i do not know if you love poetry like i do, but from reading allen ginsberg, rumi, langston hughes -- i love reading it to my kids into schools. the san francisco state poetry center, founded 46 years ago, a as an important project throughout the country. i want to acknowledge this important date is coming up. i think ms. -- i thank ms. terrence for being here so long. >> that concludes roll call. president chiu: why don't we go to general public comment? >> the public may address the board for two minutes on item one, the mayoral appearance before the board, and other matters before the subject jurisdiction of the board, including the adoption without committee reference calendar, and excluding items which have been before a board committee. speakers using translation will be allowed twice the amount of time to testify. if you would like a document to be displayed on the overhead projector, please state such. remove the document, and the screen will return to live coverage of the meeting. >> [unintelligible] [speaking a foreign language] finally, san francisco has a mayor with courag

langston hughes was responsible, the great langston hughes was responsible for my first novel being published, and i've sort of patterned myself after him. instead of going and living in france or going, you know, in the 1940s when you're a african-american novelist, you get a beret and go over there. i said, i want to go to a place where people don't care about writers or culture or anything, so i went to los angeles. [laughter] excuse me. i don't want to, i don't mean that about los angeles. i once wrote that woody allen was wrong when he said the only cultural advantage to california was that you could turn on the signal. i said they have 500,000 people in the arts-related industries in los angeles, and somebody answered, they must be all extras, you know? but i actually moved to, we moved to los angeles and practiced a life of austerity. sort of the glamorous things that were happening in new york when i was with leonard lyons column and on tv and going to french restaurants and all this little kind of stuff. and so i wrote my second novel in this los angeles. carla was working at the edd

langston hughes had a column in the newspaper, he had a spokesman, a simple kind of guy that she named semple. and the title was semple says. one the things i remember reading about was semple says let's kill off of the white folks, expect eleanor roosevelt. >> do we have other questions or comments? >> yes? >> okay. question is she had five children, did she spend time with them? >> in common, when the children were little, she turned over a lot of their care to nurses and hired help. in the later years of her life, one the reasons that she traveled so much was to go around and see a lot of her children. they were scattered all over the country and always in some sort of trouble which made some sort of embarrassing headline in the newspaper. >> what exactly? >> well, elliot roosevelt never went to college. he was kind of a bad boy. but he could get very good jobs. and then the republicans would say, he's just trading on his father's name. he probably was. and some of the children would hired by political opponents of the roosevelts, sort of to embarrass the roosevelt. but also to get,

langston hughes had a column in the newspaper, and he had a spokesman, a very simple kind of guy who he named simple. and the title of his column was "simple says." and one of the things that i remember reading and knowing about when i was young was simple says let's kill all the white folks except