᴉ ǝʌᴉl noʎ 'ǝsɹnoɔ ɟo 'ssǝlu∩

Got a few of them here, don't we?

The best perk of My job?
It's not omnipotence.
It's not omniscience.
It's not omnipresence.
It's being tax-exempt.

Tell that to the Commies! Right, Pedro?

[iambiguous]

Angela Carter

I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.

Me too. Only no shadow.

There was a house we all had in common and it was called the past, even though we'd lived in different rooms.

Or, as often as not, different houses, different communities, different nations, different continents and one day [perhaps] different planets.

The kind of power mothers have is enormous.

You know, when fathers aren't abusing them.

Drosselmeier had unwittingly exposed himself to an overdose of reality, and it had destroyed his reason.

Never happen, right Kid?

In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.

Or, sure, the not mythic schema. For example, the all too real thing.

A fairy tale is the kind of story in which one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar.

Name one.

[iambiguous]

Marlon Brando

The only reason I'm in Hollywood is that I don't have the moral courage to refuse the money.

So, was he acting then?

There's a line in the picture where he snarls, 'Nobody tells me what to do.' That's exactly how I've felt all my life.

Well, he was Marlon Brando. If that explains it.

If there are two hundred people in a room and one of them doesn't like me, I've got to get out.

Or, as things are here, they could all hate me. And I'm not going anywhere.

Even today I meet people who think of me automatically as a tough, insensitive, coarse guy named Stanley Kowalski. They can't help it, but, it is troubling.

I'll bet it was.
Me? Paul in Last Tango In Paris.

It's a long climb up Fools' Hill.

Let's ask Sisyphus.

The Mafia is the best example of capitalism we have.

And they still have an offer you can't refuse. For example, if you have bills to pay.

[iambiguous]

Gorgias

Nothing exists; even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can't be communicated to others.

You know, being optimistic.

Speech is a powerful master and achieves the most divine feats with the smallest and least evident body. It can stop fear, relieve pain, create joy, and increase pity.

And then there's "speech" here.

The man who deceives shows more justice than he who does not.

My guess: We'll need a context.

Being is unrecognizable unless it manages to seem, and seeming is feeble unless it manages to be.

A more or less vicious circle, as it were.

Men who neglect philosophy while busying themselves with ordinary affairs are like the Suitors in the Odyssey who desired Penelope but went to bed with her maids.

Ideally, as it were.

I answer, Socrates, that rhetoric is the art of persuasion in courts of law and other assemblies, as I was just now saying, and about the just and unjust.

Two long dead white men, as it were.

[iambiguous]

Dustin Hoffman

Depressed, anxious, sad, frightened? Yes. But I've never been bored.

Sure, he might really mean it. And, for that matter, I might really mean it too.

I wanted to be a jazz pianist, but I wasn't good enough. I got into city college because I didn't have the grades to get into university. I took acting because it was a way to get three credits. I just needed three credits and my friend told me to take acting because it was like gym - nobody fails you. I took it and that's literally how I got involved in acting.

Probably true, right?

You spend so much of your life basing yourself on what you think other people think of you. Then you realise that maybe one of the purposes of life is not to care.

Not only that but I'm guessing that I care less than you do.

It's true what they say about failure. You don't learn from success.

Come on, you kind of do.

37 seconds, well used, is a lifetime.

Though not a second less.

One thing about being successful is that I stopped being afraid of dying. Once you're a star you're dead already. You're embalmed.

Yuck, yuck?

[iambiguous]

Ernest Cline

Overall, she seemed to be going for a sort of mid-’80s postapocalyptic cyberpunk girl-next-door look. And it was working for me, in a big way. In a word: hot.

Let her try that on me, he scoffed.

I’d spent my entire life overdosing on uncut escapism, willingly allowing fantasy to become my reality.

The same two words:
1] Whatever
2] Works

If I was feeling depressed or frustrated about my lot in life, all I had to do was tap the Player One button, and my worries would instantly slip away as my mind focused itself on the relentless pixelated onslaught on the screen in front of me.

The same two words:
1] Whatever
2] Works

Shit! I heard Diehl shout over the comm. I just lost my gorram shields because I'm already out of frakkin' power!
Dude, Cruz said. You shouldn't mix swears from different universes.

Or, here, swears from different boards.

Very well! he said. You shall prove your worth by facing me in a joust! I’d never heard of an undead lich king challenging someone to a joust. Especially not in a subterranean burial chamber.
All right, I said uncertainly. But won’t we be needing horses for that?
Not horses, he replied, stepping away from his throne. Birds.

Virtual reality. You gotta love it.

I know that the future is scary at times. But there's just no escaping it.

Well, there is one way.

[iambiguous]

tiny nietzsche

atlas coped

Yo, Ayn!

probably fuck around and exist

Then probably fuck around some more.

this yearly end of whatever and the beginning of now seems pretty fucking arbitrary

Unless of course someone can establish that the Big Bang itself started on January First. Someone here no doubt.

I have just confirmed that I am dead

Ask him how.

let me know when it gets to zero

Make that less than zero.

what idiot called it cabaret voltaire instead of dada dada revolution?

Anyone here actually know?

[iambiguous]

Gus Van Sant

I'd come into filmmaking as a painter so, for me, making 'Good Will Hunting' was experimental because I didn't know how to do it.

Call him lucky.

I'm thinking of remaking 'Psycho' again. Doing a third remake. The idea this time is to really change it - we're talking about doing a punk rocker setting.

In 12th Century China.

Wong Kar-Wai is a really great inspiration. He's always referred to as the Jimi Hendrix of filmmaking.

My own personal favorite: ‎Chungking Express.

If it were up to the executives, they probably wouldn't have directors at all.

Or here posts.

I'm not being analytical. I just create everything intuitively. If you're too analytical, what you're doing probably ends up being too specific.

And certainly too abstract. Though sure that may be the point.
Right?

The dark comedies tend to be in a non-releasable area. There can be romantic comedies. There can be dramas. But there's no 'dark comedy' inbox for the advertising.

Take your pick: https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/gu ... es-ranked/

[iambiguous]

tiny nietzsche

It's a Wonderful Life...an "angel" gaslights a suicide victim into accepting the world as it is

"Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or a group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or group, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment."
You tell me.

the ghost of late stage capitalism



santa is condemned to be free

And again next year one suspects.

going to hunker down till this whole "joy to the world" thing blows over

Trust me: not counting reality, it never does.

if you look around the room and can't identify the glitch, it's you

Or, here, the thread.

dissent into madness

That'll do it.

[iambiguous]

Claudia Rankine

If you admit to being racist, it says you acknowledge that you are being driven by projections and stereotypes that were formed in the creation of our country. Racism is deeply rooted in America.

Wow, could this even actually be true?

I also found it funny to think about blackness as the second person. That was just sort of funny. Not the first person, but the second person, the other person.

Or, sure, why not: whiteness, yellowness, redness, brownness.

I’m not investigating race as much as I’m investigating intimacy.

Race to race as it were.

In the future, we've forgotten it. It's disappointing to find out that the past is the present is the future. Nobody wants that. And yet, that's what it is.

We'll need a context of course. Race, she suggested.

I don't really agree with the role model thing. People are always saying that athletes shouldn't do X or Y because they are role models.

Let's imagine philosophers being role models. You know, in the best of all possible worlds.

I was at Yale and I said to the poet Elizabeth Alexander, "I'm interested in the ways in which black health seems precarious in the United States." She introduced me to the term "John Henryism." And then I went back and researched it and understood that, woah, this thing I am thinking about is actually a condition that's named.

This: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henr ... yism%20(JH

[iambiguous]

Anne Carson

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

Well, when they're not falling flat on their face. And not just here.

One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.

One of the principle qualities of life is that you don't often get one.

If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.

Needless to say for better or for worse.

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

Why are you full of grief? Hey, does it even matter?

To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.

Tell me about it.
No, not really.

Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.

Right, like this one.

[iambiguous]

so sad today

obsessing over a problem that doesn’t exist

Or, sure, obsessing over the answer that doesn't exist.

i want sex and to be alone

Sure, we can work something out.

already stressed out about my funeral turnout

They can just dump me in the woods.

listen, it’s not like i chose to exist

She howled at the universe.

thanks but i’ll be my own worst enemy

If only all the way to the grave.

the lost art of shutting the fuck up

Come on, you know who you are.

[iambiguous]

Kazimir Malevich

A face painted in a picture gives a pitiful parody of life. . . but a painted surface lives.

Next up: genitals painted in a picture.

Shouldn't it give us pause that the oldest works of art are as impressive today in their beauty and spontaneity as they were many thousands of years ago?

Let's note why this is important. You know, if it's true.

Only when the habit of one's consciousness to see in paintings bits of nature, madonnas and shameless nudes has disappeared, shall we see a pure painting composition.

Like that actually means something!

The square is not a subconscious form. It is the creation of intuitive reason. The face of the new art. The square is a living, regal infant. The first step of pure creation in art.

Unless of course it's a triangle.

Every real form is a world. And any plastic surface is more alive than a face from which stares a pair of eyes and a smile.

Things artists idiots say about art. Though, sure, point taken.

I recommend that you should work actively... and study the artistic structures of Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Watteau, Poussin, and other painters, even Chardin, where he is an artist. Study very closely their dabbing manner of execution and try to copy a small piece of canvas, just one square inch.

Let's come up with the equivalent of that here.

[iambiguous]

Michael Faraday

Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature.

Next up: well, you know what's up next here.

Since peace is alone the gift of God, and as it is He who gives it, why should we be afraid? His unspeakable gift in His beloved Son is the ground of no doubtful hope.

All consistent with the laws of nature of course.

Lectures which really teach will never be popular; lectures which are popular will never really teach.

Yep, that's still true. And you can double it here.

A man who is certain he is right is almost sure to be wrong.

Don't mind me but...about what?

There’s nothing quite as frightening as someone who knows they are right.

Don't mind me but...about what?

I shall be with Christ, and that is enough.

On the other hand, isn't he quoted above as insisting, "a man who is certain he is right is almost sure to be wrong."

[iambiguous]

sad socrates

Death sucks, life is worse.

Though not necessarily in that order.

New year, same depression.

Come on, it's never exactly the same.

2020 Top 5
1. Fuck
2. Fuck
3. Fuck
4. Fuck
5. Fuck

You for example.

Every breath in 2020 was a cry for help.

Well, not on Wall Street.

Stupidity is the price of admission into the kingdom of humanity.

And he's not Kidding.

Whatever you do, you will always be dead for longer.

My guess: A hell of a lot longer.

[iambiguous]

Piet Mondrian

Art is not made for anybody and is, at the same time, for everybody.

Let's not make up our minds here, okay?

The more basic the color, the more inward, the more pure.

Or here [for some] the more basic the definition.

...abstract art is not the creation of another reality but the true vision of reality.

Abstractly as it were.

The emotion of beauty is always obscured by the appearance of the object. Therefore, the object must be eliminated from the picture.

You tell me: https://www.google.com/search?source=un ... 42&bih=597

Intellect confuses intuition.

As well it should. Sometimes, for example.

Every true artist has been inspired more by the beauty of lines and color and the relationships between them than by the concrete subject of the picture.

Or here: every true philosopher has been inspired more by definitions and deductions than by the concrete reality of human interactions.

[iambiguous]

Don DeLillo

I felt myself getting whiter... What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in?

My guess: Not good.
Actually, of course, it's not a guess at all.

Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market.

Imagine then his reaction to the Kids and the fulminating fanatics here then!

If an idea seems to find its way towards a stage setting, that's the direction I take. I don't know if I'm trying to achieve anything other than to follow an idea on to the page.

Me? A groot is born!

My attitudes aren't directed toward characters at all. I don't feel sympathetic toward some characters, unsympathetic toward others. I don't love some characters, feel contempt for others. They have attitudes; I don't.

Next he's telling us they create themselves.
Or even this...

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.

Anyone here actually believe this?

Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?

Up on the clouds for example.