Up betimes at the homeless shelter, being flat broke still, and not wishing to ask Douglas to give me coffee again for the second morning in a row--at least, not to wake him (for he slept still the sleep of the just) to ask him to do so--I went immediately across the street to K-Mart, where I got on the computer (their Net Nanny will not permit me to blog) and played a couple of games of chess on the Postcard Chess computer, losing the first ignominiously, winning gloriously the second. Then, feeling good about myself, I went and found Douglas at the Korean Korner Koffee Kup and had him buy me a cup of coffee while I explained to him the spirit and the significance of the Rococo. I am to meet him here at the main library sometime this morning, and if we find a quiet nook where we can talk, I propose to lead him through the historical stages of that kindliest, wittiest, and most musical flowering of the human spirit, from its first appearance in a mirror over a fireplace in the chateau of Versailles of Louis XIV, to its murder under the knife of the guillotine during the Reign of Terror of Robespierre et Cie.

Reading lately: an infinitely fascinating, exquisitely well written book, called Rising Tide, by one (meaning that I, in my ignorance) have never heard of him before) John M. Barry, about: the (whole vast subject of the) Mississippi River, its physical and spiritual nature; the jetties and levees which contain it, and the bridges over it, and the men who built them; and, specifically, the Great Flood of 1927. The subject, though vast, is perfectly marshalled, mastered and coordinated by the author in a manner somehow reminiscent of Moby Dick--without the blowhard hoohah. This book is also, more obviously, reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi, both of which I have read so many times as virtually to have memorized them, and which float through my reading of this like the ghosts of sidepaddler riverboats, elegant as swans, fulgurant with showers of sparks, trailing black clouds of pitchpine smoke.