I watched a group of people popularly assumed to be rude, brash, loud and forward carefully negotiate the lack of washing machines, driers and laundry baskets, politely assisting when the time-lags were evident, ignoring the intrusions on personal space with almost Scandinavian stoicism, and happily folding their clothes side by side; Spanish, Irani and Irish. It was beautiful. It made me believe in human cooperation, also in the United States. Outlaw private washing machines, fill the world with laundromates, and see people work those differences out in coordinated folding of intimate apparel. —Torill Mortensen —The Laundromat (Thinking with My Fingers)
A wonderful epiphany, taking place in a New York laundromat. Maybe there’s hope for us after all.
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That's wonderful! There's a section in my disseration on the washing machine in Willy Loman's kitchen.
Is academe ready for a critical anthology, with each section devoted to a different household appliance? ;)
Mimesis: "I watched a group of people popularly assumed to be rude, brash, loud and forward carefully negotiate the lack of washing machines...happily folding their clothes side by side; Spanish, Irani and Irish. It was beautiful."
(Mimêsis seems to be a stylizing of reality in which the ordinary features of our world are brought into focus by a certain exaggeration, the relationship of the imitation to the object....(Michel Davis, The Poetry of Philosophy, p.3)
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Memesis: "It made me believe in human cooperation, also in the United States." (Lianne Gabora says, "...because ideas and stories are not simply stored, outputted, and copied by others as discreet chunks, complete unto themselves. They are dynamically influenced by the context in which they appear...") --Washing machines as a memetic context for cooperation in a multicultural environment--http://www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/liane/papers/deep.html