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                                                      July 21, 2020

Ta-Nehisi Coates, "Eight Years in Power" (2017):

    "And then I heard this MC, somewhere out there, in
    some distant land called Queens, who lived not among
    television dreams but as I did among the concrete
    playground alleys and Saturday night specials, out        Here in the real.
    here in the real.  Perhaps he'd once been like me--       It's not hard to
    a slave.  But then he grabbed the mic like a cugel,       see what Coates
    raised it to the sky, lightning struck, and the cudgel    is talking about,
    was now a hammer, and the slave was transfigured into     but it's also not
    a god whose voice shivered the Earth.  And that is the    hard to see a
    story hip-hop told me then.", p87                         problem with this.
                                                              
                                                                 HERE_IN_THE_REAL 
    "From hip-hop I drew my earliest sense of what writing
    should mean.  Grammar was never the point.  Grammar
    was for the schoolmen and their television dreams.
    Out here, in the concrete and real, sentences should
    be supernatural, words strung together until they
    compelled any listener to repeat them at odd hours,
    long after the bass line died."


    "... should have a shading and mood that reflected
    their origins in slavery and struggle.  The sentence
    might be magical, but the magic was never sentimental."

                            p.87-88


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