“Are we in danger—or perhaps it’s not really a danger at all—of becoming Los Angeles?”
Former CNN anchor Aaron Brown posed the question to a panel of Phoenicians to discuss before an ...
by Jeff Oaks
Of course the point is to be hidden, isn’t it?
To seem like nothing, to be forgettable,
to hold still. Lonely little things now,
the size of my fist and with a lid of snow...
Those black letters graying down the chart
to nothing,
you thought then the doctor called it “Conscious
Sensitivity,” wrote it down, then replaced
“Conscious” with “Contrast”
when you knew better: the Pelli-Robson chart.
Nearly 30 years ago, Kenneth Hartman was sentenced to life without parole for beating a man to death. Hartman has since been shipped between various facilities and watched as the state’s incarcerated population exploded. In Mother California: A Story of Redemption Behind Bars he chronicles his time, his atonement, and the buildings that held him. Below, an excerpt.
Colette LaBouff Atkinson, Associate Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation in the School of Humanities at UC Irvine this year, is a couple months into her post as Zócalo’s poetry editor, selecting published and unpublished works to post here every week. Atkinson stopped by Zócalo’s offices to read from her own collection of poems, Mean, published last year.
Mary Favret, associate professor of English at Indiana University, began work on War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime after coming across “a big anthology by Betty Bennett with a generic title.” British War Poetry in the Age of Romanticism compiled war poems published in newspapers and periodicals, written by the famous and the anonymous. After studying the material through the first Gulf War and beginning writing around and after 9/11, Favret said, “I realized then that this material matters — it’s not just academic.” Below, she discusses with Zócalo the concept of distant war and how we experience it.
The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America
by Mae Ngai
Hyphenated cultures seem to be a natural part of California’s landscape today, but it wasn’t always so. The Lucky Ones by Mae Ngai offers a fresh look at California history by reconstructing the lives of immigrant and second generation pioneers who lived between cultures when it was not such a common phenomenon. Ngai’s narrative brings Chinese Americans into a richer tradition of historical storytelling by humanizing an ambivalent, middle-class immigrant family, situating their lives within the more well-known histories of Chinese laborers and those who suffered from the 1882 Exclusion Act.