The Air Itself Was Ebony, Like The

America Is Proud Of What It Does To Its Writers, The Way It Breaks And Bedevils Them, Rendering Them Deluded Or Drunken Or Dead By Their Own Hands. To Overpower Its Tender Spirits Makes America Feel Tough. Careers Are Generally Short.

Standing In The Nordic Nook Of The Kitchen, I Can Gaze Down At The Flimsy-limbed Joggers Heading South Towards The Park. It's Nearly As Bad As New York. Some Of These Gasping Fatsos, These Too-little-too-late Artists, They Look As Though They're Running Up Rising Ground, Climbing Ground. My Generation, We Started All This. Before, Everyone Was Presumably Content To Feel Like Death The Whole Time. Now They Want To Feel Terrific For Ever.

All That Rejection From Republicans Has A Bit Of A Racist Element. It Was Very Necessary To Have A Black President, And It's Been A Great Thing. It Will Help, In The End, To Ease The Trauma Of Slavery And Civil War. The War Against Slavery Cost Almost 800,000 American Lives - That's How Strongly They Felt About It. And It's Not Going To Go Away In A Century.

The Argument, Now, Is About Whether Bolshevik Russia Was 'better' Than Nazi Germany. In The Days When The New Left Dawned, The Argument Was About Whether Bolshevik Russia Was Better Than America.

Dickens Is A Much Misunderstood And Mis-approached Writer, In That He Tends To Be Read, Particularly In The Twentieth Century, As A Social Commentator - Like The Great Victorians, A Realist In His Way. But He Isn't At All Like That. His Genre Is Actually More Like A Fairy Tale - Weird Transformations, Long Voyages From Which People Come Back Altered, Parental Mysteries, Semi-magical Twists.