Dean Christakos« "Klingons in the White House" | Main | Reflections on July 4th »
January 29, 2007
Learning more about DC
In an effort to familiarize myself a bit more with native DC culture, I recently read D.C. Noir, an anthology of crime stories set in different parts of Washington, DC. This is genre fiction, and the crime stories themselves might be of dubious plausibility, but that's not really the point for me. What I wanted was a good description of various parts of DC culture. Most of my friends here are, like me, recent transplants who came here for professional reasons after finishing school. What I really wanted was an introduction to what the native culture of DC is like. The book had vignettes of:
- The cook at a bar/restaurant in rapidly-gentrifying Columbia Heights
- The police informant trying to figure out a crime on his own to cash in on reward money
- A cop illegally moonlighting in a strip club-cum-brothel
- A recently divorced wife in Chevy Chase trying to figure out how to keep her house with only $4000/month in child support payments
- A confrontation between a family-owned motown record label in DC and the mob in New York.
Sure, maybe the stories stretch the imagination a bit (the family who owns the motown record label gets help from a Nation-of-Islam-like temple organization to kidnap the daughter of a mob boss in order to gain some bargaining leverage), but I think I have a better feel for the DC neighborhoods. I think I'm going to read some more books by the editor of the anthology, George Pelecanos.
Posted by Dean at January 29, 2007 9:04 PM
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