Franz Kafka, in a letter to Milena:

"How on earth did anyone get the idea that people can communicate with one another by letter! Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can catch hold-all else goes beyond human strength. Writing letters, however, means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create a natural communication, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motor car, the aeroplane. But it's no longer any good, these are evidently inventions being made at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal service it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the radiograph. The ghosts won't starve, but we will perish."

My sister Kelly (Tel to those who know her well) teaches the developmentally challenged. So it's always interesting to hear her anecdotes about conversations with these children, because conversations with seven-year-olds are usually already surreal. But one recent conversation she related struck home. She told of a kid who came to school with bladder trouble because he had watched Freddy V. Jason the night before, which he did because it had been on in his house. Kelly took the kid by the shoulders, looked him in the eye, and said: "YOU NEED TO MAKE BETTER CHOICES".

While the idea of admonishing this little twerp with a learning disability and irresponsible parents is both amusing and sad, that motto applies equally to myself. I'm considering a little sign above my desk that reads MAKE BETTER CHOICES. Which would not mean don't watch that horror movie because you are seven and retarded, but rather, don't play with the cat, don't read unnecessary novels, and don't roll around on the floor instead of doing your work. Make better choices. It's so easy.

Tel suggested I have it tattooed on my forehead.

Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fe is one of the cruellest novels I've read. I'll admit to having to look up the meaning of the title, which is both "Act of Faith" in Portugese and "Public Burning" as the act of faith of the Spanish Inquisition. Given that Canetti wrote Crowds and Power, the public in public burning is very important. But in odd ways.

Highlights:

"His library was situated on the fourth and topmost floor of No. 24 Erlich Strasse. The door of the flat was secured by three highly complicated locks. He unlocked them, strode across the hall, which contained nothing except an umbrella and coat-stand, and entered his study. Carefully he set down the brief-case on an armchair. Then once and again he paced the entire length of the four lofty, spacious communicating rooms which formed his library. The entire wall-space up to the ceiling was clothed with books."

"Of that far deeper and most special motive force of history, the desire of men to rise into a higher type of animal, in to the mass, and to lose themselves in it so completely as to forget that one man ever existed, they had no idea. For they were educated men, and education is in itself a cordon sanitaire for the individual against the mass in his own soul."

"Murder and arson lay waste the papers, the land, the minds -- nothing attracts them more, if there's no fire after the murder their pleasure is incomplete; they'd like to start the fire themselves, the haven't the courage for murder, they're cowards; no one should read the papers; then they'd die of themselves, of a universal boycott.
Kien threw down the paper on the pile. He must cancel his regular order for papers at once. He left the hateful room. But it's night already, he said aloud, in the passage."

Business as usual. All it ever really was.

I have been walking the streets of the east side with the creepy soundrack of sirens surrounding me. I happened on Aldgate by accident, where every police officer was matched by a photographer. All of the faces are blanks. It seems quiet even with the helicopters.