the painted toenail of America

22 January, 1966

To Miami, to meet John and Jud. Neat platters of houses, like trays with canapés, float in the stagnant glaucous-green lagoons.

...

We drove to Miami Beach, where a monstrous regiment of huge hotels stand whitely against the stale Caribbean. To see the size and vulgarity of these establishments is the only reason to go to the place: they are so vile, so nightmarish, so (alas) American, that they cannot be missed. In a way it is a city of the dead - all the people there are old, uninspired, industrial debris.

...

In the lifts the women of fifty and sixty stand like cattle. One has to push them aside to get out. They drift round the lounges like somnambulists, from meal to meal, from room to room, bound, chained, as the black slaves were once chained in the slave ships, to a moronic routine in a moronic world.

...

In a way it is a European city, a monument to the dream of countless generations of underprivileged European peasants. They dreamt of an aristocratic city like Venice, perhaps; and they translated it, when they had the chance, into Miami.

...

Jud’s current director calls it ‘the painted toenail of America’. But it needs some fouler apposition: the unwiped anus. All that is worst in thу country pours through it, and stands to be seen.

- John Fowles, The Journals, Volume II: 1966-1990

Джон Фаулз, Дневники