Someone over the road has been doodling on a slightly out-of-tune piano, one-fingeredly picking out that song from Sound of Music called do-re-mi. &, goddammit, the song has stuck in my head.

So here I am, eating lunch, trying to read Samuel Delany's "Silent Interviews" – pieces of paper stuck all through (though they keep on falling out) to mark passages; going back to re-reading portions of it; trying to get through it, to absorb it all before I have to get it back to the library tomorrow - & singing "doe, a deer, a female deer…."

If it had to be this musical, why couldn't it have been Coltrane across the road, & My Favourite Things.

& the last passage marked....

"With Nietzsche, we learned that God was dead. With Barthes, we learned that the author was dead. With Foucault we learned that man was dead. (It's interesting that people who have no problem negotiating these other demises again and again balk at this one - to me the most important.) With Derrida we learned that the world is constituted of language and that language is undecidable. With de Man language reached new levels of undecidability, where it became undecidable whether or not something was   undecidable. Then, with Rorty and Davidson, we learned that language doesn't exist - and Atlantis would seem to have toppled wholly into the sea!

As Oscar Hammerstein said "ray, a drop of golden sun."