death | ZETEO | Page 2

Holocaust, Son of Saul, Kierkegaard

March 6, 2016 by Ed Mooney

Kierkegaard appears unexpectedly on the “Opinionator” page of last week’s New York Times. He’s discussed in “The Stone” by a canny and sensitive philosopher, Katalin Balog. She finds the Danish thinker just under the surface of the Hungarian movie about the Holocaust, “Son of Saul,” which was recently awarded “Best Foreign Language Film” at the Oscars. The movie’s central theme is Saul’s inner world, the loss and recovery of his soul. In scene after scene we see his face unmoved, […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: death, ethics, film, love, philosophy, technology

Leave a comment

Sex and Death

January 18, 2016 by fritztucker

While reading Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, I came across a most thought-provoking passage on Bollywood, which applies to Hollywood as well. On pg. 348, Mehta writes (emphasis mine): Gangsters and whores all over the world have always been fascinated by the movies and vice versa; the movies are fundamentally transgressive. They are our eye into the forbidden. Most people will never see a human being murder another human being, except on screen. Most people will never see […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiR • Tags: art, books, crime, criminals, death, film, History, literature, love, sex, sexuality

Leave a comment

Lynch Mobs

January 3, 2016 by fritztucker

Shortly after posting my previous week’s article about Donald Trump, fascism, and communal violence, the New York Times published footage of a woman being lynched in Kabul, Afghanistan. The preceding disclaimer did not prepare me for the video’s contents; though I can’t think of anything that would have. It was definitely the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I don’t necessarily recommend the reader watch it. I would recommend it, however, for those who genuinely think that Trump’s followers are in danger […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: African-Americans, books, crime, death, History, literature, Marx, New York Times, politics, race, reading, writing

Dancing with Woolf, Treading with Eliot

December 27, 2015 by Ed Mooney

♦ What would happen if God leaned down and gave you a full, wet kiss? — Daniel Ladinsky Some words, like people, move us before we’re really aware of what’s happening. We return the glance from across the room instantaneously, spontaneously. Sometimes words are like that, a contagious spark. We dance in the space of words and things worded. A quickness of phrase or movement will quicken an alert return. The glance and spark not just of looks […]

Categories: Ed Mooney • Tags: death, philosophy, poetry, women, writing

Leave a comment

Whales, Meteors, Terrorists, Saviors

December 20, 2015 by Ed Mooney

Herman Melville was mesmerized by a mysterious white whale. A new movie in town, In the Heart of the Sea, recounts the more or less true story of a whale ramming a ship in 1820. The Essex from Nantucket was stove in, in the South Pacific. Moby Dick is a distant relative of that event. It turns out that Melville was fascinated by a white whale and also by an ominous white meteor streaming through the sky — not […]

Categories: Ed Mooney • Tags: books, death, film, literature, Meteors, movies, reading, Thoreau, whales

Donald Trump the Fascist?

December 14, 2015 by fritztucker

Seemingly every statement regarding Donald Trump in recent weeks either explicitly or implicitly compares him to Hitler. It’s almost as though both social and mainstream media are trying to pay homage to Godwin’s Law, which humorously and tautologically states that any online discussion will eventually compare the subject to Nazi Germany. These comparisons highlight both the capacity and limitation of the American imagination. For these comparisons to have any meaning, however, historical facts must be addressed. It is true that Hitler was a uniquely effective rhetorician. Perhaps Trump is too. […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: capitalism, civil rights, crime, death, ethics, History, immigration, India, law, literature, Narendra Modi, politics, race

People console one another outside the emergency room entrance to Loma Linda Medical Center after two shootouts in San Bernardino. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

Guns, Death, Terrorism, the United States

December 3, 2015 by Walter Cummins

Details are still emerging about the San Bernardino shootings, but evidence mounts that this was terrorism. Public reaction appears to be much more disturbed and fearful than it was a few days earlier when a lone domestic gunman shot people at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood office. The extent of the San Bernardino reaction is understandable because it reveals once more a network of organized forces hostile to Americans, impersonally seeking victims in a variety of public settings. The […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: death, guns, Planned Parenthood, San Bernardino, statistics, terrorism, United States of America

Class Warfare Poverty Death

December 1, 2015 by William Eaton

Out of the hundred million people living in Soviet Russia, we should be able get 90 million behind us. The others, there’s no talking with them, they have to be annihilated. — Bolshevik leader Grigory Zinoviev, September 1918 Results. Approximately 245 000 deaths in the United States in [the year] 2000 were attributable to low education, 176 000 to racial segregation, 162 000 to low social support, 133 000 to individual-level poverty, 119 000 to income inequality, and 39 000 to area-level poverty. — Sandro […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Bolsheviks, capitalism, death, disease, exploitation, hunger, immigration, minimum wage, poverty, Russia, Soviet Union

Truth, Madeline, and the Trill of Doom

November 29, 2015 by Ed Mooney

In “Madeline, Imperfection, Love, and Loss” (Zeteo, 11.25.2015), Joy Yeager reminds us of that priceless book for children and adults called, simply, Madeline. It’s the story, as she reminds us, “of a little girl, an orphan, who lives in an old house in Paris, with eleven other girls.” A nun, Miss Clavel, is in charge. For many, the book is unforgettable, full of enchanting illustrations and about many essentials: love and loss, wandering in Paris, a little community of […]

Categories: Ed Mooney • Tags: death, literature, love, music, philosophy

Leave a comment