Among other things, Dickinson’s work can help us appreciate how language, writing in particular, can not only speak about the distances between human beings but can itself curtain us from others and erect curtains within our selves as well.
Categories: Review • Tags: Emily Dickinson, French, poetry, translation
A series of images of young children in a crowded US Border Patrol facility in Texas has been circulating the web since they leaked into conservative news and opinion website Breibart.com last week. The images show hundreds of immigrants—most of them Salvadoran, Honduran and Guatemalan children and minors—shoved in windowless rooms as they await for instructions. In an article featured in WLRN (We Learn) titled “How Central American Kids Gave Us A Reality Check,” Miami-based journalist Tim Padget reports on this issue by mocking […]
Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: childhood, children, immigrant children, immigration, politics
{“Robinson Crusoe, Goodbye Columbus” pdf} Jackson Burgess, I believe it was, who told me when I was a very young fiction writer that a novel written in the first person should make clear the circumstances of the narrator when he (or she) was telling the story and why he was telling it. One might be at some pains to think of novels that indeed followed this rule, but Burgess, himself a novelist and professor at Berkeley, likely also […]
Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: literature, Philip Roth, writing
I can hardly convey the long-awaited validation I felt this morning when I woke up to find Emma Span’s New York Times Op-Ed piece, Is Softball Sexist? In this article she lays out a very articulate explanation of how women were forced out of playing the sport of baseball, and why the option to play softball does not justify that exclusion. As a young girl, I was one of the best players on my co-ed little league team, 95% of which […]
Categories: Caterina Gironda, ZiR • Tags: American history, baseball, sexism, softball, sports, women
I am rereading some of the great Greek plays and playwrights in order to give myself food for thought for my thesis film which is a modern retelling of a famous Greek myth. What struck me when reading Euripides was how gender politics represents itself similarly in a play from around 400 B.C.E. as might be discussed today. In Andromache, the Chorus Leader warns Hermione: You speak too freely against your fellow women – forgivable in you, perhaps, but still, women […]
Categories: Jennifer Dean, ZiR • Tags: film, gender, women, writing
Part 2 of 3 of Mark Twain’s memoir of his 134-day European and Holy Land cruise in 1867, the biggest selling book in his lifetime . So said Mark Twain in is classic, travelogue, The Innocents Abroad or, The New Pilgrims’ Progress. And while he and his companions indeed discover “half the world,” the reader learns more. Page after page of Mark Twain’s Innocents (like all of his books) illustrates his brilliant writing. Twain’s facility with language, his immense […]
Categories: Tucker Cox, ZiR • Tags: travel
I feel that there is always something dark and sinister looming over the poems of Sylvia Plath. Sure, her personal story, ending in suicide, hangs heavy. But, take this one pictured to the right, “The Manor Garden.” From the title, one could simply expect a poem about a garden, perhaps succumbing to fall. But the season isn’t entirely clear throughout the nature imagery. Things are dying but there is also a bee abuzz. Finally, it becomes apparent that something larger […]
Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR • Tags: literature, poetry, Sylvia Plath, writing
Managing children’s boredom Adam Phillips makes a good point about the way adults feel and manage children’s boredom. In On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays of the Unexamined Life (Harvard University Press, 1994), Phillips examines the underlying meaning of people’s preoccupation with boredom. “Is it not indeed revealing,” he asks “what the child’s boredom evokes in the adults?” What concerns us, he suggests, is children’s lack of concern: Heard as a demand, sometimes as an accusation of failure or disappointment, it is rarely agreed […]
Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: Adam Phillips, boredom, childhood, children, families
In La société de la consommation (1970; The Consumer Society) the sociologist Jean Baudrillard wrote of how the urbanization and industrialization of human life had created new rarities: “space and time, clean air, greenery, water, silence . . . Some goods, previously free and readily available, are becoming luxury goods that only a privileged few can enjoy, while manufactured goods or services are widely available.” This fits with my sense that luxuries can now be defined negatively: not owning […]
Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Bob Dylan, consumerism, death, music, noise, Pascal, silence
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