ZETEO

Mixed Feelings

October 28, 2014 by Ana Maria Caballero

As an emotion, “mixed-feelings” catches a bad rap. But having mixed-feelings about a poem is actually a valid, and valuable, emotional response. It means something in the poem worked for you, but, at the same time, something else didn’t. There is a grey area, imprecision, ambiguity even. All spaces in which poetry thrives. The following poem, written by poet Kevin Young, leaves me with such mixed-feelings. I know the poem has merit, but at the same time, it bothers me. There […]

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

Is Nothing But (Barthes & La Rochefoucauld)

October 26, 2014 by William Eaton

« Quelque bien qu’on nous dise de nous, on ne nous apprend rien de nouveau. » Compliments can’t teach us anything we don’t know already. — François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld. « Il y a de bons mariages, mais il n’y en a point de délicieux. » There are good marriages, but there aren’t any delicious ones. A summary of a gloss of several of Roland Barthes’s observations regarding La Rochefoucauld and his maximes : The author of the maximes is not a […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: La Rochefoucauld, maxims, Roland Barthes

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Pinkwashing: Consumerism and Breast Cancer Awareness

October 25, 2014 by William Eaton

[print_link] [email_link] Before Pinktober comes to an end, we should all squeeze in a conversation about “Pinkwashing,” the corporate trend of slapping pink ribbons on every variety of product imaginable in the name of breast cancer awareness. It turns out there is no regulation on the pink ribbon (although the Susan G. Komen Foundation has patented the phrase “for the cure”) so companies draping their products in pink are not obliged to donate even a penny of proceeds […]

Categories: Caterina Gironda, ZiR • Tags: breast cancer, consumerism

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All That Is – life, love and the pursuit of happiness

October 24, 2014 by William Eaton

James Salter’s novel All That Is was a national bestseller in the US last year. A translation is now on the bestseller list in France. I was drawn to it by the taut, tense opening lines describing the experience of Americans in the Pacific during World War Two: All night in darkness the water sped past. In tier on tier of iron bunks below deck, silent, six deep, lay hundreds of men, many faceup with their eyes still open though […]

Categories: Catherine Vigier, ZiR • Tags: literature, love, travel

Wayne Thiebaud at 94

October 23, 2014 by William Eaton

There are times when old age produces not eternal youth but a sovereign freedom, a pure necessity in which one enjoys a moment of grace between life and death, and in which all the parts of the machine come together to send into the future a feature that cuts across all ages: Titian, Turner, Monet. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari There is reason to celebrate artist Wayne Thiebaud, now in his 94th year and in the 7th decade of his painting […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz, ZiR • Tags: art

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The Future of Communication

October 21, 2014 by William Eaton

The Visual Humanities and the Future of Communication By Maggie Sattler Review of Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production by Johanna Drucker (Harvard University Press, 2014) [print_link] [email_link] In “How E-Reading Threatens Learning in the Humanities,” a July 2014 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Naomi S. Baron, a professor of linguistics whose research interests include writing and technology, contends that when her students read on digital devices, their attention spans and abilities to retain information shrink. This […]

Categories: Review • Tags: education, reading, technology

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A Pot of Bones

October 21, 2014 by Ana Maria Caballero

Natasha Trethewey is one of those rare poets that everybody seems to like, despite her massive commercial success. Massive, that is, in terms of poetic commercial success, which is timid at best. Trethewey won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Native Guard (2006), written about an all-black regiment that fought in the Civil War. She was later named U.S. Poet Laureate, twice. Her work deals principally with race in America. Trethewey’s parents were a mixed-race couple living in Mississippi in […]

Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR • Tags: books, literature, poem, poet, poetry, reading, work

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A Child’s Garden (of Verses and more)

October 20, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

I found a nice little verse at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden last weekend; it was placed at the base of a fountain with a statue of a child surrounded by ivy. This is from Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses and Underwoods, published in 1913. When the golden day is done, Through the closing portal Child and garden, flower and sun, Vanish all things mortal A quick search online reveals that Stevenson was a celebrity in his own time, but with […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR

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Fifty thousand spiders in a pot

October 19, 2014 by William Eaton

In The French Generation of 1820 Alan Spitzer writes, using an image from Balzac, of “hungry young provincials competing in the Paris arena like fifty thousand spiders in a pot . . . all tortured by the discrepancy between boundless ambition and constricted opportunity.” He quotes a translation of le Comte de Rambuteau’s warning to Louis Philippe — that the French King should beware of: the déclassés, the doctors without patients, the architects without buildings, the journalists without journals, the […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: art, Balzac, Bourdieu, employment, France, Freud, pastry, revolution

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