By Andrew Bass Literature is a kind of intellectual light which, like the light of the sun, enables us to see what we do not like; but who would wish to escape unpleasing objects by condemning himself to perpetual darkness? — Samuel Johnson When asked whether he had read all the books in his library, my father once replied that he had: “Every title and most of the jackets,” he said. Tongue planted firmly in his cheek, […]
Categories: Essay
A friend recently sent me an upbeat, effortless Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919) poem that I immediately liked. And then immediately didn’t know if I liked. The poem is from Ferlinghetti’s record-breaking “A Coney Island State of Mind,” which was published in 1955 and sold over a million copies in nine different languages. The poet’s life story is worth reading. He is an orphan, veteran, journalist, world traveller, publisher (he was the first to publish “Howl“), painter, political activist and still-active ninety-something-year-old. Except for a few poems, […]
Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR • Tags: books, Ferlinghetti, poetry, reading, writing
by Ed Mooney
Do we know what knowledge is, or what intimacy is, or what matters in our lives? Well, we could start with the observation that we have plenty of room to maneuver in exploring these questions. The terrain is shifting, and that’s a good thing. I want to shift the long shadow knowledge casts over alternative life-ideals — things that matter. But I’ll start a bit off-center, looking at the terrain “liberalism” used to claim, and no longer can. It helps […]
1 A man seen on a Sunday—a very hot and humid Sunday. He’s slight, middle-aged, not quite shabbily dressed. He’s standing under a highway underpass, one of the hundreds if not thousands of highway underpasses in Connecticut. (And may I say, too, that Connecticut is one of the worst states to try to drive through. Suburban sprawl, highway-widening projects. In North Carolina some political figure came up with the horrible idea that highways should keep being built until every North […]
Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: Christianity, God, Jesus, poetry, Quaker meeting, religion, sports
by fritztucker
Iran and the US have finally reached a deal to limit Iran’s potential to develop nuclear weapons, in return for the US lifting economic sanctions against Iran. The deal includes constant video surveillance of Iran’s nuclear facilities, similar to that in the UN brokered peace treaty ending the 1996-2006 Maoist insurgency in Nepal. Skeptics of the US-Iran deal might point to the failure to demilitarize Germany after the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. There are, however, at least two key differences between the recent US-Iran nuclear deal and […]
Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: History, Iran, nuclear weapons, politics, treaty, war
by Ed Mooney
Schumann’s songs, especially Dichterliebe, are both romantically expressive and relatively simple in structure, almost like aphorisms. They have none of the virtuosic glamour or massive presence of a romantic symphony or concerto. Dichterliebe is a string of sixteen little gems, mostly only a page or two, some less than a minute in length, that are strung on an invisible (or inaudible) thread. They’re for tenor or baritone and piano, suitable for intimate chamber music performance. Schumann picked Heine’s poetry to […]
In the woods of Michigan in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville recounts, he found a not entirely unfamiliar solitude, but what was unusual was that, unlike previously, when he had visited the ruins of ancient European civilizations, the solitudes of America led his mind to project forward, losing itself “dans un immense avenir” (in a vast future). He and his traveling companion, also from France, asked themselves why fate had given them this quite singular opportunity to see both a portion […]
Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: de Tocqueville, indigenous people, natu, solitude, translation, United States of America, Western civilization, Willard Van Orman Quine, Wittgenstein
By Walter Cummins Second in a series Last time I wrote of the relationship of various prosthetic devices to the people who wear them. This time my topic is humanoids. At first glance, they may seem to be very different subjects. Prosthetics often and humanoids always, however, do share roots in robotics and artificial intelligence. But, more significantly, they question the relationships of human beings to devices that possess human characteristics. Recently, humanoids have become a particular subject […]
Categories: Essay • Tags: literature, movies, robots, sex, technology
Several years ago, British poet John Fuller wrote a poem with a bright future as a chart-topping pop song. Perhaps its catchy flow is due to the fact that it’s a strict villanelle, or perhaps it’s due to the fact that the poem is about unrequited, but not tortured, love. There’s just enough heartache to make it interesting, but no one is suffering too badly. Fuller is known for mastering traditional form and making it palatable. The villanelle for example can […]
Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR • Tags: books, John Fuller, literature, poetry, reading, writing
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