w.g. sebald points inadvertently toward the scholarly quality of blogging

"in the week i went daily to the bibliotheque nationale on the rue richelieu, and usually remained in my place there until evening, in silent solidarity with the many others immersed in their intellectual labors, losing myself in the small print of the footnotes to the works i was reading, in the books i found mentioned in those books, then to the footnotes to those books in their own turn, and so escaping from factual scholarly accounts to the strangest of details, in a kind of continual regression expressed in the form of my own marginal remarks and glosses, which increasingly diverged into the most varied and impenetrable of ramifications."

--both text and image from sebald's "austerlitz"