Spadework for a PalaceSpadework for a Palace bears the subtitle Entering the Madness of Others and offers an epigraph: "Reality is no obstacle." Indeed, this high octane obsessive rant vaults over all obstacles, fuelled by the ides fixe of a "gray little librarian" with fallen arches whose nameMr Herman Melvillis merely one of the coincidences binding him to his lodestar Herman Melville ("I too resided on East 26th Street I, too, had worked for a while at the Customs