Nowhere Man
When Joseph Mitchell was a young boy, in the 1910s, on the family farm in remote, swampy North Carolina, he liked to watch his father remove tree stumps with dynamite. His father was an “expert dynamiter,” who would circle the tree for a long time, as though he were “trying to understand it,” before laying in the explosives. In a notebook entry made six decades after the fact, Mitchell wrote of these dynamiting sessions, “It was the first time I ever heard the phrase ‘center of gravity,’ which I love.”
“Center of gravity” is an interesting phrase to apply to the work of Joseph Mitchell. I can