I found John Updike‘s “Morocco” (1979, from the book My Father’s Tears and Other Stories) a fascinating travelogue story.

Visited by an American family living in England—the year is 1969—Morocco is a land of disturbing men, “little girls in multicolored Berber costume” with their flowers to sell, swaying buses, and even quiet sexual perversion. As it happens, it is a far from lovable country, and a far from perfect vacation. It is feared, in fact, that Morocco might get sinister after Dad runs a red light and the police appear. So the man zips away.

The twelve-page story shows how foreign to Westerners an Eastern country can be. But Updike also uses his elegant prose to smile on family unity (even after a divorce), a unity that follows “the maximum family compression” of the Morocco trip. It should be noted, though, that this realization comes during a vacation in France, a Western land.

When was the first comic Western written? Beats me, but in this sparse category surely one of the best put on film is the 1969 Support Your Local Sheriff!, directed by Burt Kennedy and penned by William Bowers.

The movie stars James Garner as a fast-drawing drifter—eager to see Australia—who accepts temporarily the job of sheriff in a developing little town. There, he meets Prudy (Joan Hackett), a love interest, and trouble in the form of a family of blackguards. Swiftly rising prices in the town would have meant something to audiences in 1969 who witnessed frustrating inflation. Bowers’s script is frequently amusing and does not seem like a thrown-off item, as movie scripts today often do. It takes a lot of jabs at human behavior too: the town mayor and the council members, for example, are cowardly whoremongers. The film is nothing spectacular but it entertains—all it is meant to do.

When was the first comic Western written? Beats me, but in this sparse category surely one of the best put on film is the 1969 Support Your Local Sheriff!, directed by Burt Kennedy and penned by William Bowers.

The movie stars James Garner as a fast-drawing drifter—eager to see Australia—who accepts temporarily the job of sheriff in a developing little town. There, he meets Prudy (Joan Hackett), a love interest, and trouble in the form of a family of blackguards. Swiftly rising prices in the town would have meant something to audiences in 1969 who witnessed frustrating inflation. Bowers’s script is frequently amusing and does not seem like a thrown-off item, as movie scripts today often do. It takes a lot of jabs at human behavior too: the town mayor and the council members, for example, are cowardly whoremongers. The film is nothing spectacular but it entertains—all it is meant to do.

In Kazuo Ishiguro‘s great novel, The Remains of the Day (1988), not much goes on between the butler Stevens and the housekeeper Miss Kenton. They are friends, yes, but there is still a breakdown here in social interaction, human connectedness, which coincides with a larger moral breakdown in the characters’ milieu. Stevens’s employer, Lord Darlington, the rich host of gatherings for world officials, is deceived enough by pre-World War II Germans to become anti-Semitic and anti-democracy. He wants two Jewish staff members to be dismissed from their jobs. Miss Kenton is appalled, Stevens is not—for he is perfectly loyal to Lord Darlington.

The subject, the question, of “dignity” in the novel is no longer very interesting, though I think the subject of loyalty still is. Fresher, even so, is the theme of the passage of time which produces for both an individual and a nation “the remains of the day” (before the day dies). Be careful of a coming remains of the day—a message I give to America as it too displays Leftist anti-Semitism (ignored by the media) and other unfortunate things.

In Kazuo Ishiguro‘s great novel, The Remains of the Day (1988), not much goes on between the butler Stevens and the housekeeper Miss Kenton. They are friends, yes, but there is still a breakdown here in social interaction, human connectedness, which coincides with a larger moral breakdown in the characters’ milieu. Stevens’s employer, Lord Darlington, the rich host of gatherings for world officials, is deceived enough by pre-World War II Germans to become anti-Semitic and anti-democracy. He wants two Jewish staff members to be dismissed from their jobs. Miss Kenton is appalled, Stevens is not—for he is perfectly loyal to Lord Darlington.

The subject, the question, of “dignity” in the novel is no longer very interesting, though I think the subject of loyalty still is. Fresher, even so, is the theme of the passage of time which produces for both an individual and a nation “the remains of the day” (before the day dies). Be careful of a coming remains of the day—a message I give to America as it too displays Leftist anti-Semitism (ignored by the media) and other unfortunate things.