a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Roland Barthes

One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United Sates, where everything is transformed into images: only images exist and are produced and are consumes … Such a reversal necessarily raises the ethical question: not that the image is immoral, irreligious, or diabolic (as some have declared it, upon the advent of the Photograph), but because, when generalized, it completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it.[/b]

So much more to the point: Who decides all this?

We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

Right, like this can actually be calculated.

Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

I know that mine is lost.

As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don’t do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires. . . . And I think of Bloy’s words: “there is nothing perfectly beautiful except what is invisible and above all unbuyable".

Fortunately, as we all know, you can’t buy love.
That is still true, right?

A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.

And, for some, that more or less revolves around getting paid for it.

Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.

In order to, for example, be “one of us”.
And not be exterminated.

[b]Evelyn Waugh

What is a “canty day”, Dennis?
I’ve never troubled to ask. Something like hogmanay, I expect.
What is that?
People being sick on the pavement in Glasgow.
Oh.[/b]

Oh works for me too.

What is adolescence without trash?

I know: Where to draw the line.

He delighted in writing, in the joinery and embellishment of his sentences, in the consciousness of high rare virtue when every word had been used in its purest and most precise sense, in the kitten games of syntax and rhetoric. Words could do anything except generate their own meaning.

So, is this technically correct?

They are all negros. And the Fascists won’t be called black because of their racial pride, so they are called White after the White Russians. And the Bolsheviks want to be called Black because of their racial pride. So when you say black you mean red, and when you mean red you say white and when the party who call themselves blacks say traitors they mean what we call blacks, but what we mean when we say traitors I really couldn’t tell you. But from your point of view it will be quite simple. Lord Copper only wants patriot victories and both sides call themselves patriots, and of course both sides will claim all the victories. But, of course, it’s really a war between Russia and Germany and Italy and Japan who are all against one another on the patriotic side. I hope I make myself plain?

Couldn’t be plainer. Human nature as some say.

I can quite understand that many people may be depressed by the spectacle of naked humanity. Personally I cannot see that an ugly body is any more offensive than an ugly dress.

Clearly with exceptions.

There was a change in both of us. We had lost a sense of discovery which had infused the anarchy of our first year.

Ah, the first year!

[b]Mary Roach

It’s the reason we say “pork” and “beef” instead of “pig” and “cow.” Dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial.[/b]

What about chicken?

…the act of vomiting deserves your respect. It’s an orchestral event of the gut.

Even if you’re bulimic.

I challenge you to find a more innocuous sentence containing the words sperm, suction, swallow, and any homophone of seaman. And then call me up on the homophone and read it to me.

Shall we take her up on it?

He has a minor in explosives and the slightly bitter, misanthropic personality of someone who shouldn’t.

Better that than a major.

Khoruts gave me a memorable example of how behavior can be covertly manipulated by microorganisms. The parasite Toxoplasma infects rats but needs to make its way into a cat’s gut to reproduce. The parasite’s strategy for achieving this goal is to alter the rat brain such that the rodent is now attracted to cat urine. Rat walks right up to cat, gets killed, eaten. If you saw the events unfold, Khoruts continued, you’d scratch your head and go, What is wrong with that rat?

In a wholly determined world of course.

As when astronaut Mike Mulhane was asked by a NASA psychiatrist what epitaph he’d like to have on his gravestone, Mulhane answered, “A loving husband and devoted father,” though in reality, he jokes in Riding Rockets, "I would have sold my wife and children into slavery for a ride into space.

You know, if it was a joke.

[b]The Dead Author

You don’t have to be Vladimir Lenin to be a little bit unnerved every time someone calls a two millimeter wider iphone screen a “revolution”.[/b]

Not to mention Mao Zedong.

Never forget 9/11. Theodor W. Adorno was born on this day in 1903.

The other reason of course.

Postmodernity: when you’re not sure if you’re bored of waiting for the apocalypse to happen, or bored of witnessing it every day.

Yeah, I like that.
So, which one ought we to be?

We’ve come to value authenticity so highly that people will lie about everything if it makes them seem more believable.

And it’s not as easy as it sounds.

Dostoyevsky always sounds like he needs a lawyer. Kafka sounds like he shouldn’t have become one.

Of course that’s just common sense.

Happy 247th birthday, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. I got you nothing.

He won’t miss it.

[b]Jeanette Winterson

You need a language in this world. People want words, they want to hear their situation in language, and find a way to talk about it. It allows you to find a language to talk about your own pain.[/b]

And then one day the words themselves become the world. For example, in your head.

If you give kids a language, they can use it. I think that’s what these educators fear. If you really educate these kids, they aren’t going to punch you in the face, they are going to challenge you with your own language.

I know that I do.

What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home.

The wild and the tame cock too.

I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex.

Well, it is her house. And that’s just one of the rules. But, sure, point taken.

Napoleon was in love with himself and France joined in.

Let’s see if it works that way for Don Trump.

The heart is so easily mocked, believing that the sun can rise twice or that roses bloom because we want them to.

Or that money grows on trees.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

You will die like a dog for no good reason.[/b]

But not before you live like a dog for no good reason.

I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes. Nobody had mentioned what the stakes were. It was all right with me.

Of course you can take this too far.

I believe that all the people who stand to profit by a war and who help provoke it should be shot on the first day it starts by accredited representatives of the loyal citizens of their country who will fight it.

For starters, dream on.

Everything is on such a clear financial basis in France. It is the simplest country to live in. No one makes things complicated by becoming your friend for any obscure reason. If you want people to like you you have only to spend a little money.

I think that is more or less universal now.

None of it was important now. The wind blew it out of his head.

No, moron, not literally.

But I could tell thee of other things, Inglés, and do not doubt what thou simply cannot see nor cannot hear. Thou canst not hear what a dog hears. Nor canst thou smell what a dog smells. But already thou hast experienced a little of what can happen to man.

Thou meaning, among others, you and I.

[b]Philip Larkin

Heads in the Women’s Ward

On pillow after pillow lies
The wild white hair and staring eyes;
Jaws stand open; necks are stretched
With every tendon sharply sketched;
A bearded mouth talks silently
To someone no one else can see.

Sixty years ago they smiled
At lover, husband, first-born child.

Smiles are for youth. For old age come
Death’s terror and delirium.[/b]

Maybe you, maybe not you.

[b]When I throw back my head and howl
People (women mostly) say
But you’ve always done what you want,
You always get your way

  • A perfectly vile and foul
    Inversion of all that’s been.
    What the old ratbags mean
    Is I’ve never done what I don’t.

So the shit in the shuttered chateau
Who does his five hundred words
Then parts out the rest of the day
Between bathing and booze and birds
Is far off as ever, but so
Is that spectacled schoolteaching sod
(Six kids, and the wife in pod,
And her parents coming to stay)…

Life is an immobile, locked,
Three-handed struggle between
Your wants, the world’s for you, and (worse)
The unbeatable slow machine
That brings what you’ll get. Blocked,
They strain round a hollow stasis
Of havings-to, fear, faces.
Days sift down it constantly. Years.[/b]

Maybe you, maybe not you.

Saki says that youth is like hors d’oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don’t notice it. When you’ve had them, you wish you’d had more hors d’oeuvres.

If only all the way to the grave.

I’d like to think that people in pubs would talk about my poems.

Maybe even in a few bars.

I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others & myself…

Just not anymore of course.

Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three…between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.

Not many of us [left] can say that.

[b]tiny nietzsche

I remind me of someone I don’t know.[/b]

More to the point, of someone I’d never want to know.

…cries in orwellian…

It started in 1984.

exercise: metal
driving: hip hop
cleaning: early 80s new wave

Or, sure, for some, early 80s new wave 24/7.

who am I to be selfless?

Of course no one ever goes there anymore.

my horoscope is avoiding eye contact

That can’t be good.

bury me in the future

And then out of the blue [or not] the future is now.

fuck demands. I’ve got a list of examples.

Me, I’ve got an avalanche of groots.

[b]Neil Gaiman

If it’s true that every seven years each cell in your body dies and is replaced, then I have truly inherited my life from a dead man; and the misdeeds of those times have been forgiven, and are buried with his bones.[/b]

Tell that to the judge and the jury.

Things bloosom in their time. They bud and bloom, blossom and fade. Everything in its time.

So they keep telling us.

All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.

Of course that all changes in Heaven. We just don’t know how yet.

As far as I’m concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning.

In other words, if you’re paid enough for that to actually be an option.

It’s like you said the other day, said Adam. You grow up readin’ about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus’ when you think the world’s full of amazin’ things, they tell you it’s really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nucular waste hangin’ about for millions of years.

He means the fucking liberals of course.

Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn’t work, 2) didn’t do what the expensive advertisements said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighborhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser’s own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches.

Not yet, perhaps, but heading in that general direction.

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

What’s so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What’s so great about feeling and dreaming?[/b]

Sometimes you’re parked here and sometimes you’re not.

We just stood there, facing each other, but nine floors apart.

At least nine if your’re lucky.

I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.

He wondered: Anyone ever said that about me?

The room was filled with conversations we weren’t having.

And, fortunately, didn’t want to have.

He invented stories so fantastic she had to believe. Of course, she was only a child, still removing the dust from her first death. What else could she do? And he was already accumulating the dust of his second death. What else could he do?

Plenty of dust to go around though isn’t there.

Think of the beginning of the story of the beginning of everything: Adam (without Eve and without divine guidance) names the animals. Continuing his work, we call stupid people bird-brained, cowardly people chickens, fools turkeys. Are these the best names we have to offer? If we can revise the notion of women coming from a rib, can’t we revise our categorizations of the animals that, draped with barbecue sauce, end up as the ribs on our dinner plates — or for that matter, the KFC in our hands?

They never let you forget, that’s for sure.

[b]Terry Pratchett

Progress just means bad things happen faster.[/b]

Let’s all agree at least that it can mean that.

A European says: I can’t understand this, what’s wrong with me? An American says: I can’t understand this, what’s wrong with him?

At least until Don Trump drains the swamp.

The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that’s where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won’t do if they don’t know about it. This explains why it is so important to shoot missionaries on sight.

No, seriously.

Of course I’m sane, when trees start talking to me, I don’t talk back.

Let alone brick walls.

Everything starts somewhere, though many physicists disagree. But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of things. They wonder how the snowplow driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of words.

I know, let’s invent another God.

It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.

Where can we take this? Philosophically I mean.

[b]e e cummings

when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because[/b]

In other words, why not?

…remember one thing only: that it’s you-nobody else-who determines your destiny and decides your fate. Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else.

Let’s discuss why this is bullshit.

I’m living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.

I call it my food stamps years.

may I be I is the only prayer–not may I be great or good or beautiful or wise or strong

May I be I what though?

…nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands…

Cue Woody Allen.

…great men burn bridges before they come to them…

Either that or build them.

[b]Michael Parenti

People who think they’re free in this world just haven’t come to the end of their leash yet.[/b]

And then there are those who, for all practical purposes, never do.

Official Washington cannot tell the American people that the real purpose of its gargantuan military expenditures and belligerent interventions is to make the world safe for General Motors, General Electric, General Dynamics, and all the other generals.

No, really, political economy is an actual thing.

[b]Almost as an article of faith, some individuals believe that conspiracies are either kooky fantasies or unimportant aberrations. To be sure, wacko conspiracy theories do exist. There are people who believe that the United States has been invaded by a secret United Nations army equipped with black helicopters, or that the country is secretly controlled by Jews or gays or feminists or black nationalists or communists or extraterrestrial aliens. But it does not logically follow that all conspiracies are imaginary.

Conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral end. People go to jail for committing conspiratorial acts. Conspiracies are a matter of public record, and some are of real political significance. The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, as was the Watergate cover-up, which led to Nixon’s downfall. Iran-contra was a conspiracy of immense scope, much of it still uncovered. The savings and loan scandal was described by the Justice Department as “a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and bribery,” the greatest financial crime in history.

Often the term “conspiracy” is applied dismissively whenever one suggests that people who occupy positions of political and economic power are consciously dedicated to advancing their elite interests. Even when they openly profess their designs, there are those who deny that intent is involved. In 1994, the officers of the Federal Reserve announced they would pursue monetary policies designed to maintain a high level of unemployment in order to safeguard against “overheating” the economy. Like any creditor class, they preferred a deflationary course. When an acquaintance of mine mentioned this to friends, he was greeted skeptically, “Do you think the Fed bankers are deliberately trying to keep people unemployed?” In fact, not only did he think it, it was announced on the financial pages of the press. Still, his friends assumed he was imagining a conspiracy because he ascribed self-interested collusion to powerful people.

At a World Affairs Council meeting in San Francisco, I remarked to a participant that U.S. leaders were pushing hard for the reinstatement of capitalism in the former communist countries. He said, “Do you really think they carry it to that level of conscious intent?” I pointed out it was not a conjecture on my part. They have repeatedly announced their commitment to seeing that “free-market reforms” are introduced in Eastern Europe. Their economic aid is channeled almost exclusively into the private sector. The same policy holds for the monies intended for other countries. Thus, as of the end of 1995, “more than $4.5 million U.S. aid to Haiti has been put on hold because the Aristide government has failed to make progress on a program to privatize state-owned companies.

Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: “Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?” For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together – on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot – though they call it “planning” and “strategizing” – and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people. [/b]

No, really, political economy is an actual thing.

Democrats—lily-livered, weasel-assed collaborators.

Most liberals he means.
Well, not counting the “value-voter” issues of course.

You dont know your wearing a leash if you sit by the peg all day.

How close to it are you?

As demonstrated in Russia and numerous other countries, when faced with a choice between democracy without capitalism or capitalism without democracy, Western elites unhesitatingly embrace the latter.

Throughout, for example, the entire Third World.

[b]Ethan Hawke

Don’t you find it odd, she continued, that when you’re a kid, everyone, all the world, encourages you to follow your dreams. But when you’re older, somehow they act offended if you even try.[/b]

Of course first we’ll have to know what the dream actually is.

Give your heart to everybody you meet. The rest is pretense.

Anyone here ever tried that? Oh, and define pretense.

Success isn’t measured by what you achieve, it’s measured by the obstacles you overcome.

Let’s go out on a limb and suggest it’s both.

The older I get, the more I realize how rare it is to meet a kindred spirit.

And then one day you’re old enough to admit it’s probably never going to happen at all.

You are always in the right place at exactly the right time, and you always have been.

With the possible exception of now?

Now I have a theory that if a woman wants to keep a man she only needs to say two things: She believes in him and he’s got a big a cock. That’s all it takes. It doesn’t even have to be true.

Has that ever worked on you, Mr. Uberman?

[b]so sad today

she died as she lived: worried she was dying[/b]

And what if it doesn’t stop there?

whenever I say yes to hanging out it’s like i’m watching the word come out of my mouth in slow motion and trying desperately to stop it

Or [here]: whenever I say yes to posting it’s like i’m watching the words come up on the screen in slow motion and trying desperately to stop them

it’s going to get worse before it gets worse

Unless of course it gets much worse.

i’m annoyed, therefore i am

Or, sure, even fucking enraged.

lonely but don’t want to see people

Don’t ask us to explain that.

too anxious to sit still, too depressed to move

Don’t ask us to explain that.

[b]Joseph Heller

Major Major had lied, and it was good. He was not really surprised that it was good, for he had observed that people who did lie were, on the whole, more resourceful and ambitious and successful than people who did not lie.[/b]

Shall we just chalk this up to human nature?

As always occurred when he quarreled over principles in which he believed passionately, he would end up gasping furiously for air and blinking back bitter tears of conviction. There were many principles in which Clevinger believed passionately. He was crazy.

Either that or an objectivist. You know, if there’s a difference.

Something did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and courage and left me with a fear of discovery and change and a positive dread of everything unknown that may occur.

Or, for some of us, something will happen.

He was one of those people with lots of intelligence but no brains.

Let’s explain the difference.

The frog is almost five hundred million years old. Could you really say with much certainty that America, with all its strength and prosperity, with its fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is highest in the world, will last as long as the frog?

America was born on July 4, 1776. You do the math.

I’ll tell you what justice is. Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning.

Maybe, but how would we confirm it?

[b]Steven D. Levitt

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.[/b]

I think that, among others, Don Trump would agree.

Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent–all depending on who wields it and how.

I think that, among others, Bob Mueller would agree.

Don’t listen to what people say; watch what they do.

Well, not here of course.

As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.

Drunk or sober.

Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you’ve decided beforehand it can’t be done.

Which doesn’t mean that, in fact, it really can’t be done.

Social scientists sometimes talk about the concept of “identity”. It is the idea that you have a particular vision of the kind of person you are, and you feel awful when you do things that are out of line with that vision.

Not really a problem for some of us.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The vain man does not think he is vain.” Gilbert Ryle[/b]

Let’s run this by, among others, me.

"Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.” Jorge Luis Borges

That’s certainly worth bringing up.

"At the present moment, the security of coherent philosophy, which existed from Parmenides to Hegel, is lost.” Karl Jaspers

Not to worry, you’ll find it again, right?

“Man is something more than what he knows of himself. He is not what he is simply once and for all, but is a process.” Karl Jaspers

Until perhaps [once and for all] he is dead.

“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong” Bertrand Russell

Anyone here willing to die for theirs?

“You never know what is enough, until you know what is more than enough." William Blake

Philosophy being the least of it.

[b]Brit Bennett

Grief was not a line, carrying you infinitely further from loss. You never knew when you would be sling-shot backward into its grip.[/b]

If not hammered to a pulp.

The weight of what has been lost is always heavier than what remains.

No, really, what if it always was that way?

Reckless white boys became politicians and bankers, reckless black boys became dead.

Statistically as it were.

But we were girls once, which is to say, we have all loved an ain’t-shit man. No Christian way of putting it. There are two types of men in the world: men who are and men who ain’t about shit.

In much the same way there are two types of women. But, sure, point taken.

A daughter grows older and draws nearer to her mother, until she gradually overlaps her like a sewing pattern. But a son becomes some irreparably separate thing.

And [of course] with absolutely, positively no exceptions.

She’d already learned that pretty exposes you and pretty hides you and like most girls, she hadn’t yet learned how to navigate the difference.

Ugly too.

[b]Malcolm Gladwell

Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade…It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else’s head - even if in the end you conclude that someone else’s head is not a place you’re really like to be.[/b]

Let’s pin down a description of great writing.

The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our place in history presents us with.

Great, yet another component of dasein.

I realize that we are often wary of making these kinds of broad generalizations about different cultural groups–and with good reason. This is the form that racial and ethnic stereotypes take. We want to believe that we are not prisoners of our ethnic histories. But the simple truth is that if you want to understand … you have to go back to the past … it matters where you’re from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where you great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents grew up and even where your great-great-grandparents grew up. That is a strange and powerful fact.

True. Now, let’s see who can reconfigure it into the most extreme point of view.

No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.

So, we need find only one black God.

Six degrees of separation doesn’t mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.

Any special few here?

We live in a world saturated with information. We have virtually unlimited amounts of data at our fingertips at all times, and we’re well versed in the arguments about the dangers of not knowing enough and not doing our homework. But what I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, of being inundated with information. We have come to confuse information with understanding.

I know that you have.