Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
The columns that I wrote for Life made people laugh. But they had a serious purpose, which was to say: “Something crazy is going on here—some erosion in the quality of life, or some threat to life itself, and yet everyone assumes it’s normal.” Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it’s still outlandish.
William Zinsser • On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction
As a result, rather than their ideas being explicitly and logically argued for, they are slipped into the zeitgeist through the use of humor, both in the positive sense and in the snide, sarcastic sense. This cynical “It’s just a joke!” façade is a convenient mask for an ideology that dare not expose itself completely.
Michael Malice • The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics
Some colleagues I know even speak of an “ethics of weirdness”, something I hope to work on more and that would presumably involve risk, improvisation, nonsense, even magic, not to mention a refusal to retreat before the bizarre, the disturbing, the nonhuman, the unthinkable. To turn and face the strange; to stay with the trouble.