Really the Best Poem ever ... coming from someone who just sprayed Bragg's Amino Acids on their Dinner!

People Who Eat in Coffee Shops

by Edward Field

People who eat in coffee shops
are not worried about nutrition.
They order the toasted cheese sandwiches blithely,
followed by chocolate egg creams and plaster of paris
wedges of lemon meringue pie.
They don't have parental, dental, or medical figures hovering
full of warnings, or whip out dental floss immediately.
They can live in furnished rooms and whenever they want
go out and eat glazed donuts along with innumerable coffees,
dousing their cigarettes in sloppy saucers.

"People Who Eat in Coffee Shops" by Edward Field, from Counting Myself Lucky: Selected Poems 1963-1992. © Black Sparrow Press, 1992. Reprinted with permission (buy now)

The Good Terrorist - still

I will begin this blog by saying that I heard the poem by Dorothea Tanning on NPR http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/ this a.m. I have a special place in my mind for Tanning because of a research project I did in Art History on her in college. Surrealist painter from Ill. and NYC- married to max ernst - interesting. Connected again to thoughts of college is the book The Good Terrorist - I am still reading it. wow - a month later - I am only a third through the book. I seem to read about 10 pages a day. This explains how the month passed so quickly. It brings back many memories to college and being involved in food not bombs. Making soup from food that was collected from health food stores and distributing it to some homeless folks. The main character Alice isn't exactly doing this (although she often cooks soup for her housemates after their political rallies). I am seeing her more as a home maker type involved in the renovation of a tenement in the UK that supports the dwellers who participate in their political agendas. Just describing the book here - people - don't get too sleepy....

March

I still haven't completed March - Geraldine Brooks (remember the entry from many months ago?). I was in Gettysburg last week and now I am inspired to pick it up again. I found it odd the Gettysburg museum bookstore was not selling a copy of March - they appeared to have a selection of civil war books.

Doris Lessing

One night in college I started reading The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing and I could not put the book down until I completed it - it was disturbingly captivating. I am now reading another Lessing book - The Good Terrorist. With a title like that I was not surprised to see it was stamped as a Library Discard. It was written in the 70's and revolves around the hardships of the task of making a squatter house in the UK - legal housing. The usual stuff, dealing with neighbors who don't like you, the government and the physical labor of organizing the tenants to get the house up to speed.

Mary Gordon

I picked up Spending by Mary Gordon a few weeks ago and one hundred pages in - I am torn with this book - do I like it or do I want to continue reading it? It started out extremely interesting - the idea of a mildly successful contemporary female artist getting a chance to experience having a muse. It is a play on the idea that throughout society male artists have had the advantage of having female muses to fuel their work and make it stronger while women have been historically at a real disadvantage (no male models, drawing from sculptures, no one to clean their brushes, fix their meals, tell them their art is amazing, etc. ). Having recently read the Russell Banks book, a fictional biography on the artist Rockwell Kent - I had a mild look into the life of a male artists. This whole muse concepts seems really old school. I guess I will run along a read a few more pages.

Little Bee

I finished Little Bee by Chris Cleave a few weeks ago. It was a good read that was tough to put down. Before I knew it the book was done. The american design of the cover appeals to me- orange with a black silhouette of a woman with a printed gloss coating. Apparently, the cover design and name of the book was different in the earlier British release. I find that odd. marketing! Without giving away the story - it was enlightening to the matter of suffering and surviving as a refugee.

Today I am reading a Mary Gordon book and a local mystery novel. More on those later.

March and Strength In What Remains

I am now onto some more mature reading. March by Geraldine Brooks is the story of the father of the Little Women. As a 9-12 yr. old I never cared much for Little Women. I was not into the whole period setting aesthetics - seriously, I preferred to tune into the cool 70's style of The Jefferson's. OK, despite that extraneous background info. - I am finding March to be a very intriguing fictional look into slavery in the south during the civil war from the perspective of a man from the north. I am on pg. 57 and there have already been several disturbing scenes that really stick with you - in an unpleasant way.

Last Friday I checked out Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder. A 14 day loan from the the public library - so I have to read 20 pages a day. It is all about the pace. So I set March aside for now. I consider Kidder to write books on very relevant topics. Kidder's recent book is about a man who has gone from in a place of political unrest in Burundi, Africa to the societal unrest of a very poor man with a language barrier in New York City. I recommend Mountains Beyond Mountains by Kidder (about Paul Farmer, a doctor from Boston who spends his life providing medical care to people in Haiti).