mitchell, or, the writer

It's as if Joseph Mitchell had a list of all the things that I would be interested in when I grew up, and he wrote about everything on the list before I was born. There they were for me, published in "Up in the Old Hotel," a collection of his writings from the New Yorker. Rats in NYC, tramps and eccentrics, rivermen, the whole spectrum. 

I read most of these when they came out in book-form in 1992, and they were what made me subscribe to the New Yorker (sometimes lovingly described in this blog and the Nueva Jorker) which I've subscribed to almost continually since then. Now I'm rereading them, and they are just as relevant and vibrant and funny and deep as when I first picked up the book 16 years ago. I haven't reread "Joe Gould's Secret" yet, because I remember how good it was, how it tears you apart, so I want to save that for a time when I'm clear headed and with enough time to read it straight through uninterrupted. 

Inevitably, future generations will have a nostalgia for our time when looking back on us. For me, my own nostalgia comes out strong when I think about Mitchell writing away in the pre- and post-war era. I would have liked to have had a desk adjacent to his.