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.