Here below a letter to the Editor of Newsday from today's edition, copied verbatim, from 'Raymond Chamba, Zimbabwe Presidential Aspirant': 

Dear Editor
The coddling of mediocrity and denigration of excellence has descrated the hopes of our forefathers and dreamers thereafter.

So, we put an offer in on the house. The above might be the view from my new front door. As many white people flee Zimbabwe, manufacturing an English ancestry to do so, I continue my steady progress in the opposite direction and rely on N (Sr) for legitimacy. It is postmodern neocolonialism - I am exporting capital to Africa at considerable expense while being continually reminded of my cultural inferority by a minority that seems as corrupt as it is self-righteous; and yet, by virtue of my background, I enjoy the irony ... I am, of course, joking. See that patch of blue in the background? That may yet be my tennis court. I know ...

Reading 'Freedom' by Jonathan Frantzen. It's impressive more than it is likeable. I once met the author and thought rather the same about him. I think the problem is one common in much American literary fiction. Writers like Frantzen, Roth, De Lillo etc have become such masters at unknotting the complexities of the human psyche that they have chosen to move beyond narrative archetypes; like, for example, the hero. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I rather suspect that these writers regard archetypal characteristics as unsophisticated and therefore 'unreal'. They enjoy humanity's flaws, thrilling in their revelations of every character's dark side - the pettier and more demeaning the better. But personally I still love the idea of story as transportation - not just of the imagination, but also to a place of virtue. Dickens wrote heroes, Elliott too, and no-one could describe their characters as unsophisticated. However, I suspect they were coming to their stories from a place of moral intention rather than a kind of abstracted and rather cool urge (if an 'urge' can be 'cool') to document contemporary mores. I don't know if any of this is true, but it feels true.