Miscellany

James A. Zarzana.com

Week Two Bibliography: GOLD College

4/7/2019

GOLD College Week 2 Bibliography
            I checked on Better World Books website, and they have plenty of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Keats textbooks and collections for sale. These are used, but generally in great shape for a moderate price. Of course, a good public library will have collected copies of these poets. Look for ones with footnotes or endnotes.
            Look for Norton Edition, Penguin, or Oxford Press copies. All these have an editor who is an academic. They all have notes and explanations with generally large and insightful biographic information.
            Avoid presses like Dover which are just out-of-copyright reprints without textual notes.
Others to read at this time:
Lord Bryon’s poetry
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein.
Jane Austen: any or all of her six major novels.
Walter Scott
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent (1800)

Week One: Notes GOLD College Sprng 2019

3/22/2019

Beyond the classroom reading list for GOLD College British Poetry, Spring 2019
List 1 for Week 1
Jim Zarzana
Here is a selected bibliography of other writers and works you may be interested in from the Romantic, Victorian, and Early Modern Periods.
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 – 1797)
“A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”
William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850)
“Preface” to Lyrical Ballads
Poems:
“We are Seven”
“Exposition and Reply”
“Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”
“Michael”
“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
“My Heart Leaps Up”
“Ode: Intimations to Immortality”
His sonnets. (Will explore some in Week 2.)
The Prelude or The Growth of a Poet’s Mind This is a book-length poem, but there are many editions which have excellent footnotes and explanations.
Dorothy Wordsworth
Selections from her journals

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“The Eolian Harp”
“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
“Kubla Khan”
“Frost at Midnight”
“To William Wordsworth”
Biographia Literaria. This is Coleridge’s philosophical work. Like Wordsworth’s The Prelude, it is book-length. If interested, I would suggest reading a summary.
Sir Walter Scott, try one of his novels.
Jane Austen, any of her novels. Probably Pride and Prejudice is the best.

"The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by Willliam L. Shirer

2/24/2018

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer
First published in 1959, William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich seems like a work that does not need a review in 2018. After all, it was an immediate, worldwide success. It has become a standard history primer for professional and amateur historians of World War II. Why does such a classic need a review?
Timely is my only justification. With the rise of ultra-right-wing and violent politics in Europe and the US today, Shirer’s work is a warning to democracies and citizens everywhere.
This massive work is a stark review of fascism written by an eyewitness. Shirer was a foreign correspondent in Europe in the 1930s. He was allowed into Nazi Germany as an American in 1940 and 1941, before events brought the USA into the war. He witnessed Nazi rallies and heard Hitler himself deliver impassioned speeches on several occasions. His accounts of these events, written in the mid-1950s, ring with chilling clarity.
After the war, he was also a witness to the Nuremberg trials of the surviving Nazi leaders. The gloating, strutting rulers from the 1930s and 40s sat passively in the defendants’ docket—broken, humbled, shriveled, utterly defeated. None escaped their crimes against humanity. Most were hanged. A few were imprisoned. History honors none of them.
To the easily-led, the gullible, the power-hungry, fascism may have a certain appeal. But for the serious reader, this work shows inescapable similarities between the 1930s and today, similarities that are frightening and foreboding.
Fascists appeal to violence. This work amply shows the violence against political enemies that Hitler employed. And then the violence he used against his own party and followers to insure his sole and complete dictatorship. And finally, the violence he used to control an entire country and his conquered territories. Our current times seem to embrace this type of violence again, without thinking of the consequences.
Fascists use scapegoats to distract citizens and win supporters. Nothing whips up a crowd more than hearing who their “real enemies” are. For Hitler, the undercurrent of anti-Semitism in Germany and Europe generally was a fertile field. Our current political times, no less so— immigrants, Mexicans, the LGBT community, and Muslims are singled out time and again as our “real enemies.”
Fascists in Germany in the 1930s attacked the free press, shut it down, accused it of being disloyal and dishonest. Shirer’s work traces the rise of modern propaganda via Joseph Goebbels, a master of lying on a massive scale, of distorting and haranguing perceived enemies of the state. A true follower of Hitler, he committed suicide shortly after Hitler did in the Chancellery bunker in Berlin as the Russian steamroller closed in on the remnants of Nazi Germany. Our current political climate attacks the free press and fills the airwaves with distortions and lies with much the same ferociousness.
Fascists appoint sycophant followers who are incompetent and criminal. Their crimes are not just against civil laws—Hitler and Goering plundering art treasures from conquered countries museum after museum—but also crimes against humanity—summary executions of political enemies, barbarous mistreatment of captured soldiers, genocide on a mammoth scale.
Nearly two decades into the 21st century, reading this work is a timely reminder of how unwitting citizens can open the door to a charlatan demigod, and suddenly find themselves enslaved in their own country. Hitler, “a lying vagabond” as Shirer describes him, rose to become the most powerful person in the world. He plunged the whole world into the worst, most costly, and deadliest war humankind has ever known.
And Shirer reminds us, Hitler did so, in large part, by appealing to the ignorant, using the biases and hatreds of his day, manipulating the spineless and complacent citizenry willing to go along rather than protest or stand up to the rising Nazi tide. His hateful prejudices soon became “the law of the land.” He surrounded himself with thieves, criminals, sexual deviants, drug addicts, incompetent but loyal bunglers, and liars. Sounds all too familiar; we are not that far behind.
Shirer’s massive work should be read by taking breaks. (I read other, lighter works along the way, and I took six months to finish it.) But his seminal work is a reminder of our own political vulnerability. It is a reminder that vigilance as citizens and voters is critical to democracy.
His work proves Santayana’s point: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it.”

“The War Everyone Lost: The Great Influenza, 1918” Bibliography

2/13/2018

Bibliography
Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. Penguin, 2005.
Kolata, Gina. Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1999.
Easily found on YouTube:
Secrets of the Dead: "Killer Flu" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COxUsN9b8OU&t=2468s
American Experience: “Influenza 1918”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyZZkHVpElo&t=156s
C-SPAN interview of Gina Kolata: “Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and
the Search for the Virus that Caused It.” (2000 interview)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qti7WCaqTes
*
Once you find any of these links on YouTube, it will suggest others for you.

A new blog post, at long last!

9/8/2015

Has it really be over a year since I posted a blog? Oh, the time goes by so quickly. Anyway, I did post something today. Please give it a look.

Elaine Zarzana, my daughter, helping to sell copies of The Marsco Dissident last summer in Marshall, Minnesota.

Here I am at Tracy Library delivering a reading. A small but enthusiastic crowd. I had a wonderful time. Hoping to do more readings here in Minnesota and in California when I get back there again.

Next Blog Post coming. . .

6/13/2014

Just a reminder that a new blog post is coming on June 15th. Watch for it. It's by me this time, not a character.

Photo from Commencement, May 2014. Elaine, Marianne, and I.

Reminder: New Blog Post

6/2/2014

Just a reminder that I have a new blog post from one of my main characters in The Marsco Dissident, Tessa Miller. Get a taste of the novel by reading her blog and the two chapters I have posted at jamesazarzana.com. Launch date for the paperback is still July 20. I'll keep you posted on that. Thanks.

Tweaking Social Media

5/20/2014

Trying to tweak my social media: Facebook and Linked. Expecting to launch The Marsco Dissident on July 20, 2014. I approved the cover concept. Need to see the final draft of it. Text is still under my examination. So, about 8 weeks and you should be able to buy a hard copy or an e-copy. Thanks.

AARP Safe Driver's Instruction

5/16/2014

Marianne and I went to an AARP Safe Driver's event yesterday, to get our 10% car insurance discount. It was scary. A few participants should NOT be driving at all.

Where did summer go?

8/16/2011

It is hard to believe the last thing I posted here was about "Super 8" which Marianne and I saw in June. Summer went faster than usual. School started this week at Southwest Minnesota State University with meetings and more meetings and yet another meeting.
I am looking forward to a good year, however. Students return soon; classes start; the year unfolds.
And so it go....