a thread for mundane ironists

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10961

[b]Erich Maria Remarque from All Quiet on the Western Front

At school nobody ever taught us how to light a cigarette in a storm of rain, nor how a fire could be made with wet wood-nor that it is best to stick a bayonet in the belly because there it doesn’t get jammed, as it does in the ribs.[/b]

Let’s try to explain that.

Our knowledge of life is limited to death.

Unless of course you think outside the box. At least while you still can.

To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and again and often forever.

Me? Well, sort of.

Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out on themselves. Whoever survives the country wins. That would be much simpler and more than just this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting.

Kropp, meet Maurice Conchis: youtu.be/gQRFnYvQJVA

You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well.

Don’t even pretend to understand this.

Katczinsky says it is all to do with education – it softens the brain.

Or, here, keeps it all up in the clouds.

10962

[b]Ken Kesey from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Good writin’ ain’t necessarily good readin’.[/b]

I’ll bet that gets tricky.

But he won’t let the pain blot out the humor no more’n he’ll let the humor blot out the pain.

Trust me: here practice makes perfect. Well, here, whatever perfect is.

I don’t think you fully understand the public, my friend; in this country, when something is out of order, then the quickest way to get it fixed is the best way.

And look where that’s got us.

What the Chronics are - or most of us - are machines with flaws inside that can’t be repaired, flaws born in, or flaws beat in over so many years of the guy running head-on into solid things that by the time the hospital found him he was bleeding rust in some vacant lot

Let’s decide: Chronics…pinheads. What’s the difference?

His whole body shakes with the strain as he tries to lift something he knows he can’t lift, something everybody knows he can’t lift. But, for just a second, when we hear the cement grind at our feet, we think, by golly, he might do it.

Yo, Chief! You’re up!!

I had to keep on acting deaf if i wanted to hear at all.

Want some gum?
Thank you. Mmm. Juicy Fruit.
You sly son of a bitch, Chief. Can you hear me, too?
Yeah, you bet!
Well, I’ll be goddamned, Chief! And they all, they all think you’re deaf and dumb. Jesus Christ! You fooled them, Chief. You fooled them. You fooled them all! Goddamn you!

10963

[b]The Onion

Relationship Experts Say Mailing Body Part To Ex On Valentine’s Day Only Way To Win Them Back[/b]

Well, there’s always next year.

Valentine’s Dinner Ruined After Boyfriend Overcooks Edible Underwear

Of course it’s a real thing: google.com/search?q=edible+ … s-wiz-serp

Fear Of Rejection Prevents Man From Asking Woman What Her Underwear Smells Like

Let alone if he can eat it.

Amazon Echo Declares It Heard Everything And It’s Taking The Kids

Next up: Alexa weighs in.

Man Entirely Different Misogynist Online Than In Real Life

Next up: misandrists weigh in.

Archaeologists Discover Early Humans Developed Shelter To Provide Passive Income Stream For Landlords

Including some Neanderthals.

10964

[b]Samuel Beckett from Waiting for Godot

Astride of a grave and a difficult birth.
Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps.
We have time to grow old.
The air is full of our cries.
But habit is a great deadener.
At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing.
Let him sleep on.[/b]

We’ve all been there. Or will be.

That passed the time.
It would have passed in any case.
Yes, but not so rapidly.

Hey, like posting here!

we lost our rights?
we got rid of them.

And all the difference that makes.

Suppose we repented.
Repented what?
Oh…We wouldn’t have to go into the details.
Our being born?

A good place to start for all too many of us.

In an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness.

You know, like, for some of us, coming here.

Who am I to tell my private nightmares to if I can’t tell them to you?

Next up: fractured and fragmented nightmares.

10965

My best ever visit to a theatre was to see live Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart playing Godot in the tiny Theatre Royal Brighton.

Pozzo was played by simon callow

imdb.com/name/nm0001003/?ref_=tt_cl_t_4

I had a front row seat. It was amazing to see Ian and Pat batting off each other. Ian shone a little brighter I think.

Pozzo cam in like a fucking whirlwind…

10966

[b]Milan Kundera from The Unbearable Lightness of Being

What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.[/b]

The truth about what though?

…she merely wished to find a way out of the maze. She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness!

The unbearable lightness of sex?
Yeah, right.

what’s the matter? he asked
nothing
what do you want me to do for you?
i want you to be old. ten years older. twenty years older
what she meant was: i want you to be weak. as weak as i am.

Just you wait…your time is coming.
Still, nothing I can do about the way things are now.

He remained annoyed with himself until he realized that not knowing what he wanted was actually quite natural. We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can never compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

Of course: the human all too human condition.

History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.

And it doesn’t get heavier than that, does it?

If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.

Yo, dasein! You’re up!!

10967

[b]The Onion

God Reveals He Occasionally Eats Humans[/b]

Why should that surprise anyone?

20,000 Tons Of Pubic Hair Trimmed In Preparation For Valentine’s Day

You know, roughly.

Top Super Bowl Ad Features Paul Rudd Urging Americans To Drive Chevy Far Away From This Grim And Dying Nation

Uh, really?

New FanDuel ‘Double Play’ Contest Offers Users Chance To Win Back House

And, with it, their spouse and kids.

New Evidence Suggests Dinosaurs Would Have Driven Selves To Extinction Through Greed And Complacency Anyway

But not for millions of more years. And where would that leave us? Probably not even around yet.

Chess App Allows Man To Waste Time On Phone But In Smart Way

Well, what some call smart. But it’s still just a fucking game, Pedro.

10968

[b]Joan Didion from The Year of Magical Thinking

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.[/b]

youtu.be/DDXWclpGhcg

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.

And then, for some of us, over and over and over again.

…we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.

Or close enough.

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces.

Just out of curiosity, will someone here link us to that look. Does it match my own, I’m wondering.

Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.

Mine didn’t. On the other hand, I know why it didn’t.

I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.

Still, imagining is not the same thing as knowing for sure.

10969

[b]William S. Burroughs from Naked Lunch

Now, boys, you won’t see this operation performed very often and there’s a reason for that… You see it has absolutely no medical value. No one knows what the purpose of it originally was or if it had a purpose at all. Personally I think it was a pure artistic creation from the beginning.[/b]

Cue Doctor Benway.
Though, just out of curiosity, how’d the operation turn out for you?

What does she care for the atom bomb, the bedbugs, the cancer rent, Friendly Finance waiting to repossess her delinquent flesh… Sweet dreams, Pantopon Rose.

Of course: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantopon

The boy looks into Mugwump eyes blank as obsidian mirrors, pools of black blood, glory holes in a toilet wall closing on the Last Erection.

It was a normal day…

If a weaker baboon be attacked by a stronger baboon the weaker baboon will either (a) present his hrump fanny I believe is the word, gentlemen, heh heh for passive intercourse or (b) if he is a different type baboon more extrovert and well-adjusted, lead an attack on an even weaker baboon if he can find one.

No, seriously.

Nobody delivers on time except by accident.

If not randomly, right FJ?

The world network of junkies, tuned on a cord of rancid jissom, tying up in furnished rooms, shivering in the junk-sick morning.

Yo, Bob! Yo, Dianne! Yo, Rick! Yo, Nadine!

10970

[b]Don DeLillo from White Noise

I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it’s enough to make me proud to be an American.[/b]

Or, for others, “Sieg Heil!”

You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out. This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal existence on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature.

Well, not counting the last part, let’s say.

The vast and terrible depth.
Of course, he said.
The inexhaustibility.
I understand.
The whole huge nameless thing.
Yes, absolutely.
The massive darkness.
Certainly, certainly.
The whole terrible endless hugeness.
I know exactly what you mean.

That’s still going around.

Sounds like a boring life.
I hope it lasts forever, she said.

Some get this, some don’t.

I’m not just a college professor. I’m the head of a department. I don’t see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That’s for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the county, where the fish hatcheries are.

The philosophy department let’s call it.

Their bumper sticker read GUN CONTROL IS MIND CONTROL. In situations like this, you want to stick close to people in right-wing fringe groups.

Is that the situation here?

10971

[b]Cormac McCarthy from The Road

If you break little promises, you’ll break big ones.[/b]

Sounds about right.

Where men can’t live gods fare no better.

Wow, what a coincidence.

Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?

Not by much is my guess.

What would you do if I died?
If you died I would want to die too.
So you could be with me?
Yes. So I could be with you.
Okay.

Fuck that, he thought.

Can you do it?
When the time comes?
When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die.

Dystopian world, dystopian exchanges.

Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.

Cue God. Or, in the interim, cue Putin?

10972

[b]Joseph Heller from Catch–22

They agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.[/b]

Pick two:
1] the masses
2] the pinheads here

Insanity is contagious.

Yep, even virtually.

It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.

In other words, in this day and age, not miraculous at all.

What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can’t all be worth dying for.

Next up: what is the military industrial complex?

What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused, or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, and rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to bodyguards, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere.

Or, sure, one or two of us here.

Why are they going to disappear him?
I don’t know.
It doesn’t make sense. It isn’t even good grammar.

Yeah, that too.

10973

[b]The Onion

Disney Unveils New Mass Grave Where Fans Can Be Buried Alive With Favorite Characters Forever[/b]

Sure, it might be true.

Horrifying Email From Ex-Girlfriend Titled ‘A Few Things’

Who hasn’t gotten one of those.

Ethical Diamond Company Only Uses White Children To Mine

That would make it ethical, right?

‘New York Times’ Announces New Columnist Will Contribute Nothing To Society 3 Times A Week

Or, like all the others, something close to it?

Anonymous Mourner Returns To Lay Hydrocodone Tablet At Rush Limbaugh’s Grave

Probably you, wasn’t it?

Doomsday Prepper Hoards Chili’s Gift Cards In Case He Needs Casual Dining After The Apocalypse

Someone explain this please.

10974

[b]Anaïs Nin from Henry and June

I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength.[/b]

Next up: the men who are: knowthyself.forumotion.net/

Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.

And that’s because…

Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.

Gasp!

I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.

Of course, he wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’m sick of my own romanticism!

“a movement in the arts and literature that originated in the late 18th century, emphasizing inspiration, subjectivity, and the primacy of the individual.” Me? Fractured and fragmented all the more.

Women always think that when they have my shoes, my dress my hairdresser, my make-up, it will work the same way. They do not conceive of the witchcraft that is needed. They do not know that I am not beautiful but that I only appear to be at certain moments.

Ladies! You’re up!!

10975

[b]Erich Maria Remarque from All Quiet on the Western Front

I am no longer a shuddering speck of existence, alone in the darkness;–I belong to them and they to me; we all share the same fear and the same life…I could bury my face in them, in these voices, these words that have saved me and will stand by me.[/b]

A “war thing” let’s call it.

Our thoughts are clay, they are moulded with the changes of the days;–when we are resting they are good; under fire, they are dead. Fields of craters within and without.

A “war thing” let’s call it.
Though, for some of us, a “peace thing” too.

We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.

Literally, say.

The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.

:laughing:

The days, the weeks, the years out here shall come back again, and our dead comrades shall then stand up again and march with us, our heads shall be clear, we shall have a purpose, and so we shall march, our dead comrades beside us, the years at the Front behind us:—against whom, against whom?

Well, for me, it’s the fulminating fanatic pinheads of course.

The coffin, it shall protect me, though Death himself lies in it.

The final and the fittest “having your cake and eating it too”.

10976

[b]Ken Kesey from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

But at least I tried.[/b]

Sometimes that’s enough, and sometimes it’s not.

The secret of being a top-notch con man is being able to know what the mark wants, and how to make him think he’s getting it.

Of course: youtu.be/N27gumJNHP0

I’d take a look at my own self in the mirror and wonder how it was possible that anybody could manage such an enormous thing as being what he was.

Of course: you can’t.
Well, not counting all the millions and millions that do.

The world news might not be therapeutic.

That sure hasn’t changed.

Like a cartoon world, where the figures are flat and outlined in black, jerking through some kind of goofy story that might be real funny if it weren’t for the cartoon figures being real guys…

Say, that reminds me of the cartoon world we got going here.

It wasn’t the practices, I don’t think, it was the feeling that the great, deadly, pointing forefinger of society was pointing at me–and the great voice of millions chanting, ‘Shame. Shame. Shame.’ It’s society’s way of dealing with someone different.

Me? Well, it met its match of course.

10977

[b]James Joyce from Ulysses

Think you’re escaping and run into yourself.[/b]

Let’s just leave it at that.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Anyone here actually pull this off?

Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.

Want me to explain that to you?

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.

Well, it is Ulysses, right?

The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.

Next up: what we do here.

Let my country die for me.

[i]Of course, he’s only paraphrasing Grace Slick:

“Stephen won’t give his arm
To no gold star mother’s farm;
War’s good business so give your son
And I’d rather have my country die for me.”

Or, sure, the other way around.[/i]

10978

[b]Joan Didion from The Year of Magical Thinking

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.[/b]

It occured to me that I don’t.

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.

To say the least I might add.

Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.

A miracle let’s call it.

We were not having any fun, he had recently begun pointing out. I would take exception (didn’t we do this, didn’t we do that) but I had also known what he meant. He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living.

Whatever that means.

The death of a parent, he wrote, “despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago."

Is my own mother dead or alive? Damned if I know. Same with my brother and sisters.

There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible.

And what level might that be?

10979

[b]Arthur Miller from Death of a Salesman

A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.[/b]

Any small men here?

I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been.

That ever happen to you?

I don’t say he’s a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.

Right, the “he’s still a human being” argument. Like that settles something.

The only thing you’ve got in this world is what you can sell.

Or, for most, what they can buy.

You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there’s no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple spots on your hat and your finished.

Like me and the dearth of smiles here?

Figure it out. Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there’s nobody to live in it.

Or [sort of]: “twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift”

10980

[b]Mieko Kawakami

But I wasn’t crying because I was sad. I guess I was crying because we had nowhere else to go, no choice but to go on living in this world. Crying because we had no other world to choose, and crying at everything before us, everything around us.[/b]

Now that’s crying.

They’re on a pedestal from the second they’re born, only they don’t realize it. Whenever they need something, their moms come running. They’re taught to believe that their penises make them superior, and that women are just there for them to use as they see fit. Then they go out into the world, where everything centers around them and their dicks.

Or, of course, some come here.

If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had. Don’t ask what was in their fridge or in their closet. The number of windows says it all. It says everything. If they had none, or maybe one or two, that’s all you need to know.

Okay, let’s start counting.

Listen, if there is a hell, we’re in it. And if there’s a heaven, we’re already there. This is it.

You know, covering all bases.

Well, we use words to communicate, right? Still, most of our words don’t actually get across. You know what I mean? Well, our words might, but not what we’re actually trying to say. That’s what we’re always dealing with. We live in this place, in this world, where we can share our words but not our thoughts.

See, didn’t I tell you?

Because we’re always in pain, we know exactly what it means to hurt somebody else.

Ah, the world in a nutshell. Or one of them.