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?