5cense Black books matter on Swann ( + along Oklahoma + Montana aves)

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754

7 June 2020> We've been neglecting our Microcosmic DC project lately, not just cuz of COVID concerns but cuz we got a bruised heal that seams to never heel + each time we go running or walking we re-injure it so today we decided to get the bikes out. Figured we'd start by riding down to the newly annointed Black Lives Matter Plaza that Muriel Bowser named on the street running into the White House + in defiance to Drumpf wrote BLACK LIVES MATTER in massive yellow letters that are probly visible in outer space.

 

church on the left is the 1 Drumpf did his infamous photo-op at (after forcibly removing all the protesters)

The White House is basically a militarized zone, fenced off so protesters can't get remotely close + basically the entire downtown was closed off to traffic for the demonstration later in the day, which made for some good biking.

We decided to hit Oklahoma Ave, just cuz it's 1 of the few states we have left + spose it's relevant as Tulsa (in 1921) was the site of the "the single worst incident of racial violence in American history". There's also a lot of book boxes in Capitol Hill + we needed to re-up or supply + cross-pollinate since our liebury boox is seeing a lot of action lately, which mostly means taking the children's books folks leave in our box + leaving them in Capitol Hill (where there's far more kids per capita than our hood) in exchange for more literary 1s that appeal to our sensibilities. Then we rode north thru Ivy City along Montana Ave thru Brentwood + Edgewood, here's the route we took:

As we were riding + seeing mostly lame little library boxes we got to thinking that in honor of Black Lives Matter we'd curate our liebury boox w/ black writers, specially since our street seems to be a focal point of the BLM movement in D.C., w/ lots of passerbys coming to check out where the seige on Swann st. went down. So when we got back we stocked our boox w/ a bunch from our personal liebury + ordered a bunch more, not your typical Oprah book club writers, but more unconventional 1s twe dig, that folks may not have herd of, like Amos Tutuola, Kamau Brathwaite, Percival Everett, Ben Okri, Jean Toomer, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Renee Gladman, Ishmael Reed, Steven Dunn, Ayi Kwei Armah, Johne Keene, A. Igoni Barrett, Zadie Smith, Roxane Gay, Douglas Kearney, Sade Murphy, Dambudzo Marechera, Chigozie John Obioma, Binyavanga Wainaina, Moses Isegawa, etc. Here's what we seeded the boox w/ yesterday:

[We blog about these books in the next post, as we'll try to do going farword...]. If u have any recommendations or books to donate to the cause, get in touch.

+ here's a (also somewhat unconventional) playlist of black musicians to listen to while reading:

 

753 <(current)> 755> The last American, Ishi, book # 1,000 + grandfathering our reading log for Black Books Matter
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