Langston Hughes

Like chess pieces on the attack, billboards hawking everything from cigarettes to cemeteries surround the 15-block community of Langston Hughes in Northwest Baltimore. The billboards are strategically placed, so that few residents can leave home without seeing at least one advertisement.If this were a chess game, the community would have to concede the match. But this isn't chess and the Langston Hughes community, like neighborhoods all over the city, refuses to surrender."I'm very much against them -- we've been fighting against them and fighting against them for years," says Earles R. Mitchell, the 75-year-old leader of the Langston Hughes Community Association.

SIX AMERICAN POETS. Edited by Joel Conarroe. VintageBooks/Random House. 281 pages. $12.TC I FINALLY did it! I finally got through a book that otherwise would not have been a chore. I have AIDS, you see. The eyes burn, and I get too quickly tired. But enough about that. I want to talk about something more life-giving and life-sustaining. I want to talk about poetry.The wife of a dear friend of mine sent me a delicious meal last week, and his son sent me a collection of books. I consumed everything with gratitude.

THERE ONCE was a man from St. Paul/Who went to a fancy dress ball./He said, `Yes, I'll risk it. I'll go as a biscuit!'/And a dog ate him up in the hall."

George Houston Bass, 52, a professor of theater arts and African-American studies at Brown University and the literary executor and trustee of the estate of the late poet Langston Hughes, died Tuesday after a heart attack in Providence, R.I. He produced, directed and wrote plays. Some were produced in the New York area, and others were staged by the Rites and Reason Theater at Brown, which he founded in 1970. From 1959 to 1964, Mr. Bass had been secretary and literary assistant to Langston Hughes, who died in 1967.

Ralph Ellison By Arnold Rampersad Alfred A. Knopf / 657 pages / $35 "The blues is an impulse," Ralph Ellison explained, "to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically." Ralph Ellison is a bluesy biography of the brilliant writer who won the National Book Award in 1953 for the incomparable Invisible Man - and never published another novel.

The poet Langston Hughes called Harlem the "Negro Capital of the World," and in the 1950s, when I was growing up there, it really was. The great northern migration of Southern blacks that began near the turn of the last century had made Harlem the largest African-American community in the country, and people still looked back with pride to the remarkable flowering of black arts and culture of the 1920s known as the Harlem Renaissance. So I was somewhat nonplused by a recent report that African-Americans no longer constitute a majority in Harlem.

The clamorous debate over political correctness has been turned up a notch by the publication of "The Disuniting of America," the latest book by venerable historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. The slim volume recently spent a surprising 10 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.Mr. Schlesinger argues that just as numerous nations of the post-Cold War world are splitting into smaller ethnic pockets, the United States is undergoing a similar experience in the way minorities are demanding and achieving school curricula that focus on the achievements of each group.

"I shouldn't be here today. I should be in my studio like a good little artist," Floyd Cooper told the third- and fourth-graders gathered on the floor in front of him, as he showed them unfinished illustrations for a book.But Cooper's light-hearted demonstration of how he illustrates children's books, and the youngsters' enthusiastic and many-questioned responses, belied the need for anyone to be elsewhere Thursday."I learned how to draw with an eraser," said Cooper, this year's visiting author-illustrator at St. Paul's Lower School in Brooklandville, where he spent the day with pupils in pre-first through fourth grades.

Baltimore Jewish Film Festival If the recent Academy Awards have temporarily sated your appetite for hype, you might enjoy some films off the beaten red carpet. The 14th annual Baltimore Jewish Film Festival, which opens at 8:30 p.m. Saturday and runs throughout the month, will introduce seven films never before seen in the Baltimore area. (Two are documentaries.) The lineup includes movies from Israel, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Belgium, Hungary and the United States. The films are: I Am Alive and I Love You(above)

Tuesday's storm took out my cable. I realize that thousands of metropolitan-area residents lost power completely as severe thunderstorms swept through. Streets were flooded. Whirling winds knocked down buildings and ripped the shingles off rooftops. Hundreds of people fled their homes. A fire official told reporters, "It's a miracle no one got hurt."The loss of cable can't compare with those tragedies. And yet . . . I came home. I turned on my television. And the screen was blank."The storm!"