August | 2015

Jane Jacobs: Intuition vs. Evidence

August 31, 2015 by fritztucker

After having read countless authors who cite Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and having intuitively come to many Jane Jacobs-esque conclusions on my own over the years, I finally decided it was time to read the original work. Many of the conclusions Jacobs comes to resonate with my personal experience. Critiquing the notion that parks are safer for children than streets, Jacobs writes: “what significant change does occur if children are transferred from a lively city street to […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: books, childhood, children, civil rights, History, literature, New York City, social justice, women, writing

In Sickness and Health

August 30, 2015 by Ed Mooney

William James is known as the father of American Psychology and a Philosopher of Religious Experience par excellence. He also could exhibit a wide range of mood and sensibility. I just came across this – something new to me – in an account of James’ well-known struggles, especially in his youth, over meaning or purpose in his life: One of his early sketchpads contains what most scholars think is a self-portrait in red crayon—a young man, seated, hunched over, with […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR

The Cultural Revolution in Hindsight

August 23, 2015 by fritztucker

I’ve just read The Chinese Cultural Revolution Reconsidered: Beyond Purge and Holocaust, a collection of essays that consider the social, political, economic, and psychological factors that contributed to the 1966-76 period. It was the first I had read about the Maoist period in years, after my thorough disenchantment with Maoists in Nepal. My renewed interest in the subject is that the Cultural Revolution (CR) could be considered, from one very abstract angle, to be a mass movement aiming to achieve an egalitarian […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, crime, death, History, literature

Dream Writing

August 23, 2015 by Ed Mooney

I’ve just received a collection of essays on nature that includes exchanges among academics allied with ecology, literature, and theology. What caught my eye was an essay titled, “Dream Writing.” It reminds me of Thoreau’s phrase, “dreaming awake.” That’s what it was to look skyward from his skiff in the center of Walden Pond. The author, Susan Pyke, writes from the University of Melbourne on literature and ecology. She wonders if reading poetry and novels can enter the body to animate […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR

“Living between sand and skin”

August 20, 2015 by William Eaton

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been pondering these lines from the poem Going Back, which was written in Catalan by Gemma Gorga; translated to English by poet, linguist, and translator Anna Crowe; and published in Six Catalan Poets (Arc Publications, 2013). This poem might be one of those rare gems that transcends those large questions of poetry in translation, such as whether the conversion should focus on the vocabulary, the overall sense, the meter and rhyme, or something else […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: Catalan, identity, poetry

Early Mid-Life Crisis

August 18, 2015 by Ana Maria Caballero

There is an undocumented age crisis that occurs in the early thirties. Indeed, the onset of this decade might mark the actual “coming of age.” Eighteen is still shrouded by the incredulous, protective shield of childhood, as is any age before twenty nine. But thirty-three is different. It is lucid and stunned and dismayed at the same time. I held this notion as an inkling until reading the poem below by German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, which confirmed it as […]

Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR • Tags: aging, literature, poetry, reading, writing

Exquisite and Expansive: II

August 16, 2015 by Ed Mooney

In my previous post (“Exquisite and Expansive: I”) I tarried with a striking sentence picked up from the pages of The New Yorker. In his piece on Max Beerbohm, Adam Gopnik, a favorite writer of mine, had written, “There are two kinds of extended sentences: The first is argumentative, the second exquisite.” The idea of an argumentative sentence should be clear enough. But I had to pause on what makes something an exquisite sentence, and why we couldn’t be exquisitely […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR

Larkin, Not Really in Translation

August 13, 2015 by William Eaton

“Counting” is a beautiful little Philip Larkin poem that I had not read before encountering it in a bilingual collection, with French translations: La vie avec un trou dedans. Thinking in terms of one Is easily done — One room, one bed, one chair, One person there, Makes perfect sense; one set Of wishes can be met, One coffin filled. But counting up to two Is harder to do; For one must be denied Before it’s tried. This may also […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: New York Review of Books, Philip Larkin, poetry, translation, Victor Hugo

Exquisite and Expansive: I

August 9, 2015 by Ed Mooney

I always like Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker pieces. Reading his recent ruminations on Max Beerbohm is no exception. Gopnik touches on the fragility of Jewish and gay identities as they were negotiated in the ‘30s in America and in Britain, on the importance of voice in writing, and on Beerbohm’s great popularity between the wars. And something else jumped from the page. Gopnik makes an extraordinary generalization, marked by pithiness and grip. There are two kinds of extended sentences: “The […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR

ZETEO

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

Monthly Archives: August 2015

In Sickness and Health

The Cultural Revolution in Hindsight

Dream Writing

“Living between sand and skin”

Early Mid-Life Crisis

Exquisite and Expansive: II

Larkin, Not Really in Translation

Exquisite and Expansive: I