I'm spending the trip down to DC catching up on Merlin, which is perhaps the worst/most embarrassing show I watch. I started it because of magic and because of my continuing attachment to the Arthurian legends, even though it pained me to see the anachronisms, the clumsy reworking of the mythology, the terrible teen plot developments. But I have grown to like it, even most of the silly stuff, especially because I've realized that it is, at its core, a show about closeting, being closeted. (Primarily with regard to Merlin keeping his magic use, which is both a taboo and a crime punishable by death, a secret; secondarily, because Merlin and Arthur are SUPER GAY.) After Morgana turns "evil" (read: antipatriarchal), the show's primary conflict is between a militant closeted nonmagical patriarchy and a militant queer magical matriarchy. Morgana turns against her family because ultimately she believes that the project of dismantling an unjust, bigoted, and heteropatriarchal society is more important than her personal relationships with her father, her brother, her friends. The tragedy of the show is that because Merlin continues to hide his magic use as well as his VERY REAL romantic relationship with Arthur, he declines to participate in the creation of a better, healthier, and even gayer kingdom. He refuses to bridge the gap between Morgana's righteous radicalism and Arthur's ignorant perpetuation of anti-magic bias and self-hating continuation of gender/sexuality norms. Camelot deserves queer magical leadership. End the cycle of self-hatred, Merlin!

And those are my train thoughts for this evening.

The parallels between the populist movements headed by the Gracchi (who never seemed to work in concert but rather sequentially) and Occupy Wall Street are admittedly few. One centered around charismatic leadership, the other was diffuse. One worked within the structure of government, the other, without. Both, however, focused on the distribution of wealth. Both Gracchi angled for land reform, trying to wrest the vast majority of land ownership out of the hands of the few. They believed then, as many do now, that a successful republic is built from a robust middle class — in Roman parlance, small farmers.

Yet it's not their similarly minded grievances, it's the persistent violence against occupiers these past few weeks that has continued to remind me of the Gracchi and, more specifically, of their bloody, public ends. Though I've always liked the brothers and identified with their aims, I think of this moment in Roman history as the beginning of the end of the Republic and for that reason deeply, tragically sad. One of the lessons worth drawing is not that the Gracchi's failure is to blame for this turning point, but the lack of imagination and surplus of greed among Rome's hyperwealthy is. In this light, it's little surprise that these men, poor of spirit, turned to violence.

Tiberius was killed during a vote for his reelection as tribune, a kind of extrasenatorial spokesman for nonaristocratic landowners and a position that rendered him sacrosanct. Unwilling to face his victory, senators took up the very chairs they had been sitting on and, after a mad dash across the marketplace, beat him to death with them. As Plutarch claims in his life of the elder Gracchus, his murder was the first act of sedition since Tarquinius Superbus was expelled from Rome. It would not be the last.

I've included some selections from Plutarch's Life of Tiberius Gracchus that I found particularly eerie or prescient. First, the state of affairs:

On Tiberius Gracchus's first proposed measure for land reform, and the reaction of the Rome's gentry:

Pre-modern, pre-chad methods of election fraud:

Churches, hair salons, wing joints and bike paths

I missed the uproar surrounding the NYT article on the gentrification of H Street while I was away last week, and have been slowly catching up. Ta-Nehisi Coates (no surprise) touched on (I think) an under-reported aspect of gentrification, home-ness:

We all probably move through neighborhoods or towns or subdivisions that seem to us ugly or crime-ridden or desolate - places we call "bad" (as if geographies could be unsound or morally suspect) - and forget that each of these places is also a home. These are places where childhoods happen, where families reunite, where a memory is set. The Columbia Heights of my high school years is just gone, no longer there. People called it a "bad" neighborhood, and like TNC I don't mourn the bad things that did sometimes happen there, but it was mine. That Columbia Heights is the barbershop on Belmont, the newspapers and Rock Creek soda from Nehemiah, the Waffle Shop on Park, a mural that seemed to go on forever across Irving. It's not that these places are necessarily better or more deserving of the space than the retail and condo behemoths that have settled down along the neighborhoods corridors (well, excepting the Waffle Shop), it's that they together made up my home. The people who left Columbia Heights and the people that remain there have both lost something, lost that place.

It is the unlucky fate of urbanites that we live in places that by their nature are in flux. People move, cities change. I just hope we can all be good neighbors in the meantime:

A partial recap of Bloomsday on Broadway

(Ed. note: Around half past 11 last night I started keeping notes of WNYC's Bloomsday on Broadway because I thought it would be a good way to keep me alert and awake.)

11:25, Grant has just left - Fionnula Flanagan as Molly (an excellent Molly) is holding "so many pages," which is true. The soliloquy should last about 2 hours, maybe a little more. I'm in it to win it - after nodding off for too much of Ithaca I got a 2 buck coffee in "Barney Kiernan's Pub" aka the concession stand - and will sit this out, though to Jess's chagrin not including this 12 midnight to 1 am open bar at Ulysses, a Financial District bar, God help it. John Shea has hammed and overacted his way through both of the episodes he appeared in. Isaiah Sheffer has a rumbling, magnificent voice but his literary commentary and analysis is dubious at best. Estelle Parsons underwhelmed. (Ed. note: upon reflection I feel that Shea was perfectly appropriate during Circe and that it was his performance during Ithaca that jarred with me the most. Ithaca is comically serious but it's not all a joke - and I think Shea didn't reflect that ambiguity in his reading. Too bombastic.) (2nd ed. note: Throughout Shea's performance I had the vague feeling that he was evil, which is to say he plays evil characters, and I just realized I was remembering him as Lex Luther from Lois & Clark. That's reaching deep into the dustbin of childhood, haven't thought about that show in years.)

11:37, I find myself becoming unreasonably annoyed when the actors mispronounce words both proper (Eccles) and plain (something John Shea said). Also worth noting that the pages Flanagan is holding are exceptionally large, like broadsheets. She is not wearing shoes, and has both feet on a high footstool.

11:47, Flanagan is now feeling up her left boob.

11:50, right boob now.

12 midnight, "I don't like books with a Molly in them."

12:39, I think we're about 2/3rds through and I'm fading.

12:57, I have no idea when this is going to end. I am increasingly more sleepy. I'm not sure how much of this I can or should take. There are still several pages, 6 or 7 at least.

1:21, I've caught a second wind. The cum-gives-women-mustaches section has perked the whole audience up, roused us. (Everything sounds dirty after this many hours of Molly Bloom.) Getting really frustrated with Joyce's whole "whats the idea making us like that with a big hole in the middle of us" and "always I wished I was one myself for a change just to try with that thing they have swelling" shtick. What a lack of imagination - Joyce can't imagine what it would be like to be a woman and not want to be a man, to be a woman and feel whole. To me this is like: duh, most untrue (and illogical) thing. Come on James Joyce.

1:40, so close! Yes!

1:45, it is concluded, "yes." Jess and I have both decided that Penelope has never seemed to sad, something about reading it aloud, or about Flanagan's performance, makes Molly Bloom just the saddest character. Sheffer is shooing us out of the theater. Time to schlep back to Brooklyn.

3:02, just arrived home, after a multi-block speed walk/almost jog in the rain sans jacket or umbrella. Until next year, Bloomsday.

Beefcake hero to the oppressed

From "Rescuing the Real Uncle Tom" in the NYT:

And we tend to think of the novel itself as an old-fashioned, rather lachrymose affair that features the deaths of an obsequious enslaved black man and his blond, angelic child-friend, Little Eva.

But this view is egregiously inaccurate: the original Uncle Tom was physically strong and morally courageous, an inspiration for blacks and other oppressed people worldwide. In other words, Uncle Tom was anything but an “Uncle Tom.”

Well, I don't think Uncle Tom needs to be rescued from anything. Cabin, like South Pacific, is hailed for being *relatively* progressive, *relatively* anti-racist, as a way to explain away it's narrow vision and bald (if relatively-less-bad) racism. There's no diminishing Cabin's impact, it's bigness and heart - but why rely on it as a tool to combat racism when we have so many other, better books, characters, real live men and women to measure up to? He doesn't become a role model because, despite popular belief, he actually has muscles.

Reynolds is totally right that Uncle Tom was utterly transformed by decades of minstrel shows. (See a novel-era Tom here, and a minstrel-era Tom here or here.) It's perhaps unfortunate that a relatively less racist depiction of a beefy, 40-year-old father and husband has been twisted into a vastly more racist depiction of a feeble, old and de-sexed avuncular type - but it's no tragedy.

First Week of CSA!

I have been looking forward to my farm share for weeks - excited about the new and weird vegetables I would now have to learn how to cook, excited about how fresh and tasty it would all be. Yesterday was the first pick up, and I got a bunch of radishes (plus greens) a bunch of scallions, a head of oak leaf lettuce, a head of bok choy, a bunch of rabe, a bunch of kale, 2 garlic scapes, a little pot of purple basil & oregano, and a beautiful basket of strawberries.

I decided in advance that a frittata would be a good way to clean some of these veggies out of my refrigerator. I loosely followed Alton Brown's frittata recipe minus the asparagus and ham - and because I don't have an oven safe saute pan, baked the frittata in a 9x9 pyrex for 30 minutes at 375. Initially I was worried about the proportion of veggies to egg mixture, but then I decided I didn't care - even if it was mostly greens held together by egg, rather than mostly egg dotted by veggies - it would still be good. So after some interneting, I decided to blanch the rabe (using Giada De Laurentiis's instructions here) and chop it up. Then after deciding that garlic scapes are basically garlic and scallions are basically onions, I diced up both of the scapes and three of the scallions and threw them in with the rabe. I also grated two of the radishes, and added them to the pile. At this point the mixture smelled springy and pungent - it was great. I also had some leftover veggies from my pre-CSA life, so I pulled out and quartered 10 cherry tomatoes, half of a red bell pepper, a tablespoon's worth of fresh parsley. With the exception of the rabe, everything was raw. It smelled great, but Alton Brown's recipe called for sauteeing the veggies before adding the eggs. I was at an impasse, but after much wavering I decided to cook all the veggies together for a couple minutes. I realized after putting on the stove that I probably should have waited before adding the parsley. After the veggies started to soften, I poured them into the Pyrex, and then poured the egg mixture on top of it. While there were definitely a higher ratio of veggies to egg than Alton Brown called for, it still looked like a respectable frittata. It tasted delicious (in no small part to the salt, pepper, and parmesan) but I thought the rabe was a little stemmy, and I was disappointed I didn't get the same pungent spring-y taste that I had liked so much earlier. Couldn't taste the turnips at all. I think if I did this again I would do something about the rabe stems, and not saute the vegetables together. Andy and I ate this with a side salad of the oak leaf lettuce, but we've still got a lot left of that to go.

I think in the next week or so, I'll make stir fry with the whole head of bok choy, more scallions, and some left over green beans. With the kale, I'd like to make this one pot kale and quinoa pilaf but probably substitute the pine nuts for chopped peanuts. The lettuce I hope to continue to winnow down via salads. Maybe I'll put it on a pizza, though? I feel like it might work like spinach. As for the radishes and their greens, I am open to ideas. The strawberries won't last long enough for me to plan to do something with them.

In/visible Gentrifi/er/ed

PostBourgie follows up on Shani O. Hilton's recent Washington City Paper cover story:

Their quote from Freddie of L’Hote really brings it home:

Both of these are salient points. I have not yet read a good piece of journalism that talks about the experience of displaced families, alienated locals, the real sense of loss. Still, Hilton's piece came from a very personal place (as PostBourgie notes). While it could and should have opened up to include the -fied instead of just the -fiers, the article does its readers a service by showing just how complicated gentrification is. The split, the feeling of both belonging and not-belonging in places like Wonderland (white, gentrifier) or the Florida Avenue Grill (black, gentrified), reminds me so much of the ambivalent identity politics of post-colonial studies--the double vision of Homi K. Bhabha itself echoes the double consciousness of W.E.B. DuBois. This is just to say that the issues behind identity, authenticity and belonging are complex and manifold--that a single self is often made up of multiple selves--especially in the turbulent mix of gentrifying neighborhoods.

My own experience is caddy corner from Hilton's in the matrix of race and class, I am white and was one of the gentrified. The combination offers its own peculiar set of misreadings and discomfort. At this point in my life, armed with the BA I left Columbia Heights to pursue, returning to my old neighborhood would be an act of gentrification. Whether I like it or not, I would be a part of the horde of college graduates streaming into the heart of the city, seeking the same jobs, renting the same apartments, likely ordering the same delivery Thai. It is too much for me, I don't want to participate and I feel like there is no way I can be at home without participating. I don't want to go to Wonderland and look like I belong, no matter how loudly I grumble about the old carryout signs hung up as decoration like so many mounted heads and trophy kills. I also don't want to go back to Florida Ave and look like I don't. I always stuck out (what is this white girl doing here?), but now I have a place to stick into (another white girl here). This is born out of a series of logical assumptions - if I saw myself walking down the street I'd do the same - it's not wrong. Still, I hate it, it pains me, and as a result I've removed myself from the situation entirely. It's easier because the Columbia Heights I knew is for the most part physically no longer there. Whole blocks, swaths of blocks, are gone.

My experience is not a common one, and I don't know if I'll ever find a conversation partner outside of the family. Hilton's story, too, is one that hasn't been addressed in the media, and for that I'm glad to hear it. This whole process is messy, and I think broadening the narrative can only help. But the most pressing stories remain untold, the stories of my neighbors. You will not find a homogeneous voice, the single validating "poor, long-term, black resident" interview, you will find so many. And this is the hard truth of gentrification, that it is not just a single demographic rearranged from Columbia Heights to PG, it is the destruction of an ecosystem, the strange chemistry of a neighborhood lost. It will not be reassembled.

Let it sit

When I was little I loved St. Patrick's Day. I dressed in all green, I pinched kids wearing red (because it somehow symbolized Protestants / the British??). In early elementary school I convinced two girls that I was born in Ireland. (Sorry guys.) My mom would make Irish soda bread, coat each bite in a thick skin of butter. My Nana and Papa used to play warbling renditions of all the Irish songs we all know in their boat-wide car, and when they moved up to northern Virginia we'd eat corned beef and cabbage and mashed potatoes at their apartment, Papa answering the door in shamrock-shaped sunglasses. I remember my parents and uncles taking me down the street to the 4 P's to drink green root beer while they drank other kinds of green beverages. When I was older, in high school with few white people, much less specifically-Irish-white, I was generally embarrassed by the holiday, though I still inhaled the soda bread that appeared every March. One of my classmates would also ask me to sing Danny Boy to her, which to my teenage self seemed like an offensive thing. Plus why would I know the words? When I hit 21, St. Pat's had a new dimension beyond clothes and food and music, which has made the holiday more palatable but also somehow less special. (All holidays, to a certain extent, are opportunities to drink.) Now I think a lot about family, though I have far from neglected the clothes and food and music and booze. Now, two secret family recipes to help celebrate the day:

Irish Tea, from Papa, who taught it to me on St. Pat's many years ago:

Step 1) Put a teabag of Irish Breakfast in hot water Step 2) Let it sit for five minutes Step 3) Add milk / sugar / honey to taste and drink!

He told me "It's Irish because it's extra strong. If it's not extra strong it's not Irish."

Corned Beef and Cabbage, from Nana, via my mom:

Step 1) Put a hunk of corned beef in a large pot, fill with water until covered. Step 2) Bring to boil for 3 1/2 hours, spoon off scum that collects on top in the first 1/2 hour. Let it sit. Step 3) Quarter and core a head of cabbage, set aside. Step 4) Add cabbage at the 3 1/2 hour mark, continue to cook for an additional 30 minutes. Step 5) Drain and serve.

I told my mom I thought it would be more complicated.

Flat Langston

Thomas Sayers Ellis, a native Washingtonian and a poet who I greatly admire, has swiped a cardboard cutout of Langston Hughes (hereafter "Flat Langston") from DC coffee house / restaurant / book store / performance venue / pretension fluffer Busboys and Poets. I am posting the article in full because it ties up so many things I love and care about, and it's a spectacular stunt. From the Washington Post:

What looked like a literary prank - a cardboard cutout of Langston Hughes snatched from Busboys & Poets last week - has turned into full-blown debate about the D.C. poetry scene.

"I took it," Thomas Sayers Ellis told us Tuesday. The Washington native, poet and assistant professor of creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College said he grabbed the life-size cutout of Hughes as a protest - because he doesn't think that the restaurant/performance space pays poets fairly for their public readings.

"You would think that an establishment that makes as much money as Busboys would have set in place a reading series with a respectful pay scale for writers," Ellis said. The restaurant gives poets a venue, but it also profits from their talent. The literary community, he said, doesn't know if Busboys is the "good guys or the bad guys."

Could be that the restaurant is a victim of its own success: It's a commercial enterprise and a hangout for writers. The rookies are happy to appear at all, while some of the bigger names (who command large appearance fees from libraries and universities) believe they should share in the wealth.

Owner Andy Shallal told us he pays a monthly salary for three poets-in-residence (one at each of the restaurant's locations) as well as $50 each to a host and featured poet at three weekly readings. "We have regular gathering with poets and writers to discuss how we can become more supportive of their craft," he said. "I think we've done a lot to enhance the poetry community in this city."

"I have no issue with Andy making money," said poet Kyle Dargan, an assistant professor of literature at American University. There's been "some grumbling" among D.C. poets about the $50 payments: "Peanuts," he said, compared to Shallal's revenue from the weekly readings. While he doesn't condone the theft of Flat Langston, Dargan said it sparked "the conversation that so many people wanted for so long."

As for the cutout? Ellis told us he knows its whereabouts - but he isn't telling. Some critics (including Ellis) weren't happy about the image of Hughes as busboy and thought Shallal should have picked a more distinguished photo.

Shallal disagreed: "We have exposed Langston's poetry to thousands of people - his birthday is celebrated with the greatest of honor and fanfare." He said Ellis has never approached him with any complaints, and, in any event, it's a poor excuse to steal the cutout.

And yes - if it doesn't find its way back home, Shallal said he'll replace it.

I trust Thomas Sayers Ellis with Flat Langston, and I am in my bones suspicious of Busboys and Poets and their relentless commercialization of DC's literary scene past and present. Also, as a major agent of gentrification chic. That being said, Andy Shallal seems to love the things I love, and is a board member of DC Vote (which garners him automatic points). Ultimately my sympathies lie with Ellis, and I'm glad he's taking a stand for paying poets and for respecting Langston the writer, not Langston the busboy.

More on this at We Who Are About To Die, the Poetry Foundation, poet Sandra Beasley's blog, poet Fred Joiner's blog, and poet Randall Horton's Facebook page.

Interesting fact: Flat Langston cost Busboys $150.

A Meritocratic Hogwarts

This essay is making the rounds, the perfect kind of internet conversation starter as Maria Bustillos veers from sloppy (her attempt to shoehorn Hermoine into her framework of "chosenness" is forced) to smart (her discussion of the woefully problematic house elves). While Bustillos is certainly not the only reader to weigh the narrative implications of destiny in Harry Potter, her piece raises legitimate and troubling questions.

In the world of Harry Potter, rules are for the little people. The “wisest” adult, headmaster Albus Dumbledore, showers magical gifts and indulgences on his favorites and lets them break every rule because they are so special, better than all others. How come they are so much better? Well, the general awesomeness and favoriteness of Harry Potter and his friends is mostly arbitrary, the result of the chosenness itself, rather than of effort or application.

In the first book, Harry's "chosenness" is a miracle, rescued as he is from an abusive home, an unloving family. Material goods figure large: Harry the boy who has nothing suddenly has nice clothes (robes) to wear, the most expensive broom to ride, an opulent castle to live in, as much chocolate as he can eat. It's a wish-fulfillment story. It encourages the hope that even in the worst situations--poor, unloved, unlucky--there is a whole other world out there that a boy never knew existed, a world that already loves him, that is ready to provide for him, has known for so long how special he is. It's intoxicating.

The problem of merit and Harry Potter is the problem of Books 2-7, where Harry's rescue and new found privilege becomes old, matter of course. It stops being a miraculous rags-to-riches story and becomes an annoying its-hard-being-rich story, like Little Orphan Annie grows up and becomes the girl from Tiny Furniture, the guy from Igby Goes Down.

District Fictions: unsurprised, still disappointed

Christopher Hitchens holds up fiction of the nation's capital like jello bereft of its mold. It's a slippery mess:

HELLO JEAN TOOMER. HELLO EDWARD P. JONES.

It's interesting / unsurprising / still disappointing that the flower of our (Hitchens's) novelists are all white dudes. What even of Toni Morrison who's A Mercy is set a stone's throw away from the Potomac, a novel firmly in and of the Chesapeake region? Granted Hitchens seems to be discussing exclusively novels of power, the "Washington" novel as opposed to the "DC" novel. Still, there is not even a hint at the existence of another kind of District fiction, another kind of capital city.

WHATEVER.

It's complicated

NYT:

Bernard of Clairvaux (a complicated figure in and of himself) wrote one of the most famous examples of monastic commentary of the Song of Solomon. As described in Caroline Walker Bynum's Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, medieval religious women more often turned to Christ rather than the Virgin Mary as a locus of devotion and imitation, while medieval religious men often identified with holy women rather than Christ, assuming female roles in their spirituality as a way to distinguish their life of renunciation from that of the secular clergy. Throughout his sermons on the Song of Songs, Bernard refers to the archetypal (male) soul as the bride, God as the bridegroom. His idiom is sensual throughout (Sermon 1, 85), and it's interesting how he expands his central metaphor (male monk as female bride) to motherhood (Sermon 83, 85).

Sermon 1:

Sermon 83:

Sermon 85:

Too many McArdles spoil the neighborhood

Megan McArdle moved into my neighborhood when I was in college, and I felt that hello there are already McArdles here, find your own neighborhood foreign McArdle. But as I have reversed her journey from New York to DC, I have made peace with sharing U Street. Anyway, it seems like she's pushed the frontier farther east, moving into Eckington, where my little brother used to go to school. (I have not walked around Eckington in maybe 5 or 6 years, so I am not sure how it has changed, though if the rest of the city is any sign I might not even recognize it. Suffice to say, 5 or 6 years ago, it was not a "mixed" neighborhood.)  She writes a little bit about her role as a gentrifier here.

Alex Baca, at Greater Greater Washington, challenges McArdle's (god it's weird we have the same last name) complacency.

McArdle responds to Baca's critique, and offers a lot of urban planning policy that I don't have the chops to break down. I am skeptical of McArdle's worldview, and though it she aptly underlines the long-term difficulty of maintaining a mixed income neighborhood, she leaves out the individual agency of the gentrifiers. While I was on the ground (Fussell has made me wary to say "in the trenches"), firmly in the gentrified, rather than gentrifier, mode, what made me the most angry, indignant, was a disrespectful and selfish attitude of new residents, which manifested itself in the lack of a sense of shared ownership of the neighborhood with long-time residents, and in the wholesale destruction of entire buildings, blocks. Gentrification is essentially a phase, an uncomfortable transition from poor to rich, and maybe it's foolish to demand a more sane and respectful process, when a majority of the people who care most will be gone in the long run. But I wish that gentrifiers took more seriously the idea that it is fundamentally unjust to dislodge a community from its home. It is difficult to find a place to live, but it doesn't preclude responsibility, shouldn't discourage a generosity of spirit.

Internet conversments: review of a review of a review

Rex sent me this response to the NYTBR Richard Yates write up.

The sentiment, "Everyone knows there are no screen names on gchat!!!!", seems both stupid and beside the point to me. Anyway, pseudonyms or online monikers must still be invented sometimes: Alexander's Blogspot url is "sexyvideogameland" and her Kotaku username is "LaLeighLuLeLo." I was also interested in the 'style' of the 'essay' and whether it was 'true' to Alexander's own 'voice' or whether it was a 'funny' internet 'joke.' (Sorry. Sorry.) Her work on Kotaku and on her blog suggests that this was a one time exercise. Rex said on gchat:

Rex: i don't think it's a joke i guess she's copying the style, because she thinks it's good or something i dunno she seems like she doesn't really get the style Sent at 1:18 PM on Wednesday me: It seems like towards the end she slips out of the TL voice. Particularly when it comes to bulimia. Rex: yeah i didn't even get that far Sent at 1:20 PM on Wednesday

Alexander ends with this:

This doesn't seem very ironic or 'ironic' to me. And just, ugh, a waste of time of an essay. I've been thinking about irony a lot, as I'm reading Fussell's the Great War and Modern Memory:

If Fussell is correct in identifying the origin of modern irony, what are the implications for the amorphous but definitively ironic hipster culture which so shapes the experience of being young today? Do people drink PBR because of World War I?

TNC City Paper Retrospective: Part 2

Ta-Nehisi Coates once wrote a profile on poet and activist Gaston Neal. I like this piece because of the time spent on the then still un-gentrified U and 14th Streets, the celebration of the neighborhood's Black Arts past. The intellectual ferment of the area, which TNC captures so well below, has been replaced by buildings named after jazz era greats: restaurants named after Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, condos named after the Duke. There are no new buildings named after Baraka, Cleaver, Stokely, Neal.

I'm trying to wrangle Baraka into an interview, but he's proving elusive. When I finally do nail him down, a crew of poets and musicians slowly gravitates toward us as we talk. A discussion on Neal's importance ensues. "I've known Gaston, like, 40 years," says Baraka. He looks over at Renegade squinting. "It's hard to even say that. Forty years, man. He's a great person; I wish he had published more books. But I know the reason he hasn't published more books is because it's taken Gaston a lotta strength to get through life. He's been an underground poet."

...

We head down to 14th, a few blocks from U Street, and stop at a boarded-up strip. A black building, abandoned years ago, sports a "Do Not Enter Under Penalty of Law" sign. A few folks mill around on the block. Neal walks over to the building. He knows it well. Twenty years ago, it disappeared into the urban camouflage of condemned buildings. But for Neal, the place is still alive with a movement he and some buddies sparked ages ago. In 1965, they founded the New School for African-American Thought here.

...

The New School, conceived as an alternative to ways of thinking that had kept blacks oppressed for centuries, attracted community members and black artists and intellectuals from around the country. "We ended up attracting teachers from Howard. See, they could come teach things here that they couldn't teach at Howard because Howard would throw 'em out," says Neal.

You can almost see the intensity of the day in his face as he recollects. "Students started cutting class at Howard to take classes here." he says. "All the revolutionaries would be standing right out here. Stokely, Eldridge Cleaver, Baraka. You name it, they were here." Washington was still in the hands of white overseers, but it was seen as a nexus for black thinkers and organizers. Many of the new paradigms in black self-determination took root right here in the District.

By the late '60s, the Black Arts movement was in full swing. In his essay "And Shine Swam On," Larry Neal (no relation) had declared that poets would no longer sit back and be the journalists for the revolution, they would be participants. They would not reflect the movement, they would exhort it, they would encourage it, and ultimately they would become it.

More DC, more novels

There's been some discussion beneath "More on the DC" novel, if anyone is interested.