a thread for mundane ironists

[iambiguous]

[b]Lionel Shriver

Desire was its own reward, and a rarer luxury than you’d think. You could sometimes buy what you wanted; you could never buy wanting it.[/b]

But wouldn’t it be terrible if you could? More often than not, say?

Only in retrospect do I appreciate that this “doing your bit” is a deadly misapprehension of the nature of familial ties. Better understanding them now, I find blood relationships rather frightening. What is wonderful about kinship is also what is horrible about it: there is no line in the sand, no natural limit to what these people can reasonably expect of you.

And so, hardly giving it a second thought, I cut mine.

Franklin, I was absolutely terrified of having a child. Before I got pregnant, my visions of child rearing- reading stories about cabooses with smiley faces at bedtime, feeding glop into slack mouths- all seemed like pictures of someone else. I dreaded confrontation with what could prove a closed, stony nature, my own selfishness and lack of generosity, the thick tarry powers of my own resentment. However intrigued by a “turn of the page,” I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else’s story. And I believe that this terror is precisely what must have snagged me, the way a ledge will tempt one to jump off. The very surmountability of the task, its very unattractiveness, was in the end what attracted me to it.

The way a ledge will tempt one to jump off. I get that part.

I am in flight from my story every day, and it dogs me like a faithful stray.

When it’s not chomping me on the ass.

He looks uncomfortable, and in this respect the garb is apt. Kevin is uncomfortable; the tiny clothing replicates the same constriction that he feels in his own skin.

And then one day they’re counting the bodies.

You can blame your mother, and she can blame hers. Leastways sooner or later it’s the fault of somebody who’s dead.

And it’s not like they can deny it.

[iambiguous]

[b]William Gaddis

Justice? You get justice in the next world. In this one you have the law.[/b]

Not to be confused, are they?

I know you, I know you. You’re the only serious person in the room, aren’t you, the only one who understands, and you can prove it by the fact that you’ve never finished a single thing in your life. You’re the only well-educated person, because you never went to college, and you resent education, you resent social ease, you resent good manners, you resent success, you resent any kind of success, you resent God, you resent Christ, you resent thousand-dollar bills, you resent Christmas, by God, you resent happiness, you resent happiness itself, because none of that’s real. What is real, then? Nothing’s real to you that isn’t part of your own past, real life, a swamp of failures, of social, sexual, financial, personal…spiritual failure. Real life. You poor bastard. You don’t know what real life is, you’ve never been near it. All you have is a thousand intellectualized ideas about life. But life? Have you ever measured yourself against anything but your own lousy past? Have you ever faced anything outside yourself? Life! You poor bastard.

Well, sure, it’s possible that he is talking about me. And almost certainly about you.

If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.

Obviously: In theory.

What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology.

Of course: You have your dregs and I have mine. Ditto the shambles.

If you want to make a million you don’t have to understand money, what you have to understand is people’s fears about money.

Those that some call “marks”.

How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible…

In other words, it’s as real as you think it is. Unless it’s something else.

[iambiguous]

[b]Chuck Palahniuk

You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.[/b]

Actually, it’s the other way around.

Scratch any fortune and you’ll find blood only a generation or two back…child labor in mines or mills…Slavery. Drugs. Stock swindles. Wasting nature with clear-cuts, pollution, harvesting to extinction. Monopolies. Disease. War. Every fortune comes out of something unpleasant.

Let’s look for this on the campaign trail.

As the French say, who doesn’t like getting their butt sucked?

He means fucked of course. Well, in some circles.

What kind of dining set defines me as a person?

You tell me, mr reasonable.

According to Babette, 98.3 percent of lawyers end up in Hell. That’s in contrast to the 23 percent of farmers who are eternally damned. Some 45 percent of retail business owners are Hellbound, and 85 percent of computer software writers. Perhaps a trace number of politicians ascend to Heaven, but statistically speaking, 100 percent of them are cast into the fiery pit. As are essentially 100 percent of journalists and redheads.

On the other hand, not all Babette’s agree.

Deliver me from Swedish furniture.
Deliver me from clever art.
And the phone rang and Tyler answered.
If you don’t know what you want," the doorman said, you end up with a lot you don’t.
May I never be complete.
May I never be content.
May I never be perfect.
Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete.

I know, I know: A whack job.

[iambiguous]

[b]Robert A. Heinlein

My vocal cords lived their own life, wild and free.[/b]

That can’t be good. You know, in some places.

Death isn’t funny.
Then why are there so many jokes about death? Jill, with us — us humans — death is so sad that we must laugh at it.

Apparently, this is true: best-funny-jokes.com/dead-and-dying-jokes

Government! Three-fourths parasitic and the rest stupid fumbling - oh, Harshaw concluded that man, a social animal, could not avoid government, any more than an individual could escape bondage to his bowels. But simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason to term it “good.” He wished that government would wander off and get lost!

Don’t forget to vote!

A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.

Of course this sort of thing is not what one would call an exact science.

Victory in defeat, there is none higher. She didn’t give up, Ben; she’s still trying to lift that stone after it has crushed her. She’s a father working while cancer eats away his insides, to bring home one more pay check. She’s a twelve-year-old trying to mother her brothers and sisters because mama had to go to Heaven. She’s a switchboard operator sticking to her post while smoke chokes her and fire cuts off her escape. She’s all the unsung heroes who couldn’t make it but never quit.

Or as Donald Trump might note: losers!

If Satan should ever replace God he would find it necessary to assume the attributes of Divinity.

He thought: I can’t wait.

[iambiguous]

[b]Nein

For materialism, please press 1.
For idealism, please think 2.
For dialectical materialism, please think 2 while pressing one.[/b]

Tried it, didn’t work. Pressed 3. That didn’t work either. In fact, none of them did.

Thank you for carefully reading the terms of service. As you now know, this is a violation of the terms of service.

No, really, what if it does come to that?

Let’s be honest: it’s not all good.

Although, sure, it’s not unusual for it all to be bad.

Football. In which the clock ticks up, not down. Two halves don’t add up to a whole. And yellow means caution, but red means go.

Real football in other words.

Say what you will, critics. I love Skopje’s new Beckett monument.

Let’s just say this: It has to be seen to be believed.

Thank you, consciousness. That will be all.

But it never is, right? Well, until it’s gone forever.

[iambiguous]

[b]Salman Rushdie

Even if Shaheed had been able to hear me, I could not then have told him what I later became convinced was the truth: that the purpose of that entire war had been to reunite me with an old life, to bring me back together with my old friends.[/b]

So, what do you think: subjective or objective reality?

…time, in my experience, has been as variable and inconstant as Bombay’s electric power supply. Just telephone the speaking clock if you don’t believe me – tied to electricity, it’s usually a few hours wrong. Unless we’re the ones who are wrong . . . no people whose word for ‘yesterday’ is the same as their word for ‘tomorrow’ can be said to have a firm grip on the time.

Can there be anything more mysterious than time?

Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come.

I suspect that about covers it. Either that or it’s not even close.

Where they burn books they will in the end burn people too.

And, every once in a while, by the millions.

If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.

To “codify” it as [among others] Faust might say.

Honesty is not the best policy in life. Only, perhaps, in art.

Exactly: Whatever the hell that means.

[iambiguous]

[b]Leo Tolstoy

A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.[/b]

So, does that settle it?

If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.

Or too many to count.

Sometimes she did not know what she feared, what she desired: whether she feared or desired what had been or what would be, and precisely what she desired, she did not know.

Back then of course that was considerably more uncommon.

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

Today it seems almost anything goes. And it’s all great literature to someone.

…it’s much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it.

Except God, right?

The best stories don’t come from “good vs. bad” but "good vs. good.”

Thanks, Leo, but here that just goes in one ear and out the other.

[iambiguous]

[b]Sigmund Freud

It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.[/b]

I know that I do. You know, in moments of weakness.

Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable; this is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus, although Alexandrian doctrines taught something very similar. The second was when biological research robbed man of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world, implying an ineradicable animal nature in him: this transvaluation has been accomplished in our own time upon the instigation of Charles Darwin, Wallace, and their predecessors, and not without the most violent opposition from their contemporaries. But man’s craving for grandiosity is now suffering the third and most bitter blow from present-day psychological research which is endeavoring to prove to the ego of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind. We psycho-analysts were neither the first nor the only ones to propose to mankind that they should look inward; but it appears to be our lot to advocate it most insistently and to support it by empirical evidence which touches every man closely.

Right, like this will even slow down the objectivists.

The unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another without passing through the conscious.

Okay, let’s pin down [for all practical purposes] what this means.

Our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other.

As a pessimist, Schopenhaurer has nothing on Freud.

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct…

Cue Satyr’s thugs?

I was making frequent use of cocaine at that time … I had been the first to recommend the use of cocaine, in 1885, and this recommendation had brought serious reproaches down on me.

Fast forward a hundred years…

[iambiguous]

[b]Ian McEwan

When we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing getting better, nothing to look forward to. But when I think small, closer in-you know, a girl I’ve just met, or this song we’regoing to do with Chas, or snowboarding next month, then it looks great. So this is going to be my motto - think small.[/b]

Or tiny if that doesn’t work.

Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.

As opposed to barely wanting to.

He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn’t really much else to do. Make something, and die.

And God saw that this was good. And He called it the American Dream.

Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution.

For example: Plato’s The Republic and the real world.

Blind luck, to arrive in the world with your properly formed parts in the right place, to be born to parents who were loving, not cruel, or to escape, by geographical or social accident, war or poverty. And therefore to find it so much easier to be virtuous.

Tell that to the reactionaries, right?

Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option.

And sometimes it’s really true.

[iambiguous]

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

It flatters you to think that you’re not like other people, but it hurts you to realise that other people are not like you.[/b]

You know, if it does.

Life is an experience of not knowing where to go, but with a good sense of direction.

At least until you get there.

People with a clear conscience are just lazy and unimaginative.

And some [of course] wouldn’t have it any other way

What was in the beginning and what will be in the end becomes irrelevant as soon as you start wondering WTF are you doing in the middle.

In other words, in the middle of what?

So much existence, so little life.

Naturally as it were.

In the beginning there was Beauty. Then we tried to define it.

Beauty being the least of it in some circles.

[iambiguous]

[b]Patricia Highsmith

Our actions and responsibilities are our own; what later returns to either haunt or applaud us is neither possible to predict nor always completely understandable.[/b]

See if you can spot the contradiction in terms.

He remembered that right after that, he had stolen a loaf of bread from a delicatessen counter and had taken it home and devoured it, feeling that the world owed a loaf of bread to him, and more.

Situational ethics as it were.

At any rate, Therese thought, she was happier than she ever had been before. And why worry about defining everything?

A whole other kind of philosophy, isn’t it?

I got a theory a person ought to do everything it’s possible to do before he dies, and maybe die trying to do something that’s really impossible.

Like, for example, trying to live forever.

Mr Greenleaf was such a decent fellow himself, he took it for granted that everybody else in the world was decent, too. Tom had almost forgotten such people existed.

Of course Tom would, wouldn’t he: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Ripley

It was easy, after all, simply to open the door and escape. It was easy, she thought, because she was not really escaping at all.

And here practice makes perfect.

[iambiguous]

[b]Thomas Harris

The worm that destroys you is the temptation to agree with your critics, to get their approval.[/b]

Like that will ever happen here.

Fear comes with imagination, it’s a penalty, it’s the price of imagination.

For example, imagining the cannibal consuming you.

The most stable elements, Clarice, appear in the middle of the periodic table, roughly between iron and silver. Between iron and silver. I think that is appropriate for you.

I know: The smug bastard.

What does he do, Clarice? What is the first and principal thing he does, what need does he serve by killing? He covets. How do we begin to covet? We begin by coveting what we see every day.

And that’s where the police always go first, right?

In the vaults of our hearts and brains, danger waits. All the chambers are not lovely, light and high. There are holes in the floor of the mind, like those in a medieval dungeon floor - the stinking oubliettes, named for forgetting, bottle-shaped cells in solid rock with the trapdoor in the top. Nothing escapes from them quietly to ease us. A quake, some betrayal by our safeguards, and sparks of memory fire the noxious gases - things trapped for years fly free, ready to explode in pain and drive us to dangerous behavior…

Something straight out of, say, Penny Dreadful?

Did you ever think, Clarice, why the Philistines don’t understand you? It’s because you are the answer to Samson’s riddle. You are the honey in the lion.

Biblical busllshit as it were.

[iambiguous]

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

The limits of my language are the limits of my…
Wittgenstein: world
Heidegger: attunement to the factum of Being-with
Twitter: follower count[/b]

We need a “follower count” here, right?

The German word for the sudden urge to look up the dictionary definition of something about which you’ve just written 20 pages.

And then how to translate that into English.

Philosophy has no solution for…
Rousseau: tyranny
Kant: the finitude of knowledge
Bataille: our devotion to guilt
Camus: high cigarette taxes

Well, three out of four ain’t bad.

Good tweets are all alike. Every bad tweet is bad in its own way.

Or [of course]: Good threads are all alike. Every bad thread is bad in its own way.
Posts too.

At the pinnacle of wisdom you become…
325 BCE: a philosopher king
1781: a tutor to the rich
2016: an insufferable promoter of your TED Talk

I still don’t actually know what a TED talk is. Why? Just lucky I guess.

Philosophy: You know you know nothing
Psychoanalysis: You don’t know you know nothing

Not counting those who know everything of course.

[iambiguous]

[b]Ursula K. Le Guin

What’s wrong with men? Tenar inquired cautiously.
As cautiously, lowering her voice, Moss replied, I don’t know, my dearie. I’ve thought on it. Often I’ve thought on it. The best I can say it is like this. A man’s in his skin, see, like a nut in its shell. She held up her long, bent, wet fingers as if holding a walnut. It’s hard and strong, that shell, and it’s all full of him. Full of grand man-meat, man-self. And that’s all. That’s all there is. It’s all him and nothing else, inside.[/b]

Full of himself. That’s close enough, right?

Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can’t understand that they end in him, but they don’t end with him.

Ours will.

Freedom is never very safe.

Unless of course it’s just a word.

A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They’d rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.

A dangerous philosophy too. My own for example.

So maybe the difference isn’t language. Maybe it’s this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. The dragons are dangerous, yes. They can do harm, yes. But they’re not evil. They’re beneath our morality, if you will, like any animal. Or beyond it. They have nothing to do with it. We must choose and choose again. The animals need only be and do. We’re yoked, and they’re free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom…

Let’s file this one under, “strange, but true”.

The machine conceals the machinations.

And not just this one.

[iambiguous]

[b]Michael Cunningham

Remember, how often the great art of the past didn’t look great at first, how often it didn’t look like art at all; how much easier it is, decades or centuries later, to adore it, not only because it is, in fact, great but because it’s still here; because the inevitable little errors and infelicities tend to recede in an object that’s survived the War of 1812, the eruption of Krakatoa, the rise and fall of Nazism.[/b]

Here we go again: Great Art.

I have to keep reminding myself that almost everybody is always lying.

Worse [sometimes]: That they’re not.

Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together.

Did you hear that, Kids?

You grow weary of being treated as the enemy simply because you are not young anymore…

Either that or you pity those who are.

It’s stores, it’s the whole thing, all that shit everywhere, 'scuse me, that merchandise, all those goods, and ads screaming at you from all over the place, buy buy buy buy buy, and when somebody comes up to me with big hair and gobs of makeup on and says, ‘Can I help you?’, it’s all I can do not to scream, ‘Bitch, you can’t even help yourself’.

Another unpatriotic Commie rat.

She has failed. She wishes she didn’t mind. Something, she thinks, is wrong with her.

Trump just fired her.

[iambiguous]

[b]Arundhati Roy

It was the kind of time in the life of a family when something happens to nudge its hidden morality from its resting place and make it bubble to the surface and float for a while. In clear view. For everyone to see.[/b]

Never came close to that in my family. Unless you count the bottles and the beatings.

And on Ammu’s road to Age and Death a small, sunny meadow appeared. Copper grass spangled with blue butterflies. Beyond it, an abyss.

Nope, nothing like that yet.

The trees were still green, the sky still blue, which counted for something. So they went ahead and plugged their smelly paradise - God’s Own Country they called it in their brochures - because they knew, those clever Hotel People, that smelliness, like other peoples’ poverty, was merely a matter of getting used to. A question of discipline. Of Rigor and Air-conditioning. Nothing more.

Really, who writes those brochures anyway?

One: An end to cross-ownership in businesses. For example: weapons manufacturers cannot own TV stations, mining corporations cannot run newspapers, business houses cannot fund universities, drug companies cannot control public health funds. Two: Natural resources and essential infrastructure—water supply, electricity, health, and education—cannot be privatized. Three: Everybody must have the right to shelter, education, and health care. Four: The children of the rich cannot inherit their parents’ wealth.

You know, after the revolution.

At Pappachi’s funeral, Mammachi cried and her contact lenses slid around in her eyes. Ammu told the twins that Mammachi was crying more because she was used to him than because she loved him. She was used to having him slouching around the pickle factory, and was used to being beaten from time to time. Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kinds of things they could get used to. You only had to look around you, Ammu said, to see that beatings with brass vases were the least of them.

And not just in the Third World.

The God of Small Things.
He left no footprints in the sand, no ripples in water, no image in mirrors.

No money in the bank.

[iambiguous]

[b]Walker Percy

Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.[/b]

Must be a religious thing.

Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.

Though not necessarily having anything to do with reality.

Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world.

Hell, in that case, we’re bursting at the seams with it.

Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place.

So, he wondered, was it?

Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.

And that might be anything, right?

If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.

Apparently, this is true: poetrysoup.com/famous_poets/ … poets.aspx
[that part of it anyway]

[iambiguous]

[b]Ethicist For Hire

God is Dead is Will to Power is Eternal Recurrence is Nihilism is God is Dead is Will to Power is Eternal Recurrence is Nihilism is God is…[/b]

As in forever and ever and ever.

Man is by nature a social media animal.

You know, just to update it.

History of Philosophical Autobiography:
Ancient: “Confessions”
Modern: “Ecce Homo”
Today: “Delete Browser History”

What some call progress, what others don’t.

Why did the chicken cross the road?
Hillary: “It was the pragmatic choice.”
Bernie: “For a revolution!”
Trump: “This is why we need a wall!”

The race so far.

Analytic philosophy says do it before. Continental philosophy says do it after…

Let’s figure out before and after what.

For extra credit: Is Aristotle’s metaphysics the basis of his patriarchal views? Or are his patriarchal views the basis for his metaphysics?

Someone punt this to Turd, okay?

[iambiguous]

[b]Jeffrey Eugenides

Then one Sunday morning, before winter break, Abby’s boyfriend, Whitney, materialized at their kitchen table, reading something called “Of Grammatology”. When Madeleine asked what the book was about, she was given to understand by Whitney that the idea of a book being “about” something was exactly what this book was against, and that, if it was “about” anything, then it was about the need to stop thinking of books as being about things.[/b]

It’s about time. Or, sure, maybe not.

She used a line from Trollope’s Barchester Towers as an epigraph: "There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.”

John Fowles being the sole exception. Among [no doubt] many others.

If you weren’t a lucky child, you didn’t know you weren’t lucky until you got older. And then it was all you ever thought about.

Me? I was lucky to be less unlucky than I might have been. And nothing’s really changed since.

But as I peeked at my brother’s inert body…I was aware only of what a strange thing it was to be male. Society discriminated against women, no question. But what about the discrimination of being sent to war? Which sex was really thought to be expendable.

And which class?

It might not even be that great to marry your ideal. Probably, once you attained your ideal, you got bored and wanted another.

Not only that but over and over again.

She had just started living like a grown-up and she’d never felt more vulnerable, frightened or confused in her life.

The part they leave out. Or forget to put in.

[iambiguous]

[b]Lionel Shriver

In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting.[/b]

Comment please, Mr. Objectivist.

I don’t understand why doctors don’t advise everybody to lay on twenty extra pounds while they’ve got the chance. I might not advocate outright obesity, but there’s a reason for fat - it’s a resource.

Let’s just say that America is on board here. And then some.

For that matter, all this, is there a God? Corlis – I don’t care!
Huh, I considered. I guess I don’t either.
Most people don’t! All they care about, he added grimly, is being right.

Obviously the Devil’s work. And [around here] God’s no match for him.

Sheer obstinacy is far more durable than courage, though it’s not as pretty.

Curious minds want to know: Who decides these things?

For the living, death is thievery.

Like nature gives a shit.

They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him, because broken machines can be fixed.

The “medical model” they call it. And most times it works. Just not for Kevin. Or, for that matter, me.