March on Washington

Despite a very full schedule of conference presentations in Washington, I did manage to see some sights, some of which will never be seen again.

It was nearly a full moon my first evening in town.

Yeah, that little white speck in the middle right.  It was crisp and cool, with the smell and color of autumn leaves, something I hadn't experienced for a long time.  My cheeks were rosy and tingly. And dry. Still, a nice evening for a walkabout.

I strolled down to K Street, which was under occupation.

It all looked like any homeless campout in Hawaii, except for the creative take on the D.C. license plate (which actually reads "Taxation Without Representation."  I didn't know that.)  It all would have seemed utterly ordinary except for the police on watch.

I wanted to get close enough to photograph the really interesting thing, a police horse with a really huge head, patiently waiting in his van to be useful.  My friend R noted, "You wouldn't want THAT charging at you."  (Later, back at my hotel, I watched an episode of Frasier, in which he and Niles buy their Dad's beloved but pastured police mount as a birthday gift. It's sad.  They're both too old to do much of anything.)

Just below K street was the Treasury Department:

And the White House:

Everything was very benign.  It seemed like there should have been...news.

There could have been. But even the newspaper office was dark and quiet. There in the outdoor atrium, another monument to the obsolete: a Merganthaler Linotype that had been used to set most of the important hot-lead stories of the past.

I fingered the Linotype's "etaoin shrdlu" keyboard, which summoned a security guard out of the inner lobby. "Oh sorry, sorry," I said, "but this is SO cool."  "What is it?" she asked.  I wound up giving a little lecture on the history of printing and journalism, there in the outer lobby of the Washington Post, inspiring her to be even more protective of the artifact.  Oddly, when I emailed the photo of it back home to my husband, he told me he and our son had just an hour before been having a discussion about Linotypes.  The synchronicities of this trip were beginning to weird me out.

Not QWERTY, but ETAOIN SHRDLU

In its bizarre and complicated mechanical presence, I was thinking of the Linotype and the real freedom and power it represented in its time before offset printing, desktop publishing, email, blogs and Twitter. I once composed headlines on a Ludlow, its little letterpress cousin; I still have raw lead blocks and type I set from those days; I use them as paperweights to hold my Chinese painting paper in place on the table.

The Linotype was still on my mind the next day when I stumbled into the Laogai Museum, a little monument to the lack of a free press and expression, a sort of Chinese Holocaust Memorial.  (I've never been to that place, having grown up in a time all too aware of the Holocaust.  I don't need to see all the photos and shoes and eyeglasses to remember the horror.)  But the Laogai...I hope my Visa statement for a book I bought there doesn't hinder my visa application for my next China trip.  I probably should have paid cash.)

It took me two Harps to sober up at my new local on Dupont Circle where I also enjoyed some French onion soup and shepherd's pie.

If you get bored in Washington, there's something wrong with you.