http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/unread
Alt text
Remember that whole year you had to have Piketty on your coffee table to be accepted in polite society?
Bonus panel
The bible wasn’t written by a floating cheese nip though
If you read anything by James Joyce it should be his letters to his wife. They are wildly entertaining.
It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/02/02/james-joyces-love-letters-dirty-little-fuckbird/
damnit, I was here to say “I read the Brief History of Time, but why do people want me to have read the fart guy’s book?”
You can tell who has bad sex because they think it’s weird to fuck a fart out of someone
I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women.
So for you to think I have good sex I need to be able to do this? It’s not enough to act cool about or ignore the various escapes of gas during sex, I need to be a bloodhound for my partner’s farts?
Yes, or you don’t love them, sorry
A Brief History of Time is a great book, and an easy read. It was written for laypeople to be able to digest.
I came here to say this.
It is a good book and fun to read in his voice.
the universe in a nutshell is also pretty good.
What about Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, then?
Glad my adhd brain was able to guess the punchline after reading the first panel and thinking “I’m pretty sure that’s actually the Bible…”
Well I know exactly one person who read it from cover to cover.
My husband was required to memorize the whole book, word for word before he turned 13. He is an atheist now who scriptures Christians who don’t take care of others.
I honestly don’t think I would be surprised if one day he made a whip and started beating the shit out of money changers in Evangelical churches.
Finnegans Wake lurks behind this meme, looming over the Bible.
Nah, no one quotes Finnegan’s, they just reference its existence.
Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!!
Also, I love Finnegans Wake, there are dozens of us!
It’s Ready Player One for doctors of literature, fight me.
I mean yeah you are riffing on the popular joke about Finnegans Wake.
shrugs
I can’t refute that framing, that is kind of the point right? Whatever I say you can just say “nah it is just a book of nonsense meant to distract academics” and if that is the prevailing rheified meme about the thing as it is with Finnegans Wake than people will just terminate the thought there.
Finnegans Wake = unreadable
I am not going to defend Finnegans Wake as an easy read, I am not even that interested in defending it as any kind of perfect work of art, but it is definitely the most interesting work of art I have ever encountered in ANY medium, by far, and it isn’t even close.
It would be one thing if Finnegans Wake was a little experimental spurt of chaotic, anarchistic language like Lewis Caroll’s Jabberwocky, then its chaos could be written off as an interesting diversion, a curious anomaly that ultimately leads nowhere but itself… but the problem for the rest of art is that Finnegans Wake is hundreds of pages. It is a thorough demonstration that we are still drowning in a conservatism of imagination that threatens to uttely blind us to the actual nature of the human condition and there are very few artists I have encountered that have actually glimpsed that same radical expanse beyond that Joyce did.
No matter though, if you don’t like Finnegans Wake as a work of art that is fine, you are in good company!
(I don’t say that sarcastically, genuinely I mean it, if you read Finnegans Wake and go “Wtf?” that is an entirely rational response lol)
…However, you should at least appreciate the importance of Finnegans Wake in the fight for freedom of expression in the english/western world during the 20th Century. I wish Finnegans Wake and Ulysses were more widely appreciated for at least that, for fighting like hell for the freedom to express yourself and talk about the human things we normally shy away from (you’ve heard about Joyce’s letters to Nora, his novels are no less scandalous) even if people still refuse to give either work a fair chance because they don’t fit comfortably into pre-existing categories.
There is a history here, a living one existentially relevant to the very moment in history we find ourselves in now, careful how you trample over it…
I would like to throw 1984 in the pile of references that people haven’t actually read.
I wish it was still required reading for kids but TBH 1984 wasnt a good read and were already living in survailence state reality so theres not much point trying to warn about it. Its bizarre to me that 1984 was presented to be like exaggerated dystopian fantasy like what government would actually waste resources on arson and public humiliation courts. 10 years later I find out the Chinese and their cultural revolution made Orwell’s 1984 setting look like a Iibertarians themepark by comparison. wonder if Orwell knew about the Chinese or if the realities of eastern culture make our worst fears and ideas of tyranical government control dystopia look quaint in comparison.
My “new” favorite dystopian prediction is the one made by David Foster Wallace.
The idea that only deriving happiness and pleasure from virtual things will, in a meaningful way, lead to your own death. Most of infinite jest plays on the theme of losing touch with humanity when pleasure is so easily found through technology.
Most of infinite jest plays on the theme of losing touch with humanity when pleasure is so easily found through technology.
Yes it is this reductive cynicism that made me bounce off Infinite Jest eventually. I fucking love video games and when me and my bro play Beyond All Reason together we are genuinely connecting in a way that idle conversation pales in comparison to, even when in person.
Infinite Jest totally faceplants in this regard to perceive this capacity of joy and humanity and it ultimately undermines the rest of the book because of it in my opinion.
Idk I guess I feel like Infinite Jest has a similar hollowness in its examination of the human condition as do most Black Mirror episodes?
I wish DFW had an easier/happier time at life and was able to continue writing as the potential was certainly there to make a truly great novel like Ulysses or The Magic Mountain, Infinite Jest just simply takes on too much cynicism and sinks before it can reach that horizon.
All life is artificial in the sense that every adaption we have as a species subject to evolutionary forces is accidental, modern technology is no different in its awkward relation to the body. We evolved to scan far off forested hills with our gaze not stare into a glowing screen ok, but we also didn’t evolve to walk upright until it just happened and it became a part of “human”… I genuinely don’t know if DFW took this to heart, I have never gotten a consistent indication from his writing that he did.
Ultimately in my opinion Infinite Jest ends up feeling like a far less fun and more emotionally and conceptually limited Gravity’s Rainbow.
I’m sorry, but people read the fucking Bible. Maybe not cover-to-cover or with any degree of critical analysis. But far too many people have the John 3:16 shirts on to get me to believe nobody’s cracking the spine.
The Bible is the Monty Python of religious texts. Tons of nerds have their favorite chapters and can recall them practically line-by-line.
Tons of nerds have their favorite chapters and can recall them practically line-by-line.
Which is literally the definition of citing it without reading it.
It’s the definition of people who have read it a thousand times reciting it by heart.
