We are now up to the sixth and sixth and a half sittings. Today’s excerpt puts the connection between tripe (the non-humor forming the bulk of this book) and self-consciousness in terms of our attitudes towards free will:
The form and shape of the supposedly humorous is predictable, though the content is not. Unfortunately, form is part of content, as such:
“Knock Knock.”
“And knock knock to you.”
…Violates the form of said joke, and so is not funny, but unfortunately inevitable. Let me explain: It is a point of sociology that whenever you point out to people that they perform in some lawlike manner, always sitting in a public room according to certain arrangements and such, they immediately break whatever “law” that you (you being the high-paid sociologist) thought up just to be obnoxious. Now we know from our imagination about evolutionary history that over the years, the mass of people achieve greater self-consciousness, and so, for instance, get tired of asinine knock knock jokes (a redundant term) and will break the form and not be funny out of this desire to be obnoxious, to leap out, to freak out, to die and have sex simultaneously.
Plus we get Mr. Wolf in this section quoting Georges Bataille quoting the Marquis de Sade, which is always nice.
With continuing faithfulness,
-Mark Linsenmayer
[…] the goal of the book’s being an organic growth-in-itself is stated, it dissolves, following the pattern of self-transcendence that the book has set up. If the purpose of an endeavor is to evade all purposes, then to succeed, […]