Food for the mind and body

Sunday is the start of October. The first week of October is Banned Books Week. As I reviewed some of the American Library Association’s materials, I noticed that, perhaps because of my increasing dotage, I seem to be slipping. I haven’t read a banned book for at least several years. That won’t do. The theme for this year’s Banned Books Week is “Let Freedom Read.” (I suppose we can hope for a number of visits to book stores and libraries from Freedom Readers?) I’m planning on making at least one trip to a couple of my local, independent book stores to see which banned books they have for sale. If it’s clean, i.e., washed, I’ll wear my ACLU “Banned Books Club” sweatshirt.

Although it’s now an American classic, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was initially “Banned in Boston.” We have a copy around the house and I should again try reading it. Maybe this time I’ll get beyond the first few pages. Since I grew up in Boston, I’m familiar with the strategy of getting a book banned there as a way to get on the national best seller lists.

In addition to feeding our minds, we need to feed our bodies to give our souls somewhere to live. Here’s what was in this week’s Community Supported Agriculture [CSA] share we just picked up:

• ACORN SQUASH
• TENDERSWEET CABBAGE
• APPLES
• PEPPERS
• INDIGO APPLE TOMATOES
• CHARD, and
• GREEN ONIONS

As the days shorten, and, eventually, temperatures cool down, I’m looking forward to a delicious healthy, locally grown meal, followed by curling up with a well written, enjoyable, banned book. A combination like that should help us get through until next spring.

Poetry

Marianne Moore     1887 – 1972

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
   it after all, a place for the genuine.
      Hands that can grasp, eyes
      that can dilate, hair that can rise
         if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
   useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the
   same thing may be said for all of us—that we
      do not admire what
      we cannot understand. The bat,
         holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
   a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base—
   ball fan, the statistician—case after case
      could be cited did
      one wish it; nor is it valid
         to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
   however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,
   nor till the autocrats among us can be
     “literalists of
      the imagination”—above
         insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have
   it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion—
   the raw material of poetry in
      all its rawness, and
      that which is on the other hand,
         genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

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