‘AMERICA PREACHES INTEGRATION, AND PRACTICES SEGREGATION’—-MALCOLM X

Isn’t that the bottom line? Here in New York which considers itself died-in-the-wool liberal and smart and superior and all that, our public schools are the most segregated in the country. Come on.

‘I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.’
                                                 —James Baldwin

FIRST BOOK SPOTTED in anyone’s hands going by my building in this virus time. Tonight, just now. 

‘Wagon Train’ was on. It seemed to be beaming in from some foreign country. I shut that off, too, and went into another room, a windowless one with a painted door--a dark cavern with a floor-to-ceiling library. I switched on the lamp. The place had an overpowering presence of literature and you couldn't help but lose your passion for dumbness.’
                   —Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One 

An opening paragraph in an old Joan Didion essay I started to reread last night in bed. It’s in a collection of her essays called After Henry. The piece is called ‘Insider Baseball’ though it’s about politics:

‘It occurred to me during the summer of 1988, in California and Atlanta and New Orleans, in the course of watching first the California primary and then the Democratic and Republican national conventions, that it had not been by accident that the people with whom I had preferred to spend time in high school had, on the whole, hung out in gas stations.’