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[...] E.L.D., whose post-Gödelian theorems and nonexistence proofs amount to extremely lucid and elegant admissions of defeat in certain cases, hands thrown up w/ complete deductive justification. Incandenza, whose frustrated interest in grand-scale failure was unflagging through four different careers, would have been all over Extra-Linear Dynamics like white on rice, had he survived.
footnote 34
[...] wondered in a speculative way why people on the sidewalks all along Commonwealth seemed to be waving at us and holding their heads and pointing and jumping wildly up and down, and Orin waving cheerfully back and holding his own head in a sort of friendly imitation, but it was not until we got all the way down to the Commonwealth-Brighton Ave. split that the horrible realization hit us: Mrs. Incandenza often during summer days kept the Incandenzas' beloved dog S. Johnson leashed to the back of her Volvo within reach of his water and Science Diet bowls, and Orin and I had peeled out in the car without even thinking to check for whether S. Johnson was attached to it. I will not try to describe what we found when we pulled into a parking lot and slunk to the rear of the car. Let's call it a nubbin. Let's say what we found was a leash and collar, and a nubbin. According to the couple of witnesses who were able to speak, S. Johnson had made a valiant go of trying to keep up back there for at least a couple blocks down Commonwealth, but at some point he either lost his footing or got his canine affairs in order and figured it was his day to shuffle off, and gave up, and hit the pavement, after which the scene the witnesses described was unspeakable. There was fur and let's call it material down the middle of the inside east-bound lane for five or six blocks. What we had left to take slowly back up the Academy's hill was a leash, a collar with tags describing medication-allergies and food-sensitivities, and a nubbin of let's call it attached material.
the fucking dog story omg (footnote 269, letter from Marlon Bain)
In this dream, which every now and then still recurs, I am standing publicly at the baseline of a gargantuan tennis court. I'm in a competitive match, clearly: there are spectators, officials. The court is about the size of a football field, though, maybe, it seems. It's hard to tell. But mainly the court's complex. The lines that bound and define play are on this court as complex and convolved as a sculpture of string. There are lines going every which way, and they run oblique or meet and form relationships and boxes and rivers and tributaries and systems inside systems: lines, corners, alleys, and angles deliquesce into a blur at the horizon of the distant net. I stand there tentatively. The whole thing is almost too involved to try to take in all at once. It's simply huge. And it's public. A silent crowd resolves itself at what may be the court's periphery, dressed in summer's citrus colors, motionless and highly attentive. A battalion of linesmen stand blandly alert in their blazers and safari hats, hands folded over their slacks' flies. High overhead, near what might be a net-post, the umpire, blue-blazered, wired for amplification in his tall high-chair, whispers Play. The crowd is a tableau, motionless and attentive. I twirl my stick in my hand and bounce a fresh yellow ball and try to figure out where in all that mess of lines I'm supposed to direct service. I can make out in the stands stage-left the white sun-umbrella of the Moms; her height raises the white umbrella above her neighbors; she sits in her small circle of shadow, hair white and legs crossed and a delicate fist upraised and tight in total unconditional support.
The umpire whispers Please Play.
We sort of play. But it's all hypothetical, somehow. Even the 'we' is theory: I never get quite to see the distant opponent, for all the apparatus of the game.