March | 2014

All aboard with Joanna Dreby

March 31, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

There are many reasons to delight in Joanna Dreby’s writing. My favorite these days is her commitment to some kind of relational writing. In “How Today’s Immigration Enforcement Policies Impact Children, Families, and Communities: A View from the Ground,” Dreby uses a common social experience (i.e., that couples get divorced) to illustrate a more foreign situation (i.e., that undocumented immigrants get deported). In anticipating her readers’ lack of connection to immigrant families and their simultaneous sympathy for divorced families, Dreby successfully brings everyone […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: children, immigration, politics

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Paper and Film

March 29, 2014 by Jennifer Dean

Today I leave you with a quote that I came across from scraps of paper in a binder I recently cleared out for a project I needed to put together in paper form. Wait – what’s that, you ask – paper? I thought we got rid of that in the 21st century. . . that and film . . . aren’t all those things digital representations now? Jean Epstein, For a New Avant-Garde: Each of us, I suppose may possess some […]

Categories: Jennifer Dean, ZiR • Tags: film

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Biphobia: The downside of going both ways

March 29, 2014 by William Eaton

I’m on the road this week, so I am indulging in magazine reading as my travel smut. This New York Time’s Magazine article (because no, I don’t read Playboy for the articles) The Scientific Quest to Prove Bisexuality Exists, by Benoit Denizet-Lewis, proved to be a lengthy and interesting read regarding the enduring phenomenon of “biphobia.” The author, a self-identified gay man, spends some time with John Sylla, the president of the American Institute of Bisexuality (A.I.B.), a well-endowed group […]

Categories: Caterina Gironda, ZiR

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Masterpiece of a Misfit III – Peace of Mind and Getting There

March 27, 2014 by William Eaton

This is the third of three reviews of Sir Richard Francis Burton’s masterful travelogue of his journey in 1853 to Mecca and Medina, disguised as a faithful pilgrim. Discover why Burton is an iconoclast in Misfit I. Read one of Burton’s masterful sentences in Misfit II In a A Secret Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, Sir Richard Francis Burton says the pilgrimage is a personal journey. A pilgrimage brings the traveler peace of mind, in the acts of getting there, and of worshiping. […]

Categories: Tucker Cox, ZiR • Tags: travel

Poetry on the Go

March 25, 2014 by William Eaton

I owe a new-found obsession with off-road rallies to my husband’s passion for cars. Once our baby was born he exchanged the race track for the dirt track and brought me along. Last weekend we traversed more than 600 kilometers of Colombian wilderness on a dirt buggy. Because road trips are better taken in good company, I took Polish poet Wisława Szymborska-Włodek along for the ride. Of course, since the former Nobel Laureate is sadly no longer with us, I had […]

Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR

Teach children the capacity of happiness, not its obsession

March 24, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

I was recently given a copy of two sections of Adam Phillips’s On Balance. The first of these, entitled “Should school make you happy?,” raises an issue worth exploring these days. If we take happiness as a moral demand (“You have to be happy and you are failing if you are not”) then what do we do with our unhappiness? Non-happy moments are not only unavoidable, but also essential in everyone’s life. At risk of sounding redundant, it’s important to observe that non-happy […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: children, education, ethics, philosophy, reading

Acting v. Feeling

March 21, 2014 by Jennifer Dean

I am currently matriculated in an MFA program in Production (after already completing an MA program in Film Studies). As part of my directing class we are reading Judith Weston’s Directing Actors. Before going back to school I spent several years in the acting world and it’s interesting approaching it completely from the other side (I have always had one foot in production). I have often myself been plagued by the preconceived notions that actors are not dedicated enough or […]

Categories: Jennifer Dean, ZiR • Tags: film

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Masterpiece of a Misfit–II Burton’s Word Paintings

March 20, 2014 by William Eaton

This is the second of three reviews of Sir Richard Francis Burton’s masterful travelogue of his journey in 1853 to Mecca and Medina, disguised as a faithful pilgrim. Discover why Burton is an iconoclast in Misfit I Burton brings the pilgrimage to life in Misfit III Sir Richard Francis Burton’s A Secret Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina was published in 1856. Photography had yet to begin its rife presence in travel literature. In its stead, authors “word – painted.” Burton’s brush strokes […]

Categories: Tucker Cox, ZiR • Tags: travel

The Right Word

March 18, 2014 by William Eaton

Sometimes a word is all it takes to build a poem. Such is the case in Tomas Tranströmer’s “To Friends behind a Border,” translated from the Swedish by Robert Bly. For me, the poem is constructed around the uncommon word “trilobite,” which refers to a fossil group of extinct marine animals possessing an exoskeleton. An example is shown in the attached picture. Here is the text of the poem, as published in the Spring 2013 issue of The Kenyon Review: […]

Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR

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ZETEO

Zeteo (ζητέω): to challenge, question, dispute, explore the forgotten and ignored

Monthly Archives: March 2014

All aboard with Joanna Dreby

Paper and Film

Biphobia: The downside of going both ways

Masterpiece of a Misfit III – Peace of Mind and Getting There

Poetry on the Go

Teach children the capacity of happiness, not its obsession

Acting v. Feeling

Masterpiece of a Misfit–II Burton’s Word Paintings

The Right Word