Your Third Castling

I

For isn’t, indeed, Stephen Daedalus himself castled by Leopold Bloom? And Bloom then castled by…Molly? And on and on?

A cursory search of the internets leads me to believe the Fritz Cramer who provides the epigram for Lars Gustaffson’s “Stories of Happy People” might not exist. That sentence itself was thrice castled, in terms of its subject, wasn’t it? Here’s what he says:

Fundamentally complex living systems can be defined as systems which can delay the breakdown catastrophe for some time by organizing themselves in a more complex way for as long as possible.

suggesting that when you become complex, further complexity isn’t merely a virtue – it’s a survival tactic.

II

1. If a fence must be constructed to maximize area for grazing sheep, and “there are” 100 meters of fencing, what geometric shape should be employed and what should be the dimension(s)?
2. If the sheep (10) each graze in a random pattern, and eat 10% of their body weight in grass each day, will the area be sufficient for one week of grazing for sheep with a median weight of 10 Newtons?
3. Which sheep dies before the week is out?

III

Mr. F. Cramer escaped from a maximum security prison in 1987 and it is believed he fled toward the west-Texas/New Mexico border. He had been held for 19 years and published a weekly column on knitting in the weekly prison newsletter. It seems he’d knit a crude model of himself and tucked it into the sheets for the subterfuge. It seems, also, that he’d knitted the prison as well, and therefore only needed to tug in this one spot, for it all to disappear. Now he’s working a gas station, and his pants smell of oil and the smoke of a thousand exhaust pipes.

 

Whatever Happens Will Happen: Paling Kings Part II

 

(refresh yourself on part I if appropriate)

April, 2, 2009: FASB grants the loosening of mark-to-market accounting rules

Apparently, Mr. Herz is better able to influence the board than he thought. Sound decision or stay of execution?

 

Week of May 4, 2009: Secretary of Treasury Announces Banks Perform Well on Stress Test

         : Dow on the Rise. Economic Recovery?

Whatever happens will happen. What “happens” after the last page in Infinite Jest? Do Gately, Hal, and John Wayne really dig up Himself’s corpse and find the anti-samizdat and use it to crush the Quebecois separatist/terrorist movement and restore unsubsidized time?

The book works for a thousand pages to get us to ask better questions. What does it feel like to read a book where events of various scales are kaleidoscoped together? A teenager and the world disintegrate; an exceedingly average former addict performs heroically in a challenge so perfectly suited for him it resonates like Attic myth. The fractals are made human; they bleed. And what does this reading have to do with what seems to be this life?

Whatever Happens is Duly Recorded in the Tables

With neither beginning nor end, and therefore terrifying in infinitely large and small ways, paperwork is the mÖbius strip of life. The one sure thing about doing paperwork is that you hope to finish it. But it’s never done. We keep waiting, but it won’t ever be done.

Consider for a second the various cop shows, where the renegade cop is out doing his darndest to protect and serve, sometimes breaking rules, but always for good reasons. Consider his ball-busting lieutenant bitching constantly about all the paperwork he has to fill out if, for example, the renegade cop discharged a few rounds in a shopping mall to kill a rat attempting to lick a dripping air-conditioner*. And the renegade himself is always getting his balls busted to complete the paperwork for said shooting, which we might get a brief glimpse of during the closing credits montage set to a Sarah McLaughlin tune.

(*of course, qua tv, this action served as a bit of unintentional (by the renegade, not the show’s writers) symbolism wherein the renegade symbolized for an “innocent bystander” what might happen to a “rat” and therefore the “innocent” decides to eat so much cheese that he became a sufficiently big rat to warrant police protection. The thoughtless gunshot is therefore exactly the sort of thing this cop does without thinking to show yet again that certain cops have good instincts or “gut feelings” and their bosses typically don’t and that’s why they (the ones with bad instincts) are taken off the street and put behind a desk to do all the paperwork.)

What if the show continued, and we got to climb inside this renegade’s head while he completes the paperwork? And we also granted him a little introspection and helped him realize that the paperwork would not end; it would just stop from time to time, briefly? What if we got him to think about that, right there while he’s doing it? Would that make for exciting tv?