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Connecting the Dots

October 25, 2015 by Ed Mooney

What triggers a Zeteo rumination? Sometimes — usually — it’s an item from the media or from a book I’m browsing. Sometimes it’s the flash in memory of a line of poetry or philosophy. Things beg for connection. I try to assist. Sometimes it’s something close to anger, and I work to connect the dots. What is it that triggers a polemical response like the one I aimed at that New Yorker article titled “Pond Scum”? Of course I thought […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: beauty, kier, poetry, reading, Rilke

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Hennen’s Groundhog Day: Poetry, Pop Culture

October 19, 2015 by William Eaton

Discussion of a poem by Tom Hennen, from his collection “Darkness Sticks to Everything” (Copper Canyon Press). Does this become a way of reclaiming poetry for the non-poet? A way of making a connection with popular culture via poetry?

Categories: ZiR • Tags: Darkness Sticks To Everything, depression, Las Vegas, movies, poetry, Steven Seagal, Thomas Hennen

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Kids Traveling To A Boarding School Through The Himalayas, Zanskar, Indian Himalayas; photo by Timonthy Allen

Thoreau Bashing

October 18, 2015 by Ed Mooney

Am I that unusual or touchy to think that “scum” is an unpleasant, if not vulgar, label to have squarely pinned to your back? In “Pond Scum” (The New Yorker, October 19) Kathryn Schultz does just that as she blithely presents a “misanthropic,” “horrible” Thoreau. Apart from the vulgarity of greeting him thus, the piece offers a deeply distorted picture of the iconic writer of woodlands and ponds, rivers, meadows, and mountains. As it happens, Thoreau loved people as well […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: literature, poetry, reading

Images, Beauty, and Terror

October 11, 2015 by Ed Mooney

Images have impact! In my previous post, Zeteo 10/04, I considered Rilke’s poem “The Archaic Torso of Apollo,” where the poet conjures the image of a broken statue of Apollo as he views it in a museum. He traces the impact as his eyes follow the contours of the god’s torso. The image — what he sees — is complex: he sees stone and also a person or god. Is the uptake religious/aesthetic? Or is the impact one to the […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: literature, philosophy, poetry, Rilke

Eyes on the Street

October 5, 2015 by fritztucker

Perhaps Jane Jacobs’ most acclaimed contribution to urban studies in The Death and Life of Great American Cities is her “eyes on the street” theory. “[T]here must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street . . . to insure the safety of both residents and strangers” (1992, p. 35). According to Jacobs, this high-density street life not only provides safety, but a shared sense of civic duty. People must take a modicum of […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiR • Tags: books, capitalism, civil rights, crime, History, law, literature, New York City, politics, race, reading, social justice

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Broken Gods / Rising Swans

October 4, 2015 by Ed Mooney

And have you changed your life? A while back, in Zeteo 9/20, prompted by some remarks of E. O. Wilson, I wondered about the human need for epic, perhaps a religious epic, with roots in the Darwinian saga of creation. An epic or saga appears on a big screen. If we are concerned for the survival of the best of a religious sensibility, we might also find a place for small-screen encounters captured in poetry of the moment. We might […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR

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Death and Virgin Natality

September 27, 2015 by Ed Mooney

Leafing through Kathleen Norris’ The Cloister Walk, I came across this quite startling paragraph: If Eve is the mother of the living, she is also the mother of the dead. One of the most astonishing and precious things about motherhood is the brave way in which women consent to give birth to creatures who will one day die. That they do this is an awesome thing, as is their virginity, their existence in and of themselves, apart from that potential […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: Hannah Arendt, Heidegger, motherhood, women

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Is Darwin a New Testament?

September 20, 2015 by Ed Mooney

In every true searcher of Nature  there is a kind of religious reverence — Albert Einstein. In his recent Zeteo post, Drew Whitcup cites a New Yorker polemic by Lawrence Krauss, who posits a necessary conflict between science and religion. But the emergence of modern science is inconceivable without the ancient and medieval assumptions of a divine orderliness to things. The great philosopher-scientists of the early enlightenment — say, Kepler and Newton — saw no necessary quarrel between science, on […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR

A Sudden Collapse of Ice

September 15, 2015 by Ana Maria Caballero

Poems can sometimes behave like short stories, like very short stories. They set the scene, bring the reader in and then leave them with an uncertain longing. In just fifteen lines, the poem below tells the story of two couples, of neighbors, of marriage, of winter. The title lets the reader know what to expect from the very beginning: there is to be a crossing over to an intimate landscape for a chilling view of the life of others. Chilling, perhaps, […]

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

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ZETEO

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

Category Archives: ZiR

Connecting the Dots

Hennen’s Groundhog Day: Poetry, Pop Culture

Thoreau Bashing

Images, Beauty, and Terror

Broken Gods / Rising Swans

Death and Virgin Natality

Is Darwin a New Testament?

A Sudden Collapse of Ice