In last week’s post, I began a two-part explanation of Walt Whitman’s title “Leaves of Grass.” The “Leaves” refers simply to pages, as in pages of poetry, of which Whitman’s book is of course composed. Now it’s on to the “Grass” part. I base my understanding of what Whitman meant on the accompanying image, which reads: A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do […]
Categories: ZiR
I often avoid talking about race, class, and migration in public. People seem to take these topics as an opportunity to strengthen their beliefs, rather than to enter a discussion. (see “Breaking up the Echo” quoted in my first week of reading). A recent article in the New York Times opinion pages has taken my conviction a step further. In Does Immigration mean ‘France is Over’? Justin E. H. Smith suggests that people not only seek homogeneity in their own lives; they […]
Categories: ZiR • Tags: beliefs, culture, diversity, immigration, migration, New York Times, racism, reading
This week I started reading a book on the Jewish Mafia passed on by my friend Rick Mester (who read it for research while writing his novel). Tough Jews is one of those non-fiction books that reads like fiction, describing characters in detail and constantly setting the scene for the reader. Of course I could not help but picture it as a movie and had to laugh when I read the scenario below: The troop later found out what had happened. After […]
Categories: ZiR • Tags: film, Hollywood, Jewish studies, Mafia, movies, novels
What do Pausanias, vade mecum (Latin, “go with me”), Murray and Baedeker have in common with Seth Kugel’s weekly column/blog in the New York Times, the “Frugal Traveler”? In a lively and informative discussion about which is the better tool, Kugel’s Dec 24, 2013 piece, “Planning a Trip: Guidebook Versus the Web,” pits the worldwide web against old-fashioned guidebooks. Travelers have relied on them for millennia. Pausanias authored his great guide to ancient Greece in the 2nd century, CE. During the Renaissance […]
Categories: ZiR
I just finished a class on Ralph Ellison and was lucky enough to spend an entire semester on one of my favorite writers. We read his most famous novel, Invisible Man, his collections of short stories and essays, and Juneteenth, published posthumously in 1999. For Ellison, folklore was a constant and significant influence. A folkloric figure that appeared in both of his novels was Peter Wheatstraw, a figure for whom even Ellison, with all of his knowledge of African American folklore, […]
Categories: ZiR • Tags: folklore, Ralph Ellison
I confess that I never understood what Walt Whitman meant by “Leaves of Grass.” But, I finally get it. Or at least, I think I do. If my interpretation of the accompanying image is somewhat accurate, then “leaves” are simply “pages,” as in pages of poetry. This might seem totally obvious for many learn’d people, but it just became apparent to me. Perhaps I should have been forced to read more Whitman in high school. But reading it now, on […]
Categories: ZiR • Tags: books, literature, poetry, reading, Walt Whitman, writing
A close friend of mine (a fantastic soccer dribbler and mathematician) insisted on sharing Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010). I am not much of a sports reader. But real soccer being in hiatus during the winter, reading about it seemed like an appealing substitute. Luckily for me, the book turned out to offer an analysis of the culture of soccer as it intersects with migration, globalization, identity, corruption, and power. I’ll […]
Categories: ZiR • Tags: Brazil, capitalism, globalization, reading, soccer
I have been going through magazines that have piled up over the semester since I have been attending an MFA program at CCNY and just read the November 22nd Hollywood Reporter Directors Roundtable for 2013. The question of what distinguishes a good director from a great director was asked and Steve McQueen (director of 12 Years a Slave) gave my favorite response: The other day I was watching [John Ford’s] The Searchers, and there is that bit where John Wayne […]
Categories: ZiR • Tags: directing, film, gender, women in film, women's studies
Reading Devil Bird from Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas. Dumas was part of the Black Arts Movement, a civil rights activist, poet, and writer. In 1968, was tragically shot and killed in a New York City subway in a case of mistaken identity. Much of his work was out of print until it was resurrected by Eugene B. Redmond, academic, poet, and activist. Thanks to Redmond, we can experience the writings of a man that Toni […]
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