Reading: one Ivan Gobry's Charlemagne, Fondateur de l'Europe--about halfway through. I never dreamed it would be this interesting. Here, for example, is the true story of the Chanson de Roland; who our eponymous hero was in real life, and why and how he was killed. And here is the appalling true story of the Empress Irene (minus, curiously, what I know to be true about her blinding her son rather than letting him take power); how precariously she clung to the Purple; how in the end (at fifty-something years of age) she fell sick (perhaps nothing worse than a flu or a bad cold), and so relaxed the oversight of her palace-household, which was therewith filled in the space of a day with servants of her political enemies (of which she had many), who sequestered her, then seized her and shipped her secretly off to the island of Lesbos, where three years later she died "in misery." And here also is the very interesting true of William of Orange, whom Charlemagne called "comte," whose eponymous epics, particularly the Charroi de Nimes, I liked so much more, and found so much more interesting than the hoary old Chanson de Roland.

About to read: Four medium-sized books on torture: one by Mark Danner on the horror of Abu Ghraib; one on the torture practised in Brazil by their military, with the participation and advice of the United States Military and Interpol figures (We shall never forget who Dan Mitreone was and what he did); two fairly succinct general histories and theories of this nastiest of all nasty subjects. I have pretty much given up on reading the collected works of Clive Barker. I still think "Confessions of a (pornographer's) shroud" sublimely witty, and I very much admire Barker's Queer Sensibility when he chooses to exhibit it; but I am appalled by the heterosexual pornographic aspects of most of his writing, and the sheer morbid unpleasantness and undisciplined sloppiness of too much of it. Whenever, for example, Barker tries to say something about Music, other than the dreadful rock 'n roll he likes and (so far as that goes) understands, he opens his mouth and farts: "Trying to compose herself, she made a pot of tea and put on a flute concerto." Later, in a different mood, she "put on a horn concerto." Is it the English/Liverpuddlian lowness of his class? It has that wrong-class kind of ineptitude. Pity. Because when he's good--like the disowning of the queer son by the pompous ass heterosexual father, towards the end of Sacrament--there's none better.