It's often the provinces, "that vast obscurity beyond the city," that produce a nation's great dreamers — and that, inevitably, stifle and drive them out. In this sense Baltimore's a little like Ireland or Spain, one of those oppressive parochial places that artists with any ambition traditionally flee. Whenever one of these exiles manages to make good out in the world — a James Joyce or Picasso — his abandoned backwater always belatedly claims him as one of their own and turns his birthplace into a museum to bring in a few tourist dollars. Billie Holiday and Frank Zappa both have statues in Baltimore, although they both left when they were 12. Poe accidentally died here, so he got a monument placed on top of him, although schoolchildren had to raise the pennies for it. Of all Baltimore's homegrown artists, H.L. Mencken felt most happily at home here: "I have lived in one house in Baltimore for nearly forty-five years," he wrote. "If I had to leave it I'd be as certainly crippled as if I lost a leg." His house is currently closed.