Zev Gottdeiner

Zev Gottdiener – The Breadman V

V   The boy’s mother comes out of the cleaners carrying her sequined handbag and a pain between her shoulder blades. She steps off the curb and winces. The streets are always too crowded when I leave, she thinks, wishing they’d let her come in earlier as she whisks around the legless man perpetually posted […]

Zev Gottdiener – The Breadman IV

  The wild light of dusk laid everywhere, permeating the gaps between buildings and forcing itself high across the bowl of the sky so that one felt weighted down with all the colors, filled in with the sun’s last stand on this face of the earth. He’d left his uncle in his office closing down […]

Zev Gottdiener – The Breadman III

Nothing ever works out how you plan. That’s an old trick that ticks and trickles relevance to the point we hate it deep down for proving true. Because that chaos is an integral part of being we also harbor elaborate dreams and plan lofty ends for ourselves, acting them out even while knowing they will […]

Zev Gottdiener – The Breadman II

As he neared the wharf dock, he could tell his uncle would be free. He didn’t know what time it was, but he guessed he’d got up sometime past noon and the market had by now wound down completely. He hoped his uncle was still there, as the only people who usually stuck around were […]

Zev Gottdiener – The Breadman I

I       The boy woke up to the bread man’s song, blaring distorted from the loudspeaker’s funnel haphazardly attached to the roof rack by cut up and twisted coat hangers. He was sweaty, caught in the rays of sun broken only by the window bars which cast patterned shadows on the wall behind his head. […]

Culture Shock and the Unlearning of Eating Your Shell

I I’ve always been tickled by the question “what do you do?” How this query usually comes during the small talk phase of interaction, sometime after weather or sports and before becoming lifelong friends, could mean “what do you like to do?” or “what do you do for a living?” Though I often try to […]

Arana

Don’t Forget to Check Spiders for Your Shoes

y sin que olviden sus típicas arañas… José Alfredo Jiménez If you’d have known the fame these suckers had, you wouldn’t have ushered so many outdoors when you’ve found them posted up perpendicular to the floor in the shadow on the back of your dresser, or in the perpetually dusky corner of your shower stall. […]

Dining and Desire At the End of the World

Una Vision del Futuro, Sin Titulo by Zev Gottdiener First there is a mountain/then there is no mountain/then there is! – Donavan Man does not speak because he thinks; he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think. -Octavio Paz You’re sitting in a restaurant with […]

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Dealing with difference: ecology, material culture, and cross-cultural comparison.

by Zev Gottdeiner Often, we think about cultural difference as having to do with the apparent. We focus on surface assumptions like language, geography, phenomenology, or metaphysics. This distinction frames how we view difference. That this mode of belonging to something whose borders we have come to accept operates on every aspect of our lives […]