How 1940s American pop songs framed the world beyond the United States as exotic playgrounds or lands of folly and belittled non-Europeans. The songs discussed: “Civilization (Bongo, Bongo, Bongo),” “The Coffee Song,” “The Maharajah of Madagor,” “Managua, Nicaragua,” and “Rum and Coca Cola.”
Categories: ZiR • Tags: colonialism, Donald Trump, international relations, neo-colonialism, popular music, songs
By Walter Cummins Life is a Fiction Over a half century ago, shortly before the twentieth-century British literary critic Frank Kermode’s seminal The Sense of an Ending was published, I found myself in a debate with the campus chaplain, a priest named Joe Casey, whom I barely knew at the time. The topic—Life is a Fiction—came from me, although I don’t recall how Father Joe and I ended up on a stage in front of several hundred students. My […]
Categories: Essay • Tags: Camus, cats, fiction, life, literary theory, storytelling
By Walter Cummins Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. … In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. — Walter Benjamin, as translated by Harry Zohn The other day when I asked Alexa on an Amazon Echo to play John Coltrane’s “Wise One” and, a split second later, when McCoy Tyner’s piano chords filled the room, two references […]
Categories: Essay • Tags: Beethoven, cultural criticism, Donald Trump, jazz, Jean Baudrillard, John Coltrane, movies, televison, Walter Benjamin
By Walter Cummins Review of At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell (New York: Other Press, 2016) One reason Sarah Bakewell’s The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails is such an engaging read was her decision to organize her examination of philosophy around the lives of the central thinkers, with tantalizing tidbits about their friendships and fallings out, their wives and lovers, their personal tensions over evolving and conflicting theories. But her approach […]
Categories: Review • Tags: Camus, Existentialism, France, Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre
Review of H.L. Hix, American Anger: An Evidentiary (Etruscan Press, 2016). “I’ve got a family to feed, a neighborhood to defend.” “I’ve got a family to feed, a principle to defend.” “I’ve got a family to feed, my honor to defend.” — H.L. Hix, American Anger These lines taken from separate poems in the first section—“Aggression Cues”—of H. L. Hix’s recent poetry collection, American Anger, can serve as elements of a mantra for the entire book. The voice […]
Categories: Review • Tags: anger, Donald Trump, poetry, United States of America
Outliving Society’s Capacity to Care Despite the rapidly growing number of aged in America, the ranks of geriatricians is not keeping up with the needs for old people’s medical care. So reports the New York Times. According to projections based on census data, by the year 2030, roughly 31 million Americans will be older than 75, the largest such population in American history. There are about 7,000 geriatricians in practice today in the United States. The American Geriatrics Society […]
Categories: ZiR • Tags: aging, elderly, geriatricians, health care, home-care aides
Downton Abbey, now in its sixth and final season, has been a TV phenomenon, with audiences in more than 200 countries, including 160 million viewers in China. In the US it is the most popular PBS program ever, and, during the 2014-15 viewing year, it came out twentieth in popularity among all network and cable programming, just behind Monday Night Football. Why has it had such broad appeal? It’s difficult—perhaps impossible—to generalize for the planet, for viewers in places as […]
Categories: ZiLL • Tags: Downton Abbey, economic crisis, labor, televison, United Kingdom, work, working class
Seeking Spirituality in a Secular World An article in the New York Times about people who enjoyed a religious experience in a gym led me to think about the range of human quests for some sort of spiritual connection, and beyond that what such a spiritual connection might mean. The Times article, “When Some Turn to Church, Others Go to CrossFit” by Mark Oppenheimer, reports on Harvard Divinity School researchers’ attempts to define religiosity in contemporary America. Their project, […]
Categories: ZiR • Tags: André Comte-Sponville, atheism, Christianity, God, Hortus deliciarum, religion, Wittgenstein
Details are still emerging about the San Bernardino shootings, but evidence mounts that this was terrorism. Public reaction appears to be much more disturbed and fearful than it was a few days earlier when a lone domestic gunman shot people at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood office. The extent of the San Bernardino reaction is understandable because it reveals once more a network of organized forces hostile to Americans, impersonally seeking victims in a variety of public settings. The […]
Categories: ZiR • Tags: death, guns, Planned Parenthood, San Bernardino, statistics, terrorism, United States of America
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