ZETEO

Suicide and Fame

June 13, 2014 by Jennifer Dean

Read an article this morning in the Hollywood Reporter on the suicide of director Malik Bendjelloul (Oscar winner for the documentary Searching for Sugarman). I found Searching for Sugarman inspiring as a film (simple footage incredibly edited and animated to create a compelling story that explored art and commerce and popular culture through the story of musician Sixto Rodriguez) and was shocked to learn of the death of it’s young director. The article, written by Scott Johnson, opens with a […]

Categories: Jennifer Dean, ZiR • Tags: film

“Travel is fatal to prejudice” – part III of III

June 12, 2014 by William Eaton

Part 3 of 3 of Mark Twain’s memoir of his 134-day European and Holy Land cruise in 1867, the biggest selling book in his lifetime. Every great travelogue imprints memories of sights, experiences and perspectives. The Innocents Abroad or, The New Pilgrims’ Progress has too many to mention. For example, there is the “true cross… found in every church we go into… and as much as a keg of nails that held it together.” Imprints of Twain’s views, especially of the U.S., do not leave us : Just […]

Categories: Tucker Cox, ZiR • Tags: travel

Arabian Red Fox, photograph by Jem Babbington, appears on Birds of Saudi Arabia website

Translating Dickinson

June 11, 2014 by William Eaton

By William Eaton A discussion of four Emily Dickinson poems in the context of Françoise Delphy’s French translations appearing in Poésies complètes : Edition bilingue français-anglais by Emily Dickinson and Françoise Delphy (Flammarion, 2009). I. The Articulate Inarticulate An early reader of Emily Dickinson’s poems used this phrase—“the articulate inarticulate”—to describe her, and for me it provides a way into “translating” or seeking means of understanding one of my favorites among her poems, here quoted in its entirety: […]

Categories: Review • Tags: Emily Dickinson, French, poetry, translation

Migration of the Innocents

June 9, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

A series of images of young children in a crowded US Border Patrol facility in Texas has been circulating the web since they leaked into conservative news and opinion website Breibart.com last week. The images show hundreds of immigrants—most of them Salvadoran, Honduran and Guatemalan children and minors—shoved in windowless rooms as they await for instructions. In an article featured in WLRN (We Learn) titled “How Central American Kids Gave Us A Reality Check,” Miami-based journalist Tim Padget reports on this issue by mocking […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: childhood, children, immigrant children, immigration, politics

Robinson Crusoe, Goodbye Columbus

June 8, 2014 by William Eaton

{“Robinson Crusoe, Goodbye Columbus” pdf} Jackson Burgess, I believe it was, who told me when I was a very young fiction writer that a novel written in the first person should make clear the circumstances of the narrator when he (or she) was telling the story and why he was telling it. One might be at some pains to think of novels that indeed followed this rule, but Burgess, himself a novelist and professor at Berkeley, likely also […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: literature, Philip Roth, writing

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Separate but Unequal: The Sexism in Forcing Women to Play Softball

June 7, 2014 by William Eaton

I can hardly convey the long-awaited validation I felt this morning when I woke up to find Emma Span’s New York Times Op-Ed piece, Is Softball Sexist? In this article she lays out a very articulate explanation of how women were forced out of playing the sport of baseball, and why the option to play softball does not justify that exclusion. As a young girl, I was one of the best players on my co-ed little league team, 95% of which […]

Categories: Caterina Gironda, ZiR • Tags: American history, baseball, sexism, softball, sports, women

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Gender in Greek Tragedy

June 7, 2014 by Jennifer Dean

I am rereading some of the great Greek plays and playwrights in order to give myself food for thought for my thesis film which is a modern retelling of a famous Greek myth. What struck me when reading Euripides was how gender politics represents itself similarly in a play from around 400 B.C.E. as might be discussed today. In Andromache, the Chorus Leader warns Hermione: You speak too freely against your fellow women – forgivable in you, perhaps, but still, women […]

Categories: Jennifer Dean, ZiR • Tags: film, gender, women, writing

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I travel to learn – Part 2 of 3

June 5, 2014 by William Eaton

Part 2 of 3 of Mark Twain’s memoir of his 134-day European and Holy Land cruise in 1867, the biggest selling book in his lifetime . So said Mark Twain in is classic, travelogue, The Innocents Abroad or, The New Pilgrims’ Progress. And while he and his companions indeed discover “half the world,” the reader learns more. Page after page of Mark Twain’s Innocents (like all of his books) illustrates his brilliant writing. Twain’s facility with language, his immense […]

Categories: Tucker Cox, ZiR • Tags: travel

Small Birds Converge

June 3, 2014 by Ana Maria Caballero

I feel that there is always something dark and sinister looming over the poems of Sylvia Plath. Sure, her personal story, ending in suicide, hangs heavy. But, take this one pictured to the right, “The Manor Garden.” From the title, one could simply expect a poem about a garden, perhaps succumbing to fall. But the season isn’t entirely clear throughout the nature imagery. Things are dying but there is also a bee abuzz. Finally, it becomes apparent that something larger […]

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

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