Atonement time. Things I like about the United States: 1. The way Americans will usually risk seeming naive in order to discover more and make more connections. The English generally do not.
2. The settler capacity of Americans to form endless instant new communities.
3. The more genuine participatory democracy that can exist at small town and street levels.
A prevailing sense that being ethical (or at least appearing so) is not incompatible with sophistication.
The continued despite everything sense that Republican Virtue is linked to a passion for education.
6. American higher education —- though it goes wrong at doctoral level with too much coursework stifling creativity. But it is much more rounded and truly liberal than the British version.
7. Jazz. 8. Baseball though I don’t much understand it. But it is a true cousin sport to cricket. 9. The Appalachians. They are an incredible landscape: wild yet comfortable all at once.
10. The early skyscrapers of Chicago with their strong civic and guild sensibility. 11. The way Nee York is like a futuristic gothic castle.
12. The Hispanic-tinged fringes and sublime desert landscapes esp The Big Bend National Park. 13. The strange lost uneasy border plantation lushness if the Rio Grande Valley.
15. The sense of the cryptic and haunted in Brockden Briwn, Melville, Poe and C.S. Pierce.
The glowingly sparse and enigmatic fictions of Paul Auster.
16. American book design at its best. Restrained yet lavish.
17. The older austerely beautiful of towns like Staunton Virginia.
18. Blueberry muffins if they are warm and good. 19. East coast crab cakes and chowder.
20. Modern American poetry which is so often more ambitious than modern British.
Meant flowingly but they glow too.
Peirce.
