My husband has to travel for work fairly often, and I am lucky enough that I usually get to tag along. When I accompany him on his trips, I know I will end up being a co-pilot of sorts, which I actually enjoy. This means I won’t be lounging in a coffee shop with a book all day, so I have to plan my reading accordingly. On these types of trips, I try to travel with two books: a novel […]
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(Or “Everybody is entitled to dream, even those who came before MLK”) Eugene Field was an American writer best known for his children’s poetry, reports Wikipedia. I, on the other hand, report that translating a poem of his can be quite a challenge. Mr. Field—no doubt—had his own understanding of what childhood meant. And in this particular case, I am sure he sensed that children value secrecy—perhaps just as much as we do. These are the last three verses of […]
Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: childhood, children, dreams, literature, Martin Luther King, poetry, secrecy
My reading this week seems to be an appropriate follow-up to Tucker Cox’s post yesterday on guidebooks… after all my reading is part of my travel to Utah. This week I was researching all of the movies I can potentially see at Sundance – my first time attending the famous film festival – and as these things can happen stories of the mafia seem to be following me. I finished Rich Cohen’s Tough Jews last week and then heard stories of Whitey Bulger […]
Guidebooks (GBs) have set the sightseeing agenda for millennia. They defined the “7 Wonders of the World,” now groups of sites – ancient, modern, architectural, and so on. Herodotus’ travelogues (5thC, BCE) remain among the most popular guidebooks ever written. GBs established Jerusalem as the new Delphi for medieval pilgrims. They instructed young noblemen grooming for careers in politics or diplomacy on the do’s and don’ts of the obligatory Grand Tour of Europe in the 18th century. GBs’ made the Cathedral at […]
We lost Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) last week, at least in body. Writer, poet, dramatist, and civil rights activist, Baraka was slight in stature but grand in presence, words, and ability to generate controversy. He inhabited multiple spaces—in the form of books such as Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963) which he wrote when he still called himself LeRoi Jones, never out of print; in politics as he protested unequal treatment of African Americans; in poetry in his association with Ginsberg, […]
Categories: ZiR • Tags: African-Americans, Civil Rights Movement, poet, theater
In last week’s post, I began a two-part explanation of Walt Whitman’s title “Leaves of Grass.” The “Leaves” refers simply to pages, as in pages of poetry, of which Whitman’s book is of course composed. Now it’s on to the “Grass” part. I base my understanding of what Whitman meant on the accompanying image, which reads: A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do […]
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I often avoid talking about race, class, and migration in public. People seem to take these topics as an opportunity to strengthen their beliefs, rather than to enter a discussion. (see “Breaking up the Echo” quoted in my first week of reading). A recent article in the New York Times opinion pages has taken my conviction a step further. In Does Immigration mean ‘France is Over’? Justin E. H. Smith suggests that people not only seek homogeneity in their own lives; they […]
Categories: ZiR • Tags: beliefs, culture, diversity, immigration, migration, New York Times, racism, reading
This week I started reading a book on the Jewish Mafia passed on by my friend Rick Mester (who read it for research while writing his novel). Tough Jews is one of those non-fiction books that reads like fiction, describing characters in detail and constantly setting the scene for the reader. Of course I could not help but picture it as a movie and had to laugh when I read the scenario below: The troop later found out what had happened. After […]
Categories: ZiR • Tags: film, Hollywood, Jewish studies, Mafia, movies, novels
What do Pausanias, vade mecum (Latin, “go with me”), Murray and Baedeker have in common with Seth Kugel’s weekly column/blog in the New York Times, the “Frugal Traveler”? In a lively and informative discussion about which is the better tool, Kugel’s Dec 24, 2013 piece, “Planning a Trip: Guidebook Versus the Web,” pits the worldwide web against old-fashioned guidebooks. Travelers have relied on them for millennia. Pausanias authored his great guide to ancient Greece in the 2nd century, CE. During the Renaissance […]
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