Correspondence: Wight ring

Freshwater, Isle of Wight

Edited by Moristotle

[Items of correspondence are not attributed; they remain anonymous. They have been chosen for their inherent interest as journalism, story, or provocative opinion, which may or may not be shared by the editor or other members of the staff of Moristotle & Co.]

Every morning I ask my wife, “Has Trump resigned yet?” and she sadly shakes her head and replies, “No such news.” Moristotle, I know from your right-wing blog and the many ingratiating things you have said about President Trump that you are one of the still tens of millions of American voters who support him. But for the love of God in whom you also ardently believe, PLEASE STOP ENCOURAGING TRUMP. He must be made to accept that he no longer has the love and support of anyone but a handful of awkward individuals – in his own family, perhaps, and among those almost as bad as himself on his staff and in his Cabinet – if they didn’t abandon him the day he betrayed them. Moristotle, if you stop supporting Trump and encourage your right-wing friends to stop as well, maybe this can be turned around, and my wife can give me good news for a change.


The older I get, the more it takes to impress me. When Trump gave himself an A+ for being President, even that didn’t impress me.

Colorful, for “fish”? “Turkey’s Colorful Carpet Fields Bask in Summer Sun” [Palko Karas, NY Times, August 23]. Excerpt:

From above, they may look like Dutch tulip fields. But these are Turkish carpets, laid out to bask in the summer sun.
    Record-breaking temperatures have caused trouble across Europe this year. But in the Mediterranean Turkish province of Antalya, hot days, strong sunshine and humid nights are put to work, fading the vivid dyes of hand-woven rugs into the pastel colors preferred by many Western customers....
    This summer, according to Reuters, around 25,000 carpets from around the country were laid out across nearly 500 acres, under the sizzling sun. [read more]

Humans are quite barbaric, indeed. Some of them don’t give much thought to the ecosystem and climate either, just as they don’t much respect animals. One of the problems with certain religious zealots is their concepts of eternal heaven and eternal hell, and the idea that their moment of being saved puts them in the clear, no matter what else they may do.

Business owners often profit inordinately compared to their employees, both in terms of salary, perks, profit distributions, equity accumulation, and tax benefits. The collapse of the high end of the tax structure that existed in the 50’s and leveled net incomes compared with today is clearly a key factor. The rest of the difference is wages and salaries, which increasingly over the last 30 years favored owner and senior management. In other words, many owners exploit their employees with the excuse that they are paying ‘market rates’ and ‘that’s all the business can support’ – the same rationale as South African mine owners use. But somehow the owners get rich.
    I know whereof I speak, because as the owner of a mid-size architecture firm I benefited from the system – although nowhere near the extent of comparable construction firm owners     never mind Jeff Bezos, who makes as much in 26 seconds as one of his employees makes in a year.

Mo, was that a typo that you plan to visit Paris in 2029? If not, would the visit be for your 63rd wedding anniversary, or for the 64th anniversary of your first visit there, on Christmas day 1965?

7,000 trees planted to form guitar on a farm in Argentina

Ian McEwan is a favorite novelist of mine, and I am always eagerly on the lookout for his next book. But this Guardian article reminds me that I can simply read something of his again! “Good books, bad films: why does Ian McEwan never translate on screen?” [John Mullan, August 24]. Excerpt:

So the moans about the smugness of many of McEwan’s leading characters, with their bourgeois sensibilities and unfailing good taste, are like complaints about Emma Woodhouse’s self-satisfaction. McEwan’s novels establish wellbeing only as a precarious condition – a safe life on the way to becoming unsafe. Often there is a killing or attempted killing. But then there are other accomplished novelists who like to have a murder in a novel. Hilary Mantel’s non-historical fiction has many a homicide. The doyenne of narrational sang froid Muriel Spark provides an equally high body count.
    McEwan has in common with Spark a gift for chilly narrative control that compels attention yet repels sympathy. (Sweet Tooth even includes an argument between the novel-reading heroine and her novel-writing lover about how much to admire Spark’s more postmodern experiments.) They are the two novelists of the last 50 years who most cunningly use the trick of prolepsis – letting the reader glimpse the narrative future before it has arrived. What seizes us in the famous opening chapter of Enduring Love is the drama not just of those men trying to hold down the untethered balloon with a child in the basket, but also of the narrator’s attempts to make sense of his memories. “Knowing what I now know … ,” Joe says. It is a classic McEwan opening to a sentence. The outcome precedes the telling. You are always to realise that the author knows where he is leading you – that it has all been planned, before the first sentence is ever set down. Apprehension takes the place of surprise. You are asked to enjoy being manipulated....
    The shape of the story is the point. McEwan’s much underrated achievement is to have made accessible, and pleasurable, the narrative self-consciousness of postmodernism. Here is a characteristic sentence from Enduring Love. We are in a noisy restaurant, where Joe is celebrating his wife’s birthday with her and her uncle. “When I later remembered how we had leaned in and shouted, I seemed to be remembering an underwater event.” The narrator remembers remembering events. We only reach experience through the business of making it into a narrative. The rawer, the more shocking the experience, the truer this is. Joe is trying to narrate one of those eruptions of violence into his life, trying to see a past unavoidably refracted by hindsight: “Perhaps that was when I glanced to my left … Perhaps I noticed them later …”....
    Film-makers are beguiled but also doomed by these elegant tricks. Even with McEwan’s scriptwriting help, the film of On Chesil Beach could not do justice to the accelerating chronology of the novel’s final pages. Atonement managed to replicate one of the novel’s time-jolts (the scene in which Cecilia plunges into the fountain is given twice, first from Briony’s mystified perspective, then with the accompanying explanation of Robbie and Cecilia’s dialogue). All the other chronological shifts were beyond it. [read more]

Book titles are important but not absolute. Think of the two titles for Hemingway’s first novel. “The Sun Also Rises” in the United States, “Fiesta” in Britain. I like the allusion and ambiguities in Hemingway’s original title. The British version sounds superficial, clueless, and written by a PR hack.

It’s 8 here now, I’ve already had a beer and I’m thinking sleepy thoughts. But we’ll probably stay up till 10:30. Sleep and age make cowards of us all. Or some such Shakespearean sounding phrase.

Grateful for correspondence, Moristotle