Reading lately, and re-reading, Sam. Johnson's essays from the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler. How I love the man and his thought; despite, maybe even because of, his inability to think outside the box of the Christian religion.

I have all the fashionable psychic ailments, including SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder, with a vengeance and in spades. Not only do I get depressed when, in the northern temperate zone, the sun sinks towards the horizon in the late summer, and nearly desperate at the winter solstice; but when she comes back in the spring, I grow correspondingly exhilerated, manic even, at the summer solstice. So, lately, here on the Tropic of Cancer, past the spring equinox, the nearly vertical angle of the sun at midday fills me with exuberant elation; I have a tendency to skip and to dance when I walk, and a song seems always on my lips; and I can't think why I should be, but I am happy. Of course there are things, like finding permanent lodging, and getting back into school, which I must take seriously and put some work into; but nothing--not even the world situation and the fascist horrors of the Bush-Halliburton "war" abroad and prison-state at home--can wipe that smile off my face.

Reading the past few days: James Blish's Case of Conscience (provocative sustained, feigned history of just the sort I like); literary essays of C.S. Lewis (gooders on Addison; Jane Austen; and a deft comparison of Dryden and Shelley, explaining perfectly to me why I like the latter and never have been able to stomach the former; Donne's love poetry, how nasty and unpleasant it is; Walter Scott, how bad a writer and a medievalist, though Lewis evidently quite enjoys the Waverly novels--beats me; psychoanalysis [Freudianism] and modern literature, unreadable). Checked out Cosi fan Tutte yesterday--all I noticed when I pulled it off the shelf was Elisabeth Schwartskopf singing Fiordiligi, Nan Meriman Dorabella, Herbert von Karajan conducting--; got it 'home,' lying on my mat at the shelter, ready to be enchanted to sleep, and found that it was monaural 1955 pre-digital--sounded like it had been recorded in a barrel, ugly stuff, though some of the greatest music ever written, performed by some of the greatest musicians who ever lived--so I turned it off and went to sleep without music.

Curiously, yesterday morning, while I sat nursing my coffee, reading Lewis's essays at one of the sidewalk tables outside the Korean cafe across the street from the shelter, one of my fellow inmates pulled a chair up to my table and laid a set of radio earphones on it, just like the accursed pair I'd been so recently gifted (poisoned) with, and said, "You like music? You should hear this rock 'n roll band...." I said something like, "I like music, not that." He was more puzzled, I think, than hurt. But, the point is, the universe is going way out of its way to trash my ivory tower and democratize my aristocratic tastes: Why? What does it care?

Over the weekend I received various gifts: a library book that I had misplaced and was stolen, was recovered for me; a disability bus-pass form; an f.m. clock/radio in its modern mode of headphones. In trying to tune the last to a public broadcast station (which I never did find) I traversed the whole spectrum of f.m. broadcasts and discovered a couple of remarkable things: (1) the quality of sound-reproduction is phenomenally good; and (2) everything that is broadcast, presumably for the pleasure of listeners, is detestable. God awful. Stupid. Meretricious. Trash. All that "noise," which I have resolutely ignored when people around me have been listening to it, or, more precisely, playing it loud as if they meant to listen to it--jazz, salsa, hip-hop, grunge, Broadway show tunes, etc. (Actually I falsify when I attempt to classify it; I'm not really familiar enough with any of it to know its putative kinds and categories. Let us say, as objectively as possible, contemporary popular music)--when actually listened to, is unspeakably ugly, depressing, boring, low-minded, mean-spirited stuff. Say that music is feeling: Who wants to feel like that?

Deaths of former Incarnations

I remember two: (one) a young French peasant woman who died of starvation and exposure, in late fall or early winter, in the 8th month of pregnancy, of an unknown year (certainly she did not know it) in the late 14th or early 15th century; and (two) a middle-aged northern European male aristocrat who died of apoplexy brought on by a protracted fit of rage in the late fall or early winter of 1793 or '94. The former I call Jehanne la Sylvaine; the latter I have no name for, but maybe I'll invent one when I get around to telling his story. I must emphasize from the beginning that what I remember of these two curiously disparate existences is the circumstances of their deaths, the incidents that led up to their dying, and their thoughts and self-perceptions as death approached; everything that I know of their lives is seen backwards, as in a mirror, from those final hours. In neither case do I recall the death itself, nor any survival afterwards of consciousness--no "up the tunnel, into the light," no Heaven, Hell or Limbo: Nothing intervenes between their final thoughts and my recollection of them; rather, their lives, and deaths, have somehow been encompassed without hiatus or interval in this my present conscious existence. I have no explanation of how I come to have these memories, and I infer nothing from them; they simply are.

Now listen. I'm going to say this just once. For the first year or so of the Bush-Halliburton "war" in Iraq, all the pictures and videos of it showed the Iraqi men and boys--whom our troops had captured, and bound the hands of, and were leading off to be tortured and murdered--hooded. Grotesquely hooded. Like The victims of an Auto da Fe. After (the promotional advertising images of torture from) Abu Ghraib (were distributed in the spring of 2004), there were no more pictures of Iraqi men and boys wearing hoods--just stories about how dozens of them were being "found" every morning "with marks of torture" (sometimes the torture would be specified; usually it was "holes drilled in them," i.e., with metal-working drills). What drives me nuts is, I think I'm the only one in America who noticed those hoods, and I'm certainly the only one who noticed that the use of them (or at least the pictures of them) had been discontinued. You see, being the only sane, aware person in the country you live in is just the same as being hopelessly insane. Thanks and a tip of the hat to Jerome Coignard.

The wonders of post technology. I have just found online the score of Lobo's 'Versa est in Luctum,' and, after several gettings lost and havings to scroll back and start over, I have read through it while listening to it on my CD player; verily it loses nothing by close examination. As with Mozart, as with Josquin, the mystery of it, something more than the sum of its parts, remains, with every note and vocal line accounted for.

Dreamed night before last of Krishna the Incredibly Beautiful, the dream being a progressive revelation ending like a Disney movie with his (not explicitly sexual) embrace of Kali--unless it was one of his lovely cowgirls--impersonated by Gloria as I knew her thirty-five years ago. I didn't realize until the final, sweet (no tongue) kiss, coincident with the moment of waking, that Krishna/Kali was what it had been about. I did not exactly cry to dream again, but I felt keenly all day that I'd had a visitation from the Collective Unconscious--So what if the fraud Jung has over-familiarly besmirched the concept? I can't think what else to call it.

On my way to bridge yesterday, read Clifford D. Simak's short story (in an anthology) Lulu: sheer, hilarious delight. Almost I cried to have it end so soon. And overnight and today, on a CD which I had thought to be wholly works of Tomas Luis de Victoria, I have been listening over and over to Alonso Lobo's 'Versa est in Luctum,' written, says the blurb, for the funeral of Felipe II, and if so, several degrees of heavenly beauty and profundity above its subject.

But of course the forgoing does not apply to XX's who don't read or write Clit Lit; who, by instinct or by breeding, are of a class superior to their maudlin sisters. It does not apply to those whose first definition of themselves is as human beings, not females. It does not apply to Simone de Beauvoir, nor to the vast majority of decently educated French and Italian women. And note: I lived in Italy for six months a half dozen years ago, and in that time I heard many bitter complaints from young American women whose bottoms had been pinched by Italian men; I never once saw or heard of that outrage being perpetrated by an Italian man upon an Italian woman; and I believe generally, knowing the characters of Italian women as I have known them, that no Italian man would be damned fool enough even to try pinching their bottoms. Which is funny, because another thing I noticed about Italian women, even very respectable ladies, is that they tailor their dresses (cinch them in just a bit) to show off the lovely contours of their tushes, in a way that ladies (certainly not American women) of other nationalities never do.

But bullshit aside, the real difference between the XX's and us XY's is our attitude towards truth and truth-telling. Simply put, women lie, all the time, about everything, and don't believe that men can be so inhuman as not to lie as they do. And this is the reason for women's literature, which consists in all its major and lesser forms (romance novel, gothic novel, and soap opera) of women explaining (lying) to other women (about) what men really mean. Thus all the blather in women's magazines about "men's secrets (they'll never tell you)." Presumably, if the fact that men don't, usually, lie were understood by women, it would seem accusatory and unfair to them.

Overnight: Jack Holland's Misogyny, the World's oldest Prejudice. I guess maybe I am a speed reader when it comes to reading horrors, like Albigensian Crusades, and Bohemian "witch" trials, and unspeakable Nazi practises, so fast they almost don't register. Still, I did read it, every bit of it, and I doubt if I can ever again quite so glibly call myself "misogynist," if that's what misogyny is taken to be. On the other hand, also last night, I skimmed a critical analysis of the ghastly dull, repetitive sort of female literature called the "Gothic novel," and, while I agree that the writers and readers of such trash hardly deserve to be tortured to death, I don't, can't believe that they're my full intellectual equals--sorry.

I should be going to the university today, talking to a graduate studies advisor; maybe my conscience, and obscure sense of panic/dread of what will happen if I don't will get me there yet, if not today almost certainly tomorrow. But idly, like the dilettante and aristocrat that most inwardly I feel myself to be, I want to tie up a few loose blog-ends. To wit, more Lacunae: Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Levi-Strauss, Leo Strauss, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Irving Kristol, and their child of fascist evil William Kristol (I think of the Kristols as being analogous to Milton's unholy trinity of Satan, Sin and Death), Stephen Jay Gould, and that monster of prurient, fatuous pretence Joseph Campbell. Not so much gaps, to my way of thinking, as less-than-nothings about which I already feel I know too much.

Damn. I've lost the blog I started today by not publishing or saving it as a draft. Anyway, what I was saying, basically, was that I'm finding Johnson's Moral Imagination heavy wading--more than for its flaccid lack thereof, sloppy metaphors, and over-all stink of pragmatism--for the pathetic intellectual insufficiency of the poor, dumb author, as epitomized in his personal history of how he dealt with military service and the draft (Compare it, for example, with my own dealings with draft, blogged on May 10th and 11th, 2006). So, I'm thinking "experientialism" really does require squashing by somebody (I understand Chomsky has already had a whack at it)--but not by me. The analogy that occurs to me is pig-wrestling: Apart from inevitably getting dirtier than you intend to get, the drawback is that the pig and you can never agree on the basic point of what wrestling is....

Lacunae (things I have not read, and will not read, ever, if I can help it): (1) Anything by William 'A Rose for Emily' Faulkner, whose work is often described by those who know and like it as "having a sewer running right through the middle of it." (2) Lord of the Flies. (3) Animal Farm. (4) Anything whatsoever by the sexually insecure and obsessed sadist who wrote The Sun also Rises.

Overnight: (1) Asimov's Foundation and Empire, devoured with delight; (2) picked-at with disgust Mark Johnson's Moral Imagination; still reading and savouring Frederic Crews' Follies of the Wise--I've read pages 248 and 249, detailing Jung's preposterous, silly-ass, fraudulent invention of "the anima, every man's female second self. (A woman's corresponding 'animus' appears to have been a chivalrous afterthought.)," about six times, chortling with derisive satisfaction: I knew it! Didn't I say? And in fact I did say in my blog for the 22nd of last month. But do I get any credit? Would I get any credit? Somehow I feel that someone, who knows that I consider his "Moral Imagination" to be plain, ordinary, not-very-imaginative-at-all, Moral Self-Delusion, is not even going to be curious about how I come to know such things--"That sort of knowledge, howsoever intuitive, is bad, soul-destroying objectivist knowledge--and therefore not, in a pragmatic sense, really knowledge," is what I imagine my fellow "Duck" Mark Johnson would say.

Walking hither from my "home" in the Iwilei as I do every morning except Sunday, I always come through the back gate of the Iolani Palace grounds, and almost always stop to admire the lovely Folly that David Kalakaua built in 1883, and sigh a regretful sigh for what might have been--if only he and his successor had been able to grasp soon enough what utter mercenary, violent, hypocritical bastards the haole missionary/military complex were. God damn American imperialism. On Sundays I go to St. Andrew's for the incredible luau those Anglicans give us indigents, and to look at the picture on the wall of the refectory annex of the celebration in Westminister Abbey of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, presided over by Archbishop Benson (father of my favourite novelist), with Ellen Terry and Washington Irving in the gallery, and Queen Kapiolani across the transept from Princess Alice of Hess. How it brings it all back.

But of course: I have just discovered, what I had not quite realized, that Lakoff and Johnson are the conscious heirs of American "Pragmatism." They hark back to Dewey, James, and Peirce (whom I not so much abominate as grow weary at the very mention of)--And that is why my revulsion against them is so instinctual and so visceral; so olfactory really. Life is far too short to spend time puzzling over Dewey's or James's mistaken notions of "embodied psychology," and the unholy mess they therefore make of epistemology.

Walking hither (towards the library) from the Iwilei this afternoon, I saw a man in his early thirties or late twenties, slender, dark complected, dressed in black with black shoes, standing beside the sidewalk, seeming to be marching in place though he wasn't lifting his feet so much as just going up and down in his shoes; and as I passed him, and looked down at the growing puddle around his feet, I realized that he was pissing himself. He looked me straight in the eye, then shuffled off in the direction I had come from, leaving wet footprints. The things you see on the streets of Honolulu.

Done good at bridge yesterday, scoring highest of the high, such that Hugh said to me, before the company, "You play well, I mean brilliantly." I purred with what modesty I could muster. Life at the homeless shelter continues to be a chapter from A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, with a touch of Darkness at Noon--something to discuss with my Case Manager when I meet with him a couple of hours from now. Now to answer my email, a newsy note having come from Gloria yesterday.

And so, I do not (objectivist, positivist existentialist though I am, or try to be), as Messers. Lakoff and johnson claim I claim, claim that I can or could do without metaphor. What I do assert is that I rarely or never let a metaphor, my own or anybody else's, pass unexamined or unidentified; and if it serves, as most peoples' metaphors do, to disguise deceit and unreason, I say so. If, for example, I hear of a "War on Drugs," or a "War on Terror," or of bad law called "a tool," I cry horseshit, and do not permit the speaker continue until he has admitted his imbecility and his bad faith and vowed not to persist in it

So, it's a matter of intention (wicked or virtuous, clear or obscure), and of faith (good or bad) which determine the proper, and improper, use of metaphor and its extension allegory--it being granted that the similarity of metaphor to its object is not, and is not intended to be, exact, but rather, in a poetic or metaphysical sense, evocative.

Now then, off to bridge with my millionairesses. I hope to arrive a little early today, and so to secure a place at a table (I was 13th man out last week, and skulked off dejectedly to check my mail at Care-a-Van, rather than sit drooling and unfed at the feast).

So, to begin. Meaning in speech or writing, of whatever sort, begins with intention: To lie or speak truth, to persuade or dissuade, to expose or conceal, to respond or initiate, to inquire or answer, to explain or dissemble--and anterior to all these motives lies one essential, irreducible pre-condition, which I call Good Faith or Bad Faith and which I understand to be variable according to the inclination of the speaker or writer, and whichever, I believe it to be immediately, intuitively evident (in the same way that we "read" personalities and characters in "faces") to the hearer or reader of Good Faith--and essentially unknowable to the hearer or reader of Bad Faith. It is in this context that the implicitly metaphysical, poetic or quasi-poetic, rhetorical figure of metaphor is to be understood: For all mental phenomena, and indeed the mind itself, are only discussable or understandable as metaphor, or in the extended metaphor known as allegory. This insight I owe to C.S. Lewis (analysis of the Roman de la Rose).

And as I read, and re-read, Metaphors we live by, there are worse things: Mischaracterizations of objectivity (the distinctions that Objectivity supposedly makes between "living" and "dead" metaphors, "hard" and "soft" homonyms, are invidious and fatuous); the assertion (which I almost missed) that there isn't any truth is scarcely made less absurd by the admission that there are some truths (though which these might be is left as vague as our authors' definition of "conception," "experience," and "understanding"). In a word, not just twaddle, but real, deliberate and yet hapless, dishonest twaddle. So I guess it's up to me.

Meantime, I've been reading ever more wonderful, heretofore unknown Nero Wolfe mysteries, and Hugo-award-winning science-fiction short-stories. How I love to project my mind forward the 500 or 1,000 years it will take for the realization of extra-terrestrial life and civilization to penetrate our earth-bound consciousness.

Reading overnight Metaphors we live by by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson; far from finished with it, yet I have some major criticisms: (1) Our authors do not, in fact explicitly refuse to, define Metaphor; saying, rather, "The essence (And the quintessent leper's bell of dishonest twaddle, say I, is the grandiloquent use of the word essence rather than a normal conjugation of the verb to be) of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another," and "Whenever we speak of... metaphor it should be understood that [it] means metaphorical concept." This after having said at the beginning,
"[R]evising central assumptions in the Western philosophical tradition..[i]n particular rejecting the possibility of any objective or absolute truth and a host of related assumptions...we have worked out (sic!) elements of an experientialist (i.e., pertaining to human experience and understanding) approach, not only to issues of language, truth, and understanding, but to questions about the meaningfulness of everyday experience." Still, I wanted to read it, and I am reading it, because it is very informative about metaphor (i.e., calling things by the names of things they aren't), and about the particular forms of metaphors, and leaves the field open to me (alone, apparently) to describe the mendacious unreason (or irrational mendacity), conscious or unconscious, deliberate or unintentional, which constitutes the ordinary use of metaphor.

Overnight reading: collections of science-fiction short stories edited, and in some cases written by Isaac Asimov: sheer delicious pleasure.

Be it now said--having, I think, fulminated fulsomely enough anent "clit lit" and the dull obtrusive/obscene impertinence of the feminine in religion and letters--I cede to no one in my admiration of those exceedingly few females of great genius: Sappho, of course, and I hear of one Corinna surpassing Pindar; Lady Sei Shonagon; Mme. de la Fayette; Colette; Jane Austen; Emily Dickinson; Mme. de Se'vigne'; Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; Flannery O'Connor; Helen Waddell; and among painters, Rosalba Carriera, Mme. Vige'e-Le Brun, Berthe Morrissot, and Mary Cassatt. There may be others, and I'm not really sure that Misses O'Connor and Toklas belong in company this exhalted (though I greatly like their work), but this may stand for proof that my misogyny does not make me a witless, unappreciative oaf. And who besides me even knows who Helen Waddell was? I will even go so far as to say that there is intrinsic in the genii of those whom I name a superior feminine quality of delicacy and emotional immediacy unknown in the work of the war-making sex. So there.

Well, one besides me (I've just been looking up reviews of Waddell's The Wandering Scholars) is Fabio Paolo Barbieri, a young (born 1962) Anglo-Italian apparently in the Rosetti mold, one of those exciting, industrious Italian polymaths, the scope of whose interests, scholarship and accomplishments fairly take your breath away. I just sent him a fan letter.

Bridged today from 10:00 a.m. till 3:00 p.m. at the Central Union Church (of Christ, I think), my partners being Eugene (who passes when his partner bids 4 No Trump if he has no aces, rather than bid 5 Clubs--nearly gave Jan a heart atack), Wilfred, and, as I have intimated, Jan (who's smart and nice and has ataxia--I thought she said she had "a taxi," and I said, "That's nice. Yellow Cab?"). Overnight, no new Nero Wolfes having come in, I read Zheng He, China and the Ocean in the early Ming Dynasty, 1405 to 1433. Now ask me what I learned from it: How normal was a predatory attitude on the part of Chinese emperors towards their hapless subjects--especially the merchant class--and how much they enjoyed punishing them, inflicting beatings, tortures and death on them and their whole families (yep, kids, wives, brothers and uncles). Very much like South American dictators and the United States military and (shudder) Paramilitary forces. Illustrating one of my favorite Turkish Principles: You're not really powerful unless you abuse your authority. Of course, Princess Der Ling's memoir of her two years as Old Budddha's lady-in-waiting gave me some deep insight into that imperial/thug mentality. Maybe, knowing what I know, seeing what I see, I should write a book.

Finished the League of frightened Men last night. Strangely, it did not please as I had thought it would: (1) annoying, too-frequent use of don't as a 3rd person singular; (2) cutesy anti-intellectualism on our narrator, Archie Goodwin's part, typified by the foregoing deliberate solecism; (3) over-all tincture of hard-boiled Freudianism--the same as disfigured and nearly spoiled Stout's first novel Fer de Lance--making it necessary consciously to indulge the youth of the author and the fatuities of his era, which, were they a woman's foibles, I would refuse (as much as Nero Wolfe himself) to do (It makes one nearly puke to hear Wolfe glozing on about the psychological mechanism of fetishism, for example).

On the other hand, Confessions of an ugly Step-Sister (despite the fatal inversion of I and V, making Marie de Medicis the widow of Henri VI) lingers in the mind as nearly perfect as Wicked. The Dutchness, the exotic Englishness of Maguire's Cinderella is as exact a parody of Perrault's quaint, old-timey but scarcely magical faerey tale as his parody of Oz is faithful to the original of L. Frank Baum's.

Another iron in my metaphoric fire (Dr. C. says I spread myself too thin) is the complete phoneticization of my mother tongue, which I worked out more than half my life ago, and which I still keep snippets of diaries in. The secret of it is its exact rendering of the stress (and unstress) patterns of words and phrases in English. According to those linguisiticists who've borne with me long enough to understand it, it is cutting-edge; only the very latest descriptive grammars of English are just beginning to understand the coordinative, disjunctive, implicit negation and clausal functions of English stress/unstress word/phrase patterns. And nothing that I have seen comes close to the exactitude of my analysis--so I suppose I'd better write it all out.


Back at the main library (2:30p.m.), having stepped out for bite of lunch and come back--who should I run into downstairs but Melchior, dancing on air because of "Scooter" Libby's conviction: "This is the beginning of the end of Satan's work. One pillar crumbles. Then Cheney. Then Bush. Then they all fall down." "But," I said, "Bush will just pardon him. He has to." "No," said Melchior with something like gleeful serenity, "He cannot. He dares not. He is weaker than you think." Well, that's what my shamaan said; then, with a final joyful squeeze of my hand, he rushed down to the basement to read the good news in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Finished Confessions of an ugly Step-Sister last night, picked up the League of frightened Men (Rex Stout, 1935) this morning at the library, having reserved it. What I like about Gregory Maguire and Rex Stout, essentially, is their (very different but equally perfect) prose-styles and worldviews, the one (for want of a better word) Neo-Baroque and gay, the other Modernist-Lapidary and straight (even a tad homophobic). I guess that makes me Catholic. Odd how I keep dallying in one sense or another with the Whore of Rome. Like I've said several times to Marianne, herself infant-baptized in the One Holy Apostolic Church, I find myself being included in amongst all the mummery and hocus-pocus; somehow feeling loved and accepted, in a way I never am among Protestants, who certainly are much closer to my cultural roots. It has to do somehow with Roman Catholicism's never-minding my abiding contempt for and hatred of St. Paul (one of the twin pillars, for Christ's sake, of Christianity). Somehow, the fact that I do, purely and simply, love the man who preached the Sermon on the Mount, without worshipping him, seems not at all to scandalize my RC brethren, while Baptists and Free Methodists tend to get apoplectic with me--and I with them. I ought to ask my shamaan and my psychiatrist about it.

Done now with Mirror Mirror and Lost, currently reading Confessions of an ugly Step-Sister--the last of Gregory Maguire that I'll be reading for a while; because there isn't much more of Maguire's stuff to read, and I'm getting pretty close to sated.

On the way to St. Andrews yesterday I encountered, for the third time in four weeks, my shamaan, Melchior (Menchor as he pronounces it) from Truk, born on Epiphany 1943 (hence the name). God knows how these relationships happen. He tells me that my mission in life is to go on seeing things with my heart and intellect; pretty much what Dr. C. has been telling me lately. It doesn't bother him that I'm a Buddhist/Hindu, but when I tried to say that he was a Christian, he cut me short, saying, "No, I am not a Christian, I am a Roman Catholic," and showed me his rosary. He says he wants to go Rome to ask the Pope "Where is the church?" When I told him not to bother, because Ratzinger is a Hitler Jugend and a fool, he nodded assent and said, "Ah yes, Satan is everywhere."

Amusingly, for those who think I'm a preposterous poseur and driv'ling phony, I took la Messe de nostre Dame, score and CD, "home" with me last night, and, striking an attitude of ineffable extasy, gave it a listen and a simultaneous read-through: utter dismay, I think, best describes what I felt from it, and my sincerest appreciation, seconding John XXII, is "god-awful ugly stuff." Likewise a come-down was the Rex Stout novel, not as I had supposed a Nero Wolfe novel, but, rather, written to show that Stout could write an absorbing detective story without the machinery and ritual apparatus of Archie Goodwin, inspector Cramer, Saul Panzer, et alia, and proving quite plainly that he couldn't--reminding one rather of P.G. Wodehouse's occasional efforts to write outside the Jeeves and Bertie Wooster genre, which however good they are never quite come up to that sublime standard. Gregory Maguire's Mirror, Mirror, on the other hand, for all its strange newness--16th century Tuscany and Umbria, instead of Oz--is every bit up to the standard of Wicked and Son of a Witch. The man's a wizard.

On the way to the Ala Moana shopping center and back (by bus) this morning did pick up and read, as thoroughly as it warranted (I don't know if I'm exactly a speed-reader, but I skim fast and don't miss much) one Eleanor Herman's Sex with the Queen: nasty, ill-written trash, but valuable to me for the first (that I've seen) fairly full and explicit account of Princess Diana's whore/slut character, with some indication of what an extremely dim light she was, and just skirting the (presumably actionably libelous) assertion that 'the Palace' had her murdered (which I, for one, consider probable); but rather missing the (to me) obvious facts that HRH Prince Charles is gay as a goose, that the love of his life was his valet (who tragically died), and that Camilla Parker-Bowles is simply camouflage. Not that I really give a rusty patootie--But there are those who wonder how I know these things, and doubt that I do know them, and cannot fully comprehend the fact that I know them the way Nero Wolfe knows things: By deduction and inference.

The library, of course, has the priceless treasure of Guillaume's Messe de nostre Dame, both score and CD recording; but where (oh where?) shall I find his many lovely part-songs which so captivated me even back in the remoteness of my youth when my French was small and I could understand them, if at all, only by a kind of instinctual heart-felt sympathy which, if it had been colder and more cerebral, might have been called intuition? Looks like I'm going to have to do some research. And like most of my researches, this has the feeling of leading directly back into, not away from, myself, as the many-headed suppose of all intellection. Something there is about Guillaume de Machaut, the poet and the composer, that speaks right to my heart. No wonder that John XXII (the J. Edgar Hoover of the first decades of the fourteenth century), that great hater of liberal philosophy and the dolce stil nuovo, so hated and did his best to spoil Guillaume's work.

Meanwhile, what's come in of books on reserve are: a couple of new-to-me Nero Wolfe novels, one with a copyright of 1937, which excites me (all are good, but so far the very best, I think, are the earliest); three of Gregory Maguire's, Lost, Confessions of an ugly Step-Sister, and Mirror, Mirror. I'm happy to think that I won't have time for much else: "The prospect," as Dr. Burney said as he rode over the rise into Naples, "of Pleasure."

Gave Dr. C. my blog name today. She only of all the world knows now who I really am. I woke this morning singing to myself:

L'amour de moi s'y est enclo-o-se
Dedans un joli-i jardinet,
Ou` croi^t la ro-o-o-o-o-se
Et le muguet.

Guillaume de Machaut, naturally.

Somehow it made everything all right. If when I die, I wake up and find that I'm not dead, and somewhere someone is singing that, then I'll know I'm in Heaven (if it's 'Climb every Mountain' of course then I'll be in Hell). My dear Dr. C. wanted me to hear a musical about homelessness today--I told her as gently as I could that I despise and abominate the non-music of musicals. But I don't think she gets it. Nobody who doesn't hate musicals gets it.