EAT, NEWS

Third Annual “Plate of Nations” Celebrates Global Cuisine in Rainier Valley

Posted on March 24, 2013 by Editor

RAINIER VALLEY – Attention local foodies!

Hankering for simmering Somali goat stew or Lao papaya salad with Blue Crab? What about Vietnamese Claypot fish and Ethiopian dry-cooked lamb? Or how about Okonomiyaki Japanese cabbage pancakes with hazelnut risotto cakes?

MLK Jr. Way South, home to some of Seattle’s best, independently-owned ethnic eateries, has all of these exotically tasty dishes and more to offer during the Third Annual Plate of Nations event.

From March 24 to April 6, Plate of Nations will draw food lovers and urban adventurers to sample the local venues and global menus offered by some of the best restaurants in the city, right here in the heart of the Rainier Valley, one of the most ethnically diverse communities in the country.

"The Most Exciting Thing To Do With Your Head"
A great essay "interview" by Sam Anderson with the amazing Anne Carson in the New York Times Magazine. I think you can check it out here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/magazine/the-inscrutable-brilliance-of-anne-carson.html?ref=magazine&_r=0

I'm really looking forward to her new book, Red Doc>


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Also -- I love this poem by Dana Levin from today's Poem a Day:

The Gods Are in the Valley by Dana Levin The mind sports god-extensions. It's the mountain from which the tributaries spring: self, self, self, self-- rivering up on curling plumes from his elaborate head-piece of smoke. His head's on fire. Like a paleolithic shaman working now in the realm of air, he folds his hands-- No more casting bones for the consulting seeker, this gesture seems to mean. Your business, his flaming head suggests, is with your thought-machine. How it churns and churns. Lord Should and Not-Enough, Mute the Gigantor, looming dumb with her stringy hair-- Deadalive Mom-n-Dad (in the sarcophagi of parentheses you've placed them)-- He's a yogi, your man with a hat of smoke. Serene, chugging out streams of constructed air... Mind's an accident of bio-wiring, is one line of thinking. We're animals that shit out consciousness, is another. The yogi says: you must understand yourself as projected vapor. Thus achieve your superpower.

Copyright © 2013 by Dana Levin. Used with permission of the author.

About this Poem: "The poem was sparked by a drawing accompanying an 8th Century Chinese alchemical text, The Secret of the Golden Flower. To me, the drawing makes an argument for the multiplicity of self, the projected self, the vaporous, ever-changing nature of self: self as smoke. Something of continuous interest to me." Dana Levin

I Just Want the World to See

Great article from Michael Moore, about Sandy Hook (and likening it to Emmett Till, the holocaust, Mai lai etc) and how we all really need to be made to see the horror of it, if we are going to change anything, and break the stranglehold the NRA has.

 Check it out here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-moore/newtown-gun-control_b_2866126.html

 a couple quotes:

 Emmett Till's body was found and returned to Chicago. To the shock of many, his mother insisted on an open casket at his funeral so that the public could see what happens to a little boy's body when bigots decide he is less than human. She wanted photographers to take pictures of her mutilated son and freely publish them. More than 10,000 mourners came to the funeral home, and the photo of Emmett Till appeared in newspapers and magazines across the nation.

"I just wanted the world to see," she said. "I just wanted the world to see."

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 Most of us continue to say we "support the Second Amendment" as if it were written by God (or we're just afraid of being seen as anti-American). But this amendment was written by the same white men who thought a Negro was only 3/5 human. We've done nothing to revise or repeal this – and that makes us responsible, and that is why we must look at the pictures of the 20 dead children laying with what's left of their bodies on the classroom floor in Newtown, Connecticut.

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Looks like another CCP poets wins the Kingsley Tufts. Congrats!! Poet Marianne Boruch (Claremont Graduate University) By Carolyn Kellogg March 4, 2013, 10:00 a.m. Claremont Graduate University announced Monday that the winner of its 2013 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award is Marianne Boruch. Boruch will be awarded $100,000 for her collection "The Book of Hours," published by Copper Canyon Press. The prize, one of the largest American awards for poetry, is given to a mid-career poet. Boruch's work includes two collections of poetry: "Grace, Fallen From" (Wesleyan, 2008) and "Poems: New and Selected" (Oberlin, 2004). She is also the author of two books of essays about poetry -- "In the Blue Pharmacy" (Trinity, 2005) and "Poetry's Old Air" (Michigan, 1993) -- and the memoir "The Glimpse Traveler" (Indiana, 2011). She teaches creative writing at Purdue University and in the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. *