Laundromats -- January 8, 2022

Laundromats were recently in the news.

A reader did some internet searching on laundromats in Mt Vernon, NY, yesterday, and sent me what was found.

My reply:

My dad was going to open a laundromat years ago. Had he done it, it would have been a super-duper laundromat. He never went halfway on his projects. He was the "Harold Hamm" of little projects. LOL.

Except "Hooterville" in Williston. Dad ought an entire block of houses that should have been condemned, but rented them out as is, and did very, very well (based on how long he held that property). The rent was in the range of $50 - $150 / month (in today's money -- LOL --probably a bit of hyperbole but not much).

The city was constantly on his back to bulldoze the entire block and do something else --- anything else --- with that lot, even a big parking lot.

Our family was very, very embarrassed every time they drove by but I don't think anyone in Williston -- except the tax department, city council, and a few real estate agents -- knew who owned it.

Interestingly, he was a very good landlord. A lot of folks had difficulty making even those very small rental payments, and he never evicted anyone and never went after missed rent payments, as far as I know. If so, he wasn't very aggressive.

My hunch: he took a huge tax loss to lower his income tax. I don't know. But he was certainly appreciated by any folks over the years who really had no place to go.

With the boom, the area has been re-built.

Back to the laundromat: had he built that laundromat (that was before the boom) he would have become the Harold Hamm of laundromats in Williston. I don't know if folks recall but during the early days of the boom, "everyone" needed a laundromat.

Dickinson folks recalled Williston as one "big ball of dust."

Ten Best Performing Commodites Of 2021

Link to Alex Kimani. Commodity, 52-week change (2021), in order starting with best performing:

• lithium, 477%
• ethanol, 125%
• coal, 111%
• oat, 90%
• coffee, 78%
• gasoline, 62%
• naphtha, 62%
• propane, 61%
• heating oil, 60%
• crude oil, 58%
  

"Halved By A Horizon" -- January 4, 2022

Our oldest granddaughter has just completed her first semester at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. She brought home one of her books which she thought I might enjoy. After spending some time with the book, I wrote her the following note:

Your book Identity and Violence, Amartya Sen, ends with an interesting phrase:

"We have to make sure, above all, that our mind is not halved by a horizon."

 

Whenever  you see an interesting phrase such as "halved by a horizon" -- if you have not seen it before, or are not sure if you understand it -- google it. You may be surprised.

From Cultural Tensions and Hybrid Identities in Derek Walcott's Poetry: 

While trading the beginning of the Caribbean race, [Derek] Walcott is searching for a particular moment in history when "the mind was balved by a hovizon" ("Names," 1.11).

By this phrase, Walcott means the introduction and the internalization of the binary opposition between the black and the white.

Your book by Sen was c. 2006. Derek Walcott wrote in the 40's through the 70's.

Many links on the internet to Derek Walcott, including this one:

http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1141/cultural-tensions-and-hybrid-identities-in-derek-walcotts-poetry

This might be a better site, considering your classes in poetry:

https://poemanalysis.com/derek-walcott/names/ 

From that site:

The black people may try to find their origins once again, but the poet ruefully admits that “the wind bends our natural inflections”. Walcott often repeats words and entire phrases to emphasize a search that seems to yield no results. When he repeats that “the mind was halved by horizon”, he, as an intellectual, perceives that his world has indeed been divided into white and black by colonial history, language, education, and racial prejudice.

Thus, his search for a past previous to colonial history is futile. The exotic cities of Benares, Canton, or Benin that once held sway over the world are lost in the recesses of time. Again the poet asks the soul-searching questions, “Have we melted into a mirror, / leaving our souls behind.”

Sen attributes such ideas from Derek Walcott in the bibliography / writers he cites at the end of the book, and references Walcott in three places in this book.

So, there you go.

There was an interesting connection between your political science book by Sen and poetry which you also enjoy.

On a separate note, there seems to be a whole "school" of writers and thinkers writing about this issue, and Amartya Sen, part of the school, was moving the discussion forward. Among that school, there are probably a handful that were instrumental; it looks like Derek Walcott was one of them.

This book made my day. I learned something completely new and now it gives me something to explore.