Passing under a railroad bridge, my bus was suddenly deluged by the accumulated runoff, massive even compared to tonight's hard rain. We passengers were collectively shocked, even maybe stupefied.

One is hardly allowed time to think, by the world or by one's self.

This post by Alex is remarkable. The Derrida thread he refers to is here.

I'm writing a bibliography.

It's exciting!

A nice little phrase - 'how we stand toward people'.

On Döblin and speed: part of Döblin's style is so inconspicuous that it took me hundreds of pages to realize the effects it was working: much of the prose posed relative to the characters' thoughts and feelings is relatively undifferentiated from that of other characters (whose consciousnesses may also be expressed by nearby sentences, though usually not too nearby), and indexical words and phrases are made to do more work in determining the meanings of the sentences than in 'more standard' novelistic prose. At times I can even catch myself making the imaginative effort, to keep in mind when I read a sentence who the pronouns refer to, what those characters have just done, what their longer-term relationships have been.

Vahid's zombie term paper.

<stasis that one wants to break only in the right way>

A curious note at the end of the compiler's introduction to the Oxford Book of Aphorisms:

'There is one gap in this anthology which I particularly regret. I had hoped to include a number of aphorisms by Wittgenstein, drawn principally from Philosophical Investigations (1953) and Culture and Value (1980), but unfortunately permission to do so was refused by his literary executors.'

Not cool, literary executors. Not cool.