Ideas Bouncing Around

 Part of my interest in starting this old-school blog was getting myself to type out things I was considering and research I found, as if to keep me on track toward... something. I'm still not sure what the result will be, if anything.

One idea I'm considering is some kind of heady mix of neighborhood history (South End in Boston), publishing history (the South End Press), and personal narrative, thinking through urban studies ideas around gentrification, transportation changes, the history of the political left in this country, and more. Would anyone care? I could see mixing chapters on the neighborhood, but perhaps in first person rather than a more dry history, along with chapters focusing on important publications from the South End Press, with context around each book's publication with also a sense of its impact and legacy. 

Part of me wonders if a book like this could be useful as we think about place and grounding ourselves, and how to face overwhelming politics. Are there ways to find inspiration by looking around us? Did some faint remainder (not to use a publishing term here intentionally) of the South End Press's radical politics, along with other presses such as the New England Free Press and Alyson Books, draw me to the South End, even if these presses were gone? What to make of other ghosts in the neighborhood, including the men who filled the Single Room Occupancy buildings that had almost entirely flipped to condos and floor-thru rentals by the time I arrived?

I am inspired a bit by How To Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood by Pe Moskowitz (Bold Type Books), though they only had personal experience (if I recall) in NYC. They were not afraid to talk about visiting the other cities covered, such as Detroit and New Orleans. Of course, one obviously thinks of Sarah Schulman's The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (University of California Press), a smart and very readable meditation that reshaped how I have thought about gentrification, that moves away from a simplistic working class > queer people > rich people narrative and reframes the perspective by considering urban policy and eager real estate investors. 

In the case of the South End, I think about the queer folks who were living in those Single Room Occupancies. Who amongst those folks, mostly men, were queer, held leftist politics, were perhaps eager readers of political texts? Was there overlap between that community and the UMass Amherst PhD-holding Marxists who set up shop to publish radical ideas, who felt connected enough to the area to name their press after the neighborhood? Did any of their voices or voices like them come through those South End Press books? What about the waves of immigrants coming through the neighborhood over the years, from Irish to Syrian to Greek to Chinese to Caribbean, as well as the Black Americans running gathering spots including but not limited to music venues in the mid-20th century? 

If nothing else, was there some corner of this neighborhood that combined a certain urban aesthetic with a diverse population, a Jane Jacobs-esque community that had things people needed in stores, and art, and places to sit unhounded by police or nervous neighbors, and access to public transportation, and a decent school for their kids, and safe playgrounds for when they were out? Maybe it was not as clean or visually appealing, it wasn't ready for a glossy spread in the Boston Globe Magazine, but maybe it felt like home, if not for a future at least for a present? And did that commitment to that present, to wanting a stable present, make its way into books about abortion, about immigration policy, about environmental degradation, published by a handful of committed activists running a collective, and sometimes sleeping around the machinery?

Just thinking out loud.