a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won’t even stand close to the blade. I’m one of those. We don’t bend anything.[/b]

Any benders of history here?

I never learn anything from listening to myself.

Well, at least she learned that.

There are always more questions. Science as a process is never complete. It is not a foot race, with a finish line… People will always be waiting at a particular finish line: journalists with their cameras, impatient crowds eager to call the race, astounded to see the scientists approach, pass the mark, and keep running. It’s a common misunderstanding, he said. They conclude there was no race. As long as we won’t commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing.

You being the exception, right?

Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what’s not in it.

Or, for some, an empty syringe.

Bitter words normally evaporate with the moisture of breath, after a quarrel. In order to become permanent, they require transcribers, reporters, complicit black hearts.

Or the equivalent of that here.

To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.

Marked and…scarred.

[b]Jackson Pollock

Painting is no problem. The problem is what to do when you’re not painting.[/b]

Of course I have my own equivalent of that.

The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.

And that narrows it down to almost nothing.

A real friend is someone you say a sentence to and they know ten thousand words behind that sentence.

Or at least a hundred.

I continue to get further away from the usual painter’s tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass or other foreign matter added.

I use a slingshot myself.

When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing.

Anyone like that here?

You can’t learn techniques and then try to become a painter. Techniques are a result.

I suspect however that in some respects the two are indistinguishable.

“I shall enjoy Hannah Montana’s gin-soaked reveries at the beginning of the remake of Citizen Kane directed by James Franco.”

This made my day.

[b]God

Orgasms are My way of apologizing for everything else.[/b]

Like that even comes close.

I never would have made you this smart if I knew you were going to be this stupid.

Does even He understand what that means?

[b]Just to answer a few recent prayers:

No.
No.
Maybe.
No.
I’ll see what I can do.
Are you kidding?!?
Sure, that would be funny for Me.
Reply hazy. Ask again later.
No.
No.[/b]

Which one is yours?

Try not to take yourself too seriously. After all, you’re an idiot.

Trump or [now] Mueller?

I blame everyone in general and you in particular.

Though in no particular order.

Time to start over again.

Okay, fine, just leave me out of it.

[b]Douglas Hofstadter

I am the thought you are now thinking. [/b]

Not anymore.

I would like to understand things better, but I don’t want to understand them perfectly.

What things for example?

The nice thing about having a brain is that one can learn, that ignorance can be supplanted by knowledge, and that small bits of knowledge can gradually pile up into substantial heaps.

Or not as the case may.

The paraphrase of says that for any record player, there are records which it cannot play because they will cause its indirect self-destruction.

Next up: Gödel’s Theorem and the 8-track.

I don’t feel I have the right to snuff the lives of chicken and fish.

And, if they could, they’d thank him for it.

We don’t want to focus on the trees or their leaves at the expense of the forest.

And let’s not forget the pine needles.

[b]Wassily Kandinsky

The sound of colors is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would express bright yellow with bass notes or dark lake with treble. [/b]

How about the color brown? A shit plopping into the toilet?

The organic laws of construction tangled me in my desires, and only with great pain, effort, and struggle did I break through these ‘walls around art’.

Things only artists say.

The force that propels the human spirit on the clear way forward and upward is the abstract spirit.

Things only artists playing philosopher say.

Black is like the silence of the body after death, the close of life.

That or a particularly dark grey.

Efforts to revive the art principles of the past at best produce works of art that resemble a stillborn child.

Can anyone here name one?

Objects damage pictures.

If not on purpose.

Jan Mieszkowski

My new book, Crises of the Sentence, is now available from @UChicagoPress. It includes:
a) Hegel on how to write a sentence
b) Freud on how not to write a sentence
c) Flaubert on never finishing a sentence
d) Nietzsche on never starting one

I’d buy one if I still read books.

Idealism: I am what I think
Materialism: I think what I am
Psychoanalysis: You aren’t what you think
Existentialism: You can only think what you aren’t, weren’t, and never will be

And in precisely that order.

The Mathematics of Desire
Hegel: 0 x 0 = 1
Lacan: 1 + 1 = -1
Deleuze: 2 ÷ 0 = 3
Twitter: 280 - Self - Other = 279

And in precisely that order.

English Lit: You’re meeting your archenemy on the bridge
French Lit: You’re dueling with your archenemy on the bridge
Russian Lit: You’re realizing that your archenemy on the bridge is you

American Lit: You’re archenemy is a comic book character.

Our children may not be learning biology, but they are learning an ideological critique of science.

You know, if you have children.

Idealism: So much for the facts!
Realism: So much for the fictions!
Materialism: So much for your thoughts!
Existentialism: So much for your feelings!

More or less as it were.

[b]Greg Iles

Einstein said the arrow of time flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said the past is never dead; it’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose provenance dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.[/b]

Let’s just say that I understand this better than you.

The temptation to second-guess is strong. But I must remember one thing.
Life is simple.
You are healthy or you are sick. You are faithful to your wife or you aren’t. You are alive or you are dead.
I am alive.

Sure, call it all simple.

He always reminded us that every atom in our bodies was once part of a distant star that had exploded. He talked about how evolution moves from simplicity toward complexity, and how human intelligence is the highest known expression of evolution. I remember him telling me that a frog’s brain is much more complex than a star. He saw human consciousness as the first neuron of the universe coming to life and awareness. A spark in the darkness, waiting to spread to fire.

Is he anyone you know?

Man plans, God laughs.

Fuck God then, he thought.

Man is the universe becoming conscious of itself.

Autonomically as it were.

People make a grievous error thinking that a list of facts is the truth. Facts are just the bare bones out of which truth is made.

If, of course, there is even a truth to be had.

[b]Joan Lindsay

Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place.[/b]

Starting with the Big Bang?

Although we are necessarily concerned, in a chronicle of events, with physical action by the light of day, history suggests that the human spirit wanders farthest in the silent hours between midnight and dawn. Those dark fruitful hours, seldom recorded, whose secret flowerings breed peace and war, loves and hates, the crowning or uncrowning of heads.

Sometimes literally, sometimes not.

Everything, if you could only see it clearly enough, like this, is beautiful and complete.

Either that or nothing.

Marion Quade, the only member of the class to take Pythagoras in her stride, was a favourite pupil, in the sense that a savage who understands a few words of the language of a shipwrecked sailor is a favourite savage.

Who is the equivalent of that here?

Sometimes just to look at Miranda’s calm oval face and straight corn-yellow hair gave her a sharp little stab of pleasure.

The one in the film was stunning.

Any artist is insulted by the suggestion that art is merely a matter of recording reality, and knows that it is impossible to explain how imagination can transform not only events and people, but the artist as well, into quite different “realities”.

Though some prefer to have their art spoon-fed.

[b]Existential Comics

Using philosophy in my day to day life to remind the cashier that metaphysically speaking, the paper and plastic bags are the same, so the choice is spurious.[/b]

Go ahead, try this yourself. You know, if paper is even still an option.

The fact that life is short is what makes the time we have that much more beautiful.





APRIL FOOLS!!!
life is suffering and death is inconceivably horrifying

Of course that was yesterday.

I don’t understand how the British Isles have like 145 distinct accents but every single person from California sounds like the same idiot.

Genetics?

Sometimes we just have to accept that certain things are fundamentally unknowable, such as how the universe got created, what consciousness is, or what exactly happens when you try to leave the European Union.

Maybe the Brits here can explain it.

[b]Top ways to deal with existential despair:

  1. Drown it out with alcohol.
  2. Distract yourself with entertainment.
  3. Try to find God.
  4. Pursue meaningless sex.
  5. I dunno…try to authentically find some sort of reason to live, I guess.[/b]

Actually, nothing works.

It’s actually not possible to understand Hegel, you can only dialectically approach a more refined misunderstanding of Hegel.

Or here: It’s actually not possible to understand Kids, you can only dialectically approach a more refined misunderstanding of Kids.

[b]Sarah Bernhardt

Art is not about something, Art is something.[/b]

Not unlike almost everything else.

We ought to hate very rarely, as it is too fatiguing; remain indifferent to a great deal, forgive often and never forget.

We’ll need a context of course.

Once the curtain is raised, the actor is ceases to belong to himself. He belongs to his character, to his author, to his public. He must do the impossible to identify himself with the first, not to betray the second, and not to disappoint the third.

Much as we do with our personas.

Oscar Wilde: ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’
Sarah Bernhardt: ‘I don’t care if you burn.’

A couple of wits let’s call them.

Slow down? Rest? With all eternity before me?

Though only if not slowing and resting is actually an option.

He who is incapable of feeling strong passions, of being shaken by anger, of living in every sense of the word, will never be a good actor.

Uh, no shit?

[b]Lenny Bruce

I wanted out of the navy so bad in '45, I faked homo to get a discharge. It didn’t matter that the Germans surrendered, I knew we were heading to Japan and I was done with that scene.[/b]

Anyone here ever fake homo?

Communism is like one big phone company.

Or, for others, one big cemetary.

If you live in New York, even if you’re Catholic, you’re Jewish.

How about if you’re only visiting?

Miami Beach is where neon goes to die.

Anyone here actually seen that?

The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds.

Let’s prove this.

I’ve talked to biblical cats, and Neanderthals who been here since day one. No one here has even seen the Big Boss. Ever.

Yeah, but you have to die first.

[b]The Dead Author

It is important to love yourself not because you are worth it, but because love is the only reason to keep living with a terrible person.[/b]

You more than me I’m guessing.

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

Or, for some, both.

Sometimes you have to give up if you want to keep going.

And sometimes this even makes sense.

Don’t believe in Josef K.'s innocence based on Max Brod’s edition of The Trial.

What’s the scoop here?

Karl Marx died 136 years ago today. Slavoj Žižek has become sex columnist for the newspaper of Swiss finance capital.

What’s the scoop here?

If it doesn’t spark joy, it won’t make you unhappy later.

And how comforting is that?

[b]Richard Rorty

Truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.[/b]

Let’s just say you can take this too far.

Always strive to excel, but only on weekends.

Well, he was an ironist.

There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.

Unless you count the biological stuff.

There are credentials for admission to our democratic society. You have to be educated in order to be a participant in our conversation. So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours.

I like to think that here it’s the fucking Kids.

Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.

That and what you let them get away with.

My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.

Clearly, you can’t get more remote than that.

[b]Nikola Tesla

Life is and will ever remain an equation incapable of solution, but it contains certain known factors.[/b]

Well, if you know what they are it does.

Invention is the most important product of man’s creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.

Of course he’s just paraphrasing God.

Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.

Like some do here with words.

What one man calls God, another calls the laws of physics.

My guess: it works that way for women too.

If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9, then you would have the key to the universe.

I’ll need a little help with this one.

Nature may reach the same result in many ways. Like a wave in the physical world, in the infinite ocean of the medium which pervades all, so in the world of organisms, in life, an impulse started proceeds onward, at times, may be, with the speed of light, at times, again, so slowly that for ages and ages it seems to stay, passing through processes of a complexity inconceivable to men, but in all its forms, in all its stages, its energy ever and ever integrally present. A single ray of light from a distant star falling upon the eye of a tyrant in bygone times may have altered the course of his life, may have changed the destiny of nations, may have transformed the surface of the globe, so intricate, so inconceivably complex are the processes in Nature. In no way can we get such an overwhelming idea of the grandeur of Nature than when we consider, that in accordance with the law of the conservation of energy, throughout the Infinite, the forces are in a perfect balance, and hence the energy of a single thought may determine the motion of a universe.

Sure, why not?

[b]Harlan Coben

Years fly by, but the heart stays in the same place.[/b]

Tell that to mine.

“…better to have loved and lost" bullshit. Don’t show me paradise and then burn it down.

Until one day you’re setting it on fire yourself.

Trust is like that. You can break it for a good reason. But it still remains broken.

We’ll need to hear the reason of course.

I remember one time I heard this English professor asking the class what the world’s scariest noise is. Is it a man crying out in pain? A woman’s scream of terror? A gunshot? A baby crying? And the professor shakes his head and says, No, the scariest noise is, you’re all alone in your dark house, you know you’re all alone, you know that there is no chance anyone else is home or within miles—and then, suddenly, from upstairs, you hear the toilet flush.

Either that or from downstairs in the basement.

You bring your own weather to the picnic.

True, and so do all the others.

We are often told during times of bereavement that time heals all wounds. That’s crap. In truth, you are devastated, you mourn, you cry to the point where you think you’ll never stop - and then you reach a stage where the survival instinct takes over. You stop. You simply won’t or can’t let yourself “go there” anymore because the pain was too great. You block. You deny. But you don’t really heal.

One thing for sure he thought: no one will ever mourn like that when I go.

[b]Jim Holt

…“messages from the unseen” that the great Alan Turing left behind at his death: Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.[/b]

What’s that make philosophy then?

As Grünbaum is fond of saying, even though the universe is finite in age, it has always existed, if by “always” you mean at all instants of time.

Wow, that explains nothing so well.

For, as the German diplomat and philosopher Max Scheler wrote, “He who has not, as it were, looked into the abyss of the absolute Nothing will completely overlook the eminently positive content of the realization that there is something rather than nothing.” Let us, then, dip briefly into that abyss, with full assurance that we will not come up empty-handed. For, as the old saying goes: Nothing seek, nothing find.

Tried that myself. :laughing:

To begin with, if existence arose out of a need for goodness, then it must be essentially mental. In other words, existence must ultimately consist of mind, of consciousness.

Let’s begin some place else, he muttered.

As the physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed has put it, “The earth is not the center of the solar system, the sun is not the center of our galaxy, our galaxy is just one of billions in a universe that has no center, and now our entire three-dimensional universe would be just a thin membrane in the full space of dimensions. If we consider slices across the extra dimensions, our universe would occupy a single infinitesimal point in each slice, surrounded by a void.

In case you needed some cheering up.

Does mathematics carry its own ontological clout?

And how about arithmetic: 1 + 1 = everything. Or, sure, 1 - 1 = everything.

[b]Sad Socrates

Being alone in hell > Being in heaven with people[/b]

Let’s see if that’s true.

The universe is much larger than it is logical.

Einstein probably proved that.

There’s nothing to live for but the destruction of our bodies.

Of course they don’t need our help for that.

Sometimes I see the me inside me, and it’s never a reflection.

Though no less fractured and fragmented.

I look so much like yesterday.

And even the day before.

Dreams are as meaningless as thoughts.

Of course that’s the brain’s prerogative…

[b]Nick Cave

To sustain hatred is a very difficult thing to do, year after year. It’s exhausting.[/b]

But, for some, well worth it.

Inspiration is a word used by people who aren’t really doing anything. I go into my office every day that I’m in Brighton and work. Whether I feel like it or not is irrelevant.

Same here, right?

I’m a believer. I don’t go to church. I don’t belong to any particular religion, but I do believe in God. I couldn’t write what I write about and be creative without a certain form of belief.

Say, it ain’t so, Nick!

…think I’m a miserable sod but it’s only because I get asked such bloody miserable questions.

That’ll do it.

The artistic process seems to be mythologized quite a lot into something far greater than it actually is. It is just hard labor.

Unless, of course, you’re born a fucking genius.

In the hysterical technocracy of modern music, sorrow is sent to the back of the class where it sits, pissing its pants in mortal terror.

Let’s try to imagine that together.

[b]Iggy Pop

DMT was a gaseous wax that you could smoke that gave you a 20-minute psychedelic high. You’d inhale it. And then when you’d exhale—poof, you’d be high. I saw Buddha, man. I know that sounds like no big deal. But I saw a gigantic holographic Buddha — correct in every way! Buddhas can be very intricate — these drawings that you see in books. Thousands of details were included in this Buddha. Where did they come from? I didn’t make them up. I can’t even draw, you know? I could barely spell cat, you know? And there it was. And I thought, Wow — the power of the mind, you know? [/b]

If only entirely determined! Well, if that’s what it actually is.

I think that prosecuting some college kid because she shared a file is a lot like sending somebody to Australia 200 years ago for poaching his lordship’s rabbit. That’s how it must seem to poor people who just want to watch a crappy movie for free after they’ve been working themselves to death all day at Tesco or whatever, you know.

The real crime is watching a crappy movie at all.

It is very important what not to do.

As likely as not the most important thing of all.

What do you do with a lifetime of work? Face it in the morning.

Wow, that’s original.

The more walking-around money I have, the less I walk around.

Especially on election day.

If you give a good performance, something that gets some feeling across to people, that’s such a rare gift. It’s underestimated at this point in history, when the music biz is inevitably turning into a kind of politics.

I’d like to think I put on a good performance here. If I do say so myself.