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.