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.