Not as productive a Monday as I thought it could have been, though getting through the entire Derrida in two sittings was an accomplishment, I thought. The Du Fu poem has a great line about loyalty: 葵藿傾太陽， 物性固莫奪. Kui2huo4 here refers to two different plants that always face the sun.

Derrida, Jacques, and Derek Attridge. ""this Strange Institution Called Literature" : An Interview with Jacques Derrida." In Acts of Literature. New York: Routledge, 1992, 456
On first reading, this interview with Derrida left me with abstract visions: Autobiography stands at the core of both philosophy and literature -- just look at Nietzsche and Sartre ; literature is logocentric and phallocentric at once ; Romeo and Juliet and other timeless literary classics are iterable singularities, shimmering patterns similar in my vision to the visualizers that come with audio playback software. I think I'll have a much better handle on the second reading; in the meantime I feel confident that the key to understanding Derrida is to put him in the context of the history of language: he belongs at the bleeding edge, where language critiquing itself offers up great hope, but also the potential for nihilism.

Du Fu 杜甫. "Zi Jing Pu Fengxian Xian Yong Huai Wu Bai Zi." In Xiang Zhu Quan Tang Shi. Edited by Lin Debao 林德保, Li Jun 李俊 and Ni Wenjie 倪文杰. Dalian: Dalian chubanshe, 1997, 3544.

Also completed and glossed chapter 7 of Hong lou meng. Also listened to more of Seth Lehrer's lectures on the Story of English.

Needs: Connect Derrida to rhetoric, to the history of world language. Connect Yang Jiang to rhetoric. See rhetorical studies of Chinese lit in Chinese.