literature | ZETEO

Halloween as Social Movement

November 2, 2015 by fritztucker

In Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (Holt Paperbacks, 2007), Barbara Ehrenreich writes about the evolution of carnivals; from tribal societies masking and dancing to manufacture group solidarity (Intro, Ch. 1); to feudal festivals that challenged oppressive gender and class relations (Ch. 4). Writes Ehrenreich: Whatever social category you had been boxed into–male or female, rich or poor–carnival was a chance to escape from it. No aspect of carnival has attracted more scholarly attention than the tradition of mocking the powerful, […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiR • Tags: art, books, capitalism, childhood, children, civil rights, gender, History, homosexuality, law, literature, love, politics, social justice, women

Kids Traveling To A Boarding School Through The Himalayas, Zanskar, Indian Himalayas; photo by Timonthy Allen

Thoreau Bashing

October 18, 2015 by Ed Mooney

Am I that unusual or touchy to think that “scum” is an unpleasant, if not vulgar, label to have squarely pinned to your back? In “Pond Scum” (The New Yorker, October 19) Kathryn Schultz does just that as she blithely presents a “misanthropic,” “horrible” Thoreau. Apart from the vulgarity of greeting him thus, the piece offers a deeply distorted picture of the iconic writer of woodlands and ponds, rivers, meadows, and mountains. As it happens, Thoreau loved people as well […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: literature, poetry, reading

Images, Beauty, and Terror

October 11, 2015 by Ed Mooney

Images have impact! In my previous post, Zeteo 10/04, I considered Rilke’s poem “The Archaic Torso of Apollo,” where the poet conjures the image of a broken statue of Apollo as he views it in a museum. He traces the impact as his eyes follow the contours of the god’s torso. The image — what he sees — is complex: he sees stone and also a person or god. Is the uptake religious/aesthetic? Or is the impact one to the […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: literature, philosophy, poetry, Rilke

Eyes on the Street

October 5, 2015 by fritztucker

Perhaps Jane Jacobs’ most acclaimed contribution to urban studies in The Death and Life of Great American Cities is her “eyes on the street” theory. “[T]here must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street . . . to insure the safety of both residents and strangers” (1992, p. 35). According to Jacobs, this high-density street life not only provides safety, but a shared sense of civic duty. People must take a modicum of […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiR • Tags: books, capitalism, civil rights, crime, History, law, literature, New York City, politics, race, reading, social justice

The Black Panthers: Revolutions and Dinner Parties

September 20, 2015 by fritztucker

I recently watched Stanley Nelson’s The Black Panthers: Vanguards of the Revolution. While the documentary is clearly pro-Panther, I nevertheless found it to be a surprisingly critical examination of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. The film focuses on many of the well-remembered legacies left by the Panthers–such as their Free Breakfast for Children Program, their armed-yet-non-violent storming of California’s capitol building in Sacramento, and the mass movements to free Huey Newton, the Chicago 7, and the New York 21–as well as a few of the negative […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: African-Americans, art, Black Panthers, capitalism, civil rights, crime, death, film, History, literature, movies, New York City, politics, race, social justice

A Sudden Collapse of Ice

September 15, 2015 by Ana Maria Caballero

Poems can sometimes behave like short stories, like very short stories. They set the scene, bring the reader in and then leave them with an uncertain longing. In just fifteen lines, the poem below tells the story of two couples, of neighbors, of marriage, of winter. The title lets the reader know what to expect from the very beginning: there is to be a crossing over to an intimate landscape for a chilling view of the life of others. Chilling, perhaps, […]

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

The New Amerikan Thing

September 1, 2015 by Ana Maria Caballero

Juan Felipe Herrera’s story is a nice one. Born in California in 1948, he grew up picking crops with his migrant worker parents in the San Joaquin and Salinas Valleys. After graduating from San Diego High School, Herrera went on to complete degrees at UCLA, Stanford and the prestigious University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has published over fourteen collections of poetry, children’s books, young adult novels and served as California’s Poet Laureate in 2012. His work is a key part […]

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

Jane Jacobs: Intuition vs. Evidence

August 31, 2015 by fritztucker

After having read countless authors who cite Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and having intuitively come to many Jane Jacobs-esque conclusions on my own over the years, I finally decided it was time to read the original work. Many of the conclusions Jacobs comes to resonate with my personal experience. Critiquing the notion that parks are safer for children than streets, Jacobs writes: “what significant change does occur if children are transferred from a lively city street to […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: books, childhood, children, civil rights, History, literature, New York City, social justice, women, writing

The Cultural Revolution in Hindsight

August 23, 2015 by fritztucker

I’ve just read The Chinese Cultural Revolution Reconsidered: Beyond Purge and Holocaust, a collection of essays that consider the social, political, economic, and psychological factors that contributed to the 1966-76 period. It was the first I had read about the Maoist period in years, after my thorough disenchantment with Maoists in Nepal. My renewed interest in the subject is that the Cultural Revolution (CR) could be considered, from one very abstract angle, to be a mass movement aiming to achieve an egalitarian […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, crime, death, History, literature