April | 2015 | ZETEO

Wisdom as Sensuous Slowness

April 19, 2015 by Ed Mooney

What would it be to find wisdom in an unhurried way of life? What is it to discover a “sensuous slowness” in one’s life – to discover a Sabbath or sabbatical? Franco Berardi, an Italian Marxist, dons the cloak of a prophet. He foresees a cultural revolution based on . . . facing the inevitable with grace, discovering the sensuous slowness of those who do not expect any more from life than wisdom — the wisdom of those who have seen […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: Franco Berardi, Kierkegaard, slowness, Thoreau

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Trouble on Memory Lane

April 13, 2015 by Alexia Raynal

Sociologist Sari Knopp Biklen died last year, but she left a substantial body of research that will undoubtedly be brought to life by people across disciplines. In reading her article “Trouble on Memory Lane,” I am reminded of the analytical risks of working with youth, including the assumption that we can connect to a group we once belonged to. Whether you like it or not, says Biklen, people who study youth often travel down memory lane to revisit their own adolescence . […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: childhood, children, Sari Knopp Biklen

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Poetry: Fleshly or Lawyerly?

April 12, 2015 by Ed Mooney

This is a follow up to my last post, “Corporeal Words.” There, I paused with the thought, borrowed from the philosopher Kelly Jolley, that poetry lets words become bodies or objects. Thus they might set up a resonance with our own bodies. In a comment, Daniel D’Arezzo seemed to move us toward theology. He suggested that my drift would let the word become flesh. Although I applaud this aperçu, Daniel rejects it. I would argue that every poem is an argument—argues […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR

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We are the robots!

April 11, 2015 by William Eaton

As reported in “The Spy Who Fired Me, The human costs of workplace monitoring” by Esther Kaplan, in March 2015, Harper’s, the company Cornerstone OnDemand provides software that tracks the every move of a company’s employees. Companies that use its platform can quickly assess an employee’s performance by analyzing his or her online interactions, including emails, instant messages and Web use. . . With the rise of the global workforce, the remote workforce, the smartphone and the […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz, ZiLL • Tags: art, global capitalism, technology

Thou shalt not read

April 9, 2015 by William Eaton

At a brunch an American father mentioned his surprise that his teenage son did not believe that people were naturally good. My son doesn’t believe this either, but in my household this is not surprising. Of course this is a large subject which would quickly bog down were we to try to define the good. Heading toward a definition of evil, one of the other fathers at the table mentioned self-interest. As in, we humans are willing to do a […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: evil, Germany, Holocaust, indigenous people, Jesus, Kant, lynching, Rousseau, self-interest

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What Work Is

April 7, 2015 by Ana Maria Caballero

I recently came across a remarkable poem by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip Levine thanks to a blog I sometimes read. As remarkable as the poem (below) is, I am even more grateful that it led me to an utterly delicious interview of Levine conducted by Mona Simpson in The Paris Review. Few interviews of poets can be described as page-turners, but this one certainly is. What Work Is We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park. […]

Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR

Corporeal Words

April 5, 2015 by Ed Mooney

A good philosopher makes you think – not just adopt an opinion or give you something to believe or believe in (or not believe or believe in). A good philosopher makes you put on the brakes, stop the mind from racing along in its familiar tracks. Here’s a good philosopher, Kelly Jolley, thinking out loud about poetry. Listening to him put the brakes on and made me think: Poetry is a way of getting something to take on a body. […]

Categories: ZiR

Derek Walcott on CLR James and cricket.

April 3, 2015 by William Eaton

In his collection of essays, What the Twilight Says, Nobel prize-winning poet Derek Walcott discusses, among other things, fellow writers of the Caribbean, including the Marxist historian CLR James. In his short piece on James, Walcott explores the seeming contradiction between the writer’s unrelenting combat against Empire and the racism it engendered, and his love for the very British game of cricket. James’s Beyond a Boundary is probably less well known than his classic work The Black Jacobins, the history […]

Categories: Catherine Vigier, ZiR • Tags: History, literature, race

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Divine Wisdom (and of course emotions)

April 2, 2015 by William Eaton

Love, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has been translated (perhaps inaccurately) as saying, involves giving something you haven’t got to someone who doesn’t exist. It might be more simply proposed that movies involve offering illusions to people who are in the dark. And the next step for a purist would be to propose that the best movies are those that concern, or at least touch on, this very fact. I read in the New York Times that the American-French […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: families, incest, isolation, Lacan, marriage, movies

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ZETEO

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

Monthly Archives: April 2015

Wisdom as Sensuous Slowness

Trouble on Memory Lane

Poetry: Fleshly or Lawyerly?

We are the robots!

Thou shalt not read

What Work Is

Corporeal Words

Derek Walcott on CLR James and cricket.

Divine Wisdom (and of course emotions)