Archive for November, 2010

Christopher Isherwood Goes to the Circus, and Clifton’s

Posted By Zócalo On November 30, 2010

The Sixties: Diaries: 1960-1969, by Christopher Isherwood

For decades writer Christopher Isherwood made Los Angeles his home. From his sunlit spot in the Santa Monica Canyon, Isherwood observed and recorded the 1960s in hundreds of typed pages. His The Sixties: Diaries 1960-1969 captures everything from the political tumult of the time to its spiritual questing to Isherwood’s rich social circle of fellow artists, all up for discussion in Zócalo’s forthcoming panel, Christopher Isherwood’s Los Angeles. In the two diary entries excerpted below, the first from 1962 and the next from 1965, Isherwood visits the circus, checks out skateboarders, drives the just-opened Santa Monica Freeway, and has lunch at Clifton’s….

Read More

What Defines Immigrant Art?

Posted By Zócalo On November 30, 2010

Port-au-Prince

Haitian-born, New York-bred Edwidge Danticat is author of several novels and most recently a collection of essays, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. “Whether or not they write about being immigrants, there is that sense, perhaps that shadow, of another culture over immigrant art,” Danticat said. She stopped by Zócalo’s offices to chat with Swati Pandey about her first encounter with immigrant writing, what defines it, and where it fits into literature broadly.

Read More

Creating Dangerously

Posted By Zócalo On November 30, 2010

Create Dangerously, by Edwidge Danticat

Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work
by Edwidge Danticat

A cultural critic and memoirist, Edwidge Danticat’s elegiac essays reveal the tumultuous history Haiti, and the urgency of immigrant art. Her collection of stories hinge on the themes of artistry, death, memory, and what it means to have a soul divided between two countries: America and Haiti.

Read More

Bursting the Bubble and Minding the Border

Posted By Zócalo On November 28, 2010

MEXICO, Ciudad Juarez, 02MAR09. Mas de 1000 elementos de las fuerzas armadas de la Policía Federal refuerzan la seguridad en Ciudad Juarez Chihuahua. Foto: Jesus Villaseca Perez/Latitudes Press.

by Cecilia Ballí

To call the U.S.-Mexico border home, as I do, is to live in a kind of no man’s land, at least as far as Washington and Mexico City are concerned. Neither country has ever really understood the region that binds them — a third space that both Mexicans and Americans perceive as neither here nor there, an exotic fault line not easily accessible to mainstream understanding, even for those who reside a few hundred miles away.

Read More

Searching for Silence in the Midwest

Posted By Zócalo On November 27, 2010

The view from Linderman's farm house.

by Lee Linderman

The southern Minnesota farmhouse, my childhood home, hides inelegantly behind a spotty row of evergreens. The trees stand bravely in the wind, the house’s only defense from winter’s bitter gusts. Outside the house’s curtilage lies a frozen expanse that, in warmer months, reveals fertile soil, a place where soybeans and corn flourish. But in November, at Thanksgiving, a bitter frost suffocates the earth.

Read More
« PREV |

Articles

Feuilleton
Friday, December 3, 2010
How One Family Created Chinese America
Zócalo

The Lucky Ones, by Mae Ngai 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.

Read More
Poetry
This week in L.A.
From the green room
 
Connecting People to Ideas and to Each Other

Thank you to Zócalo sponsors:

 

 
Wordpress template made by HeJian