ZETEO

Goethe: “All That Is Brooding in my Own Mind” – I of II

July 3, 2014 by William Eaton

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Italian Journey is a memorable picture of Italy at the end of the eighteenth century. Italian Journey portrays Goethe’s joy and struggle to satisfy his intellectual curiosity and commitment to understanding art. “With great objects [of art] around,” he said, the purpose of his trip was “to learn and to improve myself ere I am forty years old.” (He began the journey at 37.) Goethe traveled throughout Italy from 1786 to 1788. Upon arriving he declared his “delight that the language I always […]

Categories: Tucker Cox, ZiR • Tags: travel

Ivy League Sex Education

July 1, 2014 by William Eaton

On a recent trip to New York City a made an obligatory stop at The Strand bookstore, quite possible the world’s best. Their poetry section is so rich with options that it is almost impossible not to make an interesting discovery. Among the discoveries I made is Taylor Mali’s book “What Learning Leaves.” I picked it because the cover looks like a classic composition book, the type that are sold in drugstores all over the country, which I happen […]

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

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Changing the plot: victims of incest

June 30, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

For those of us who grew up with the Disney characters, artist Saint Hoax’s “Princest Diaries” series might be extremely off-putting. In an effort to create sexual assault awareness (or else, to re-write history based on visual lies), the Middle Eastern artist shows Disney’s princesses being forced to kiss their fathers. The disturbing images use the corruption of a somewhat common childhood fantasy—being a princess—to bring light to the true horror of domestic sexual abuse: a majority of child victims are assaulted by family […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: art, childhood, children, rape, sexuality

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Porn in the Web

June 29, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

? What categorizes some things as art or marketing and others as pornography? What if we went beyond the “purely pornographic” and viewed marketing as a manipulation machine, seeking to both please and coerce consumers?

Categories: Review

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On Nakedness and Awkwardness

June 29, 2014 by William Eaton

Toward the end of his seminal chapter on the objectification of women in European painting, in Ways of Seeing (1972), John Berger discusses an exception to the rule: Rubens portrait of his second wife, Hélène Fourment: We see her in the act of turning, her fur about to slip off her shoulders. Clearly she will not remain as she is for more than a second. In a superficial sense her image is as instantaneous as a photograph’s. But, in a more […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: art, male gaze, narrative, Rubens, sexuality, women

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I Throw Like a Girl: New Ads Challenge Gender Stereotypes

June 28, 2014 by William Eaton

Since I don’t have a television, I am not able to contextualize the 2-3 advertisements that I watch by choice online within the cacophony of commercials that the average television watching individual is assaulted with on a daily basis. I wonder when and where these gender-non-conforming ads appear on television, and what kind of an impact they actually have when they are buried among all of the other noise. In the Washington Post, blogger Nia-Malika Henderson highlights a few of these ads […]

Categories: Caterina Gironda, ZiR • Tags: advertising

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Please come back next week!

June 26, 2014 by William Eaton

Tucker Cox is currently exploring. His reading and commentary in the field of traveling will return next week. Thank you for reading!

Categories: Tucker Cox, ZiR

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Photograph, by Claire Stewart, is of chefs Adrienne Jones and David Caban competing in the Kitchen Feud at the New York City College of Technology on April 25, 2013.

Culinary Star Wars

June 25, 2014 by stewchef

By Claire Stewart Review of The Cultivation of Taste: Chefs and the Organization of Fine Dining by Christel Lane (Oxford University Press, 2014) The Cultivation of Taste: Chefs and the Organization of Fine Dining is a dogged endeavor to categorize and analyze the world of Michelin-starred restaurants and the chefs who run them. Author Christel Lane conducts a comparative study of restaurants in Britain and Germany, and applies her findings in an effort to examine the broader issue of […]

Categories: Review • Tags: chefs, cooking, England, Germany, restaurants, sociology

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One Candle Power

June 24, 2014 by William Eaton

Poems that soothe, that create a mellow mood can be difficult to find, particularly so in a collection of Sylvia Plath poems. For this reason, I was so thrilled to find the poem “By Candlelight.” Its backdrop is one of recent abandonment and of deep cold. But there is a candle well lit and a “small love” that shine throughout. I find it a very intimate, maternal poem. Perhaps this is why I like it, having had a baby not […]

Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR • Tags: literature, poetry, reading, Sylvia Plath

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