Quote of the day

[iambiguous]

William Gaddis from The Recognitions

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.

Me of course. But what about you?

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

On this planet, let's say.

Merry Christmas! the man threatened.

Ah, Satyr at ILP once upon a time. Now, however, he suspected, it's Christmas there 12 months a years.

Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it's right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of...recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it...

Or, here, when they read a post like this one.

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

And, all the more preposterous still, the future.

It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.

And then [if you are particularly lucky] all the way to the grave.

[iambiguous]

Andy Warhol

I never think that people die. They just go to department stores.

He's probably in a jewelry store right now. You know, if Catholics are allowed in Heaven.

I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of work, because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do. The machinery is always going.

Of course you might interpret it differently.

When I look around today, the biggest anachronism I see is pregnancy. I just can't believe that people are still pregnant.

Not only that, but they're all still women. Though, it might be noted, some are now forced to give birth.

Making money is art. And working is art. And good business is the best art.

Of course he's only being ironic.
Not.

Everybody winds up kissing the wrong person goodnight.

Or fucking the wrong person up the ass goodnight.

Just because people throw it out and don't have any use for it, doesn't mean it's garbage.

Though it doesn't mean it's not either.

[iambiguous]

Samuel Beckett from Endgame

All life long, the same questions, the same answers.

Come on, even here?

Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.

Next up: it starts again.

Then one day, suddenly, it ends, it changes, I don’t understand, it dies, or it’s me, I don’t understand that either.

Now you're talkng!

I say to myself—sometimes, Clov, you must learn to suffer better than that if you want them to weary of punishing you—one day. I say to myself—sometimes, Clov, you must be better than that if you want them to let you go—one day. But I feel too old, and too far, to form new habits. Good, it'll never end, I'll never go.

And now here...Satyr.

...is it not time for my pain-killer?

Yo, Mr. Reaper!

You cried for night; it falls: now cry in darkness.

Well, it is the endgame, right?

[iambiguous]

The Onion

Gun Owner Spends Another Disappointing Night Without Home Invasion

Yo, henry!

World’s Wealthy Call For Removal Of Stars Obstructing View Of Universe

And not just in Hollywood.

Man Forced To Venture Pretty Far Into Wilds Of Internet To Have Opinion Confirmed

https://knowthyself.forumotion.net/

The Dark Side Of Murder: 5 Terrible Things About Murder The Murder Industry Doesn’t Want You To Know About

6 if you count dasein.

Men Explain Why Women’s Yoga Pants Should Be Banned In Public

Yo, men! Explain that here please.

Man Who Didn’t Pull Out Rushes To CVS To Also Impregnate Pharmacist

They mean Walgreens of course.

[iambiguous]

J.D. Salinger from The Catcher in the Rye

It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.

Nope, not here they don't.
For example: dasein.

When you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.

Next up::
"J.D. Salinger was probably cremated, not buried. There is no reputable documentation of the actual disposition of his remains. There is no known grave or memorial site for him."

I don't exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.

Oddly enough, however, Holden Caulfield was not a pinhead.

All morons hate it when you call them a moron.

Wow, pinheads too!

...when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose.

Even if only virtually here.

If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late?

Okay, but how swell?

[iambiguous]

Oyinkan Braithwaite from My Sister, the Serial Killer

The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces. They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder.

No fucking way I let them get me.
But somebody got me.

It’s because she is beautiful, you know. That’s all it is. They don’t really care about the rest of it.

That and all the holes.

That’s how it has always been. Ayoola would break a glass, and I would receive the blame for giving her the drink. Ayoola would fail a class, and I would be blamed for not coaching her. Ayoola would take an apple and leave the store without paying for it, and I would be blamed for letting her get hungry.

Any Ayoolas here?

There is music blasting from Ayoola's room, she's listening to Whitney Housten's I Wanna Dance With Somebody. It would be more appropriate to play Brymo or Lorde, something solemn or yearning, rather than the musical equivalent of a pack of M&Ms.

Let's decide if that make sense.

We are nothing if not thorough in our deception...

Next up: our self-deception.

I wonder what the chances are that the death of a person in the company of a serial killer would come about by chance.

If you're her sister, say.

[iambiguous]

Bret Easton Ellis from American Psycho

A curtain of stars, miles of them, are scattered, glowing, across the sky and their multitude humbles me, which I have a hard time tolerating. She shrugs and nods after I say something about forms of anxiety. It's as if her mind is having a hard time communicating with her mouth, as if she is searching for a rational analysis of who I am, which is, of course, an impossibility: there... is... no... key.

Imagine me as a sociopath, say. Or, perhaps, as a psychopath?

I've forgotten who I had lunch with earlier, and even more important, where.

Or, here: "I've forgotten who I had posted this for earlier, and even more important, why.”

I felt lethal, on the verge of frenzy. My nightly bloodlust overflowed into my days and I had to leave the city. My mask of sanity was a victim of impending slippage.

Of course, for some, there is no mask. And, thus, no slippage.

The seals stupidly dive off rocks into swirling black water, barking mindlessly. The zookeepers feed them dead fish. A crowd gathers around the tank, mostly adults, a few accompanied by children. On the seals' tank a plaque warns: COINS CAN KILL——IF SWALLOWED, COINS CAN LODGE IN AN ANIMAL'S STOMACH AND CAUSE ULCERS, INFECTIONS AND DEATH. DO NOT THROW COINS IN THE POOL. So what do I do? Toss a handful of change into the tank when none of the zookeepers are watching. It's not the seals I hate...it's the audience's enjoyment of them that bothers me.

No, I actually get this.

You can't get dyslexia from pussy.

Me? Not so far.

Open the hood of a car and it will tell you something about the people who designed it, is just one of many phrases I’m tortured by.

Nope, that doesn't bother me at all. Not so far, anyway.

[iambiguous]

Stephen R.C. Hicks

In 1920, psychiatry Professor Alfred Hoche and distinguished jurist Karl Binding wrote The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life. Their book called for the destruction of “worthless” humans for the sake of protecting worthy humans. So-called worthless individuals included the mentally and physically disabled.

Here, of course, that would be the pinheads. But don't quote me on that, okay?

A new ethical standard was therefore necessary. With great fanfare, then, much of the Left changed its official ethical standard from need to equality. No longer was the primary criticism of capitalism to be that it failed to satisfy people’s needs. The primary criticism was to be that its people did not get an equal share.

Next up: QAnon and MAGA.

As Nietzsche noted in Daybreak: When some men fail to accomplish what they desire to do they exclaim angrily, “May the whole world perish!” This repulsive emotion is the pinnacle of envy, whose implication is “If I cannot have something, no one can have anything, no one is to be anything!”

Next up: Howard Roark and John Galt.

Both religion and socialism thus glorify weakness and need. Both recoil from the world as it is: tough, unequal, harsh. Both flee to an imaginary future realm where they can feel safe. Both say to you: Be a nice boy. Be a good little girl. Share. Feel sorry for the little people. And both desperately seek someone to look after them—whether it be God or the State.

On the other hand, what if it's actually more complicated than this? What if it can't be reduced down to cant like this?

Why did the French Revolution go so horribly wrong, descending in a reign of paranoia, fratricide, and terror? Why, by contrast, did the American Revolution, in many ways fighting the same kind of battle and subject to the same desperate pressures, not go the same self-destructive route?

Tell that to the American Indians and to the slaves. And to anyone back then who wasn't of, say, Northern European stock? Or anyone without a p**** dangling between their legs?

Morality, as Nietzsche puts it paradoxically, has become a bad thing; morality has become immoral: precisely morality would be to blame if the highest power and splendor actually possible to the type man was never in fact attained? So that precisely morality was the danger of dangers?

We'll need a context, of course. And a place where those with the highest cannot "disappear" you if you did not slavishly embrace their own.

[iambiguous]

Stephen Hawking from A Brief History of Time

In an infinite universe, every point can be regarded as the center, because every point has an infinite number of stars on each side of it.

On the other hand, with or without an infinite God.

This means it will take about a thousand million million million million years for the earth to run into the sun, so there’s no immediate cause for worry.

Next up: what that means.

Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

Anyone here know?

Up to now, most scientists have been too occupied with the development of new theories that describe what the universe is to ask the question why. On the other hand, the people whose business it is to ask why, the philosophers, have not been able to keep up with the advance of scientific theories. In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, 'The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.' What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!

Rebuttals anyone? Satyr?

We now know that our galaxy is only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes, each galaxy itself containing some hundred thousand million stars.

God's mysterious ways, right?

We have developed from the geocentric cosmologies of Ptolemy and his forebears, through the heliocentric cosmology of Copernicus and Galileo, to the modern picture in which the earth is a medium-sized planet orbiting around an average star in the outer suburbs of an ordinary spiral galaxy, which is itself only one of about a million million galaxies in the observable universe.

Also, one by one we ourselves are dead and gone.
Oblivion?

[iambiguous]

Italo Calvino from Invisible Cities

Perinthia's astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations are wrong and their figures are unable to describe the heavens, or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters.

Pick one:
1] astronomers today
2] astronomers 100 years from now
3] astronomers 1,000 years from now

And when my spirit wants no stimulus or nourishment save music, I know it is to be sought in cemeteries: the musicians hide in the tombs; from grave to grave flute trills, harp chords answer one another.

Of course: save music.

The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past.

Then, in the West, going all the way back to the pre-Socratics.
Or, sure, the caves.

An invisible landscape conditions the visible one.

Then, in the West, going all the way back to the pre-Socratics.
Or, sure, the caves.

There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.

Next up: the inhabitants here.

From my words you will have reached the conclusion that the real Berenice is a temporal succession of different cities, alternately just and unjust. But what I wanted to warn you about is something else: all the future Berenices are already present in this instant, wrapped one within the other, confined, crammed, inextricable.

And from your words?

[iambiguous]

The Onion

Geologists Uncover Slab Of Amber Containing Perfectly Preserved Adam And Eve

Wow. I guess I was wrong.

Man In Splashy Floral Print Wastes Everyone’s Time By Not Having Any Drugs On Him

Right, like that could actually happen.

Increasingly Anxious Man Worried Order Confirmation Email Never Going To Come

Think about this: what if it never comes?

Dry Humping An Adequate Sex Alternative For Teens, Says Weird, Unsolicited Report From Department Of Interior

Except in Florida, of course.

Senate Freaking Out After Dianne Feinstein Gets Her Hands On Gun

Yo, henry! Imagine this: Senate Freaking Out After Dianne Feinstein Gets Her Hands On Bazooka

Couple Choosing Not To Have Kids Can’t Fathom Bringing Child Into World With So Many Marvel Movies

Good for them!

[iambiguous]

Elena Ferrante from My Brilliant Friend

Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is day, this is night.

This is philosophy.

They were more severely infected than the men, because while men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end; women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end.

And, of course, absolutely no exceptions.

Nowhere is it written that you can’t do it.

Still, you can't do it. Then what?

I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don't recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad. Life was like that, that's all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us.

Your childhood might have been different. Then what?

The beauty of mind that Cerullo had from childhood didn’t find an outlet, Greco, and it has all ended up in her face, in her breasts, in her thighs, in her ass, places where it soon fades and it will be as if she had never had it.

You do grasp how specious this is, don't you? It can take years...decades...to fade.

Nino has something that's eating him inside, like Lila, and it's a gift and a suffering; they aren't content, they never give in, they fear what is happening around them.

Either I comprehend this more or less than you do. No one ever grasps it the same.

[iambiguous]

Chuck Palahniuk from Fight Club

We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.

Let's file this one under, "it's so deep it's meaningless".

On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

I know, I know: What if that was actually true?!

If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?

So, which one would you like me to be?

We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.

This coming from Brad Pitt!
Well, in the movie, anyway.

Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken!

My guess: not even close.

Worker bees can leave.
Even drones can fly away.
The Queen is their slave.

Tell that to Marla Singer.

[iambiguous]

William Gaddis from The Recognitions

We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition!

No fucking way, right?

What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us.

No fucking way, right?

That's what I can't stand. I know I'll bounce back, and that's what I can't stand.

And then the time you don't bounce back.

He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?

Try it and see what happens.

The Mona Lisa, the Mona Lisa...Leonardo had eye trouble...Art couldn't explain it...But now we're safe, since science can explain it. Maybe Milton wrote Paradise Lost because he was blind? And Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony because he was deaf...

You know, in a free will world.

Fearful of missing anything, he read on, filled with this anticipation which was half terror, of coming upon something which would touch him, not simply touch him but lift him and carry him away.

Just not here, right?

[iambiguous]

Andy Warhol

I always run into strong women who are looking for weak men to dominate them.

Next up: how that is applicable here.

I don't want to be smart, because being smart makes you depressed.

Well, if you're smart enough to know what he means.

The biggest price you pay for love is that you have to have somebody around, you can't be on your own, wich is always so much better.

No, really.

You know it's ART, when the check clears.

Pick one:
1] too cynical
2] not cynical enough

When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.

Pick one:
1] genes
2] memes

I'm bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is "In 15 minutes everybody will be famous.”

Reality TV we call it.
Well, not counting me.