1. I'm not fully satisfied with how our washing machine is working. The repair man will visit early next week. Today I decided to go to Kellogg's laundromat and I had an awesome time. Hardly anyone else was in the house and I immediately loaded three washing machines and before long loaded two dryers.
While the machines ran, I settled into reading a slim book by E. B. White, Here is New York. It's really a long essay, a meditation on what New York City looked like to White in August of 1948. By this time in his life, White had moved to Maine and so his observations of New York City are those of a writer who once resided in the city, but was now an outsider, an outsider with many memories and a keen sense of which of New York City's attributes had endured and what changes had transpired.
E. B. White is one of my favorite writers, as is his stepson, Roger Angell, who died in May of 2022. He was 101 years old. For years, Angell wrote essays about baseball for The New Yorker and I loved these pieces and loved the books he published that collected them.
The book I read today as my sheets, trousers, socks, and shirts were being washed and spun was published in 1999 and featured a new introduction by Roger Angell, a tender and insightful meditation upon his stepfather and his relationship with New York City.
I didn't quite finish this book before it was time to take my laundry out of the dryers and fold it and take it home.
I can't say that I have a long term relationship with Manhattan, but I know I love going there, love having a bagel with cream cheese, love dropping in for a beer at O'Hara's, love walking its streets, love its energy and the mammoth scale of its buildings and parks, and love meeting friends -- Ed, Mike, Melissa, Eric, Scott, or Mary -- and roaming Manhattan together.
And I loved roaming today with E. B. White. There's a word -- I can't remember what it is -- but it means to feel nostalgia for a place you've never been. Well, I've never been to New York City in 1948, but E.B.White succeed in moving me to long for it, to wish I could go back to it, even though I've never been there.
I had much the same experience when I read essays by Joseph Mitchell. Mitchell, too, wrote for The New Yorker and produced detailed essays about Manhattan, especially the Lower East Side. It took me hours to read Mitchell's work and this slim volume of E. B. White's was a condensed version of the kind of writing Mitchell did and made my time at the laundromat not only productive, but a great pleasure.
2. Today I discovered a podcast produced at The University of Chicago called Big Brains. I found it via an online search. I wanted to find out if Kathleen Belew, a scholar of the white power movement in the USA, had appeared on any podcasts. She did. It was back in 2019 and she talked about her scholarship on Big Brains. The Kathleen Belew episode was only about twenty-five minutes long. Belew talks fast (I need to listen to this episode again). She packs a lot into a short period of time.
I was intrigued by her assertion that the white power movement gained a lot of traction in the years following the Vietnam War when a small percentage of disillusioned veterans returned home and became involved in white power meetings, helped devise strategies, and participated in acts of protest and violence. In addition, Belew pinpointed 1983 as a watershed year in the white power movement. It was in 1983 that the Aryan Nations compound near Hayden Lake, Idaho hosted the Aryan World Congress, a conference that Belew asserts significantly energized those involved in white power groups and actions.
I wanted to listen to Kathleen Belew as a follow up to listening to Leah Sottile. Belew is a scholar, a professor at Northwestern University. She spends long hours diving into archives, researching in preparation to present papers and to publish books of a more scholarly nature. Sottile is a journalist. I am going to try to come to some understanding of how Belew's scholarship and Sottile's journalism compliment each other, if they do, and try to understand better what makes both of their efforts so valuable.
3. Debbie called me around 4:00 or so and asked me to fix chicken for dinner. I said I'd be happy to, especially if she'd stop at the store and buy some chicken. We didn't have any on hand.
She did. I baked chicken thighs and fixed some broccoli and we enjoyed a simple dinner while Columbo nailed a car salesman played by Robert Vaughn for committing murder on a cruise ship. Not exactly The Love Boat!
We then watched Perry Mason untangle a complicated case involving an aqueduct, a drunk driving accident, real estate, a construction company's scam, and murder.
It left me breathless as Perry Mason would not be fooled and got right to the heart of who did what and nailed the murderer.
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