reading | ZETEO

Augie March’s Christmas

December 19, 2014 by William Eaton

[print_link][email_link] For an unsentimental take on Christmas, and a view of not-so-loving, cat-and-mouse relationships between adults and children, I went back to Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March. In this scene the young Augie is in the Chicago department store where he has been hired as one of Santa’s helpers for the Christmas season: Painted and rouged with theater greasepaint and dusted with mica snow, Jimmy and I marched around the store with tambourines and curl-tongued noisemakers, turning […]

Categories: Catherine Vigier, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, children, literature, reading

Proverbial Snow

December 16, 2014 by Ana Maria Caballero

No one like William Carlos Williams to capture the simple transcendence of snowfall. His poem “Blizzard,” below, beautifully captures the private feeling of loneliness that heavy snow can instill. It seemed like a fitting piece to share now that much of the country is immersed in the thick of winter. Blizzard Snow: years of anger following hours that float idly down — the blizzard drifts its weight deeper and deeper for three days or sixty years, eh? Then the sun! […]

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

Please come back. . .Next Year!

December 15, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

Alexia Raynal is heading home for the holidays. Her commentary in the fields of children and childhood will return next year. Wish her luck as she tries to keep her hands off the keyboard! From Duncan Tonatiuh’s book Dear Primo: A Letter to My Cousin. Watch him read the stories of two cousins—Carlos and Charlie—about their lives across borders here. — Alexia Raynal, Zeteo Associate Editor To read more posts in the fields of children and childhood by Alexia Raynal, visit her ZiR page here.

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: books, childhood, children, Duncan Tonatiuh, reading

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Salsa’s Living Lyrical Legend

December 9, 2014 by William Eaton

Last Saturday I went to see Rubén Blades play live. Blades may very well be the greatest salsa music composer still playing today. This is due, in large part, to the fact that he is a healthy salsa musician, far removed from the late night excesses of his contemporaries, many of which have passed away. Blades even served as Minister of Tourism for his native Panama in 2004 and holds a degree in International Law from Harvard University. His songs rank among […]

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

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Nun Fun

November 4, 2014 by Ana Maria Caballero

There are a few ways to tell that you’ve “made it” as a poet. One of these is getting a piece published in The New Yorker. For Los Angeles-based poet Suzanne Lumis, however, getting published in the most recent edition of the magazine is simply one more confirmation of having unequivocally “made it.” Lumis is a highly respected, veteran writer, educator and champion of the arts in the L.A. region. She works with kids, with college students, and with her community at […]

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

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Learning to read again (Mrs Dalloway)

November 2, 2014 by William Eaton

Evelyn was a good deal out of sorts, said Hugh, intimating by a kind of pout or swell of his very well-covered, manly, extremely handsome, perfectly upholstered body (he was almost too well dressed always, but presumably had to be, with his little job at Court) that his wife had some internal ailment, nothing serious, which, as an old friend, Clarissa Dalloway would quite understand without requiring him to specify. For many years I had a fairly steady reading habit, […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: French, literature, reading, Virginia Woolf, writing

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Mixed Feelings

October 28, 2014 by Ana Maria Caballero

As an emotion, “mixed-feelings” catches a bad rap. But having mixed-feelings about a poem is actually a valid, and valuable, emotional response. It means something in the poem worked for you, but, at the same time, something else didn’t. There is a grey area, imprecision, ambiguity even. All spaces in which poetry thrives. The following poem, written by poet Kevin Young, leaves me with such mixed-feelings. I know the poem has merit, but at the same time, it bothers me. There […]

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

The Future of Communication

October 21, 2014 by William Eaton

The Visual Humanities and the Future of Communication By Maggie Sattler Review of Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production by Johanna Drucker (Harvard University Press, 2014) [print_link] [email_link] In “How E-Reading Threatens Learning in the Humanities,” a July 2014 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Naomi S. Baron, a professor of linguistics whose research interests include writing and technology, contends that when her students read on digital devices, their attention spans and abilities to retain information shrink. This […]

Categories: Review • Tags: education, reading, technology

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A Pot of Bones

October 21, 2014 by Ana Maria Caballero

Natasha Trethewey is one of those rare poets that everybody seems to like, despite her massive commercial success. Massive, that is, in terms of poetic commercial success, which is timid at best. Trethewey won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Native Guard (2006), written about an all-black regiment that fought in the Civil War. She was later named U.S. Poet Laureate, twice. Her work deals principally with race in America. Trethewey’s parents were a mixed-race couple living in Mississippi in […]

Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR • Tags: books, literature, poem, poet, poetry, reading, work

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ZETEO

Zeteo (ζητέω): to challenge, question, dispute, explore the forgotten and ignored

Tag: reading

Augie March’s Christmas

Proverbial Snow

Please come back. . .Next Year!

Salsa’s Living Lyrical Legend

Nun Fun

Learning to read again (Mrs Dalloway)

Mixed Feelings

The Future of Communication

A Pot of Bones