July | 2015 | ZETEO

Testifying (John the Baptist, Flores, MacNeice)

July 31, 2015 by William Eaton

1 A man seen on a Sunday—a very hot and humid Sunday. He’s slight, middle-aged, not quite shabbily dressed. He’s standing under a highway underpass, one of the hundreds if not thousands of highway underpasses in Connecticut. (And may I say, too, that Connecticut is one of the worst states to try to drive through. Suburban sprawl, highway-widening projects. In North Carolina some political figure came up with the horrible idea that highways should keep being built until every North […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: Christianity, God, Jesus, poetry, Quaker meeting, religion, sports

The Possibility for Nuclear Non-Proliferation

July 26, 2015 by fritztucker

Iran and the US have finally reached a deal to limit Iran’s potential to develop nuclear weapons, in return for the US lifting economic sanctions against Iran. The deal includes constant video surveillance of Iran’s nuclear facilities, similar to that in the UN brokered peace treaty ending the 1996-2006 Maoist insurgency in Nepal. Skeptics of the US-Iran deal might point to the failure to demilitarize Germany after the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. There are, however, at least two key differences between the recent US-Iran nuclear deal and […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: History, Iran, nuclear weapons, politics, treaty, war

Contradictory feelings and music

July 26, 2015 by Ed Mooney

Schumann’s songs, especially Dichterliebe, are both romantically expressive and relatively simple in structure, almost like aphorisms. They have none of the virtuosic glamour or massive presence of a romantic symphony or concerto. Dichterliebe is a string of sixteen little gems, mostly only a page or two, some less than a minute in length, that are strung on an invisible (or inaudible) thread. They’re for tenor or baritone and piano, suitable for intimate chamber music performance. Schumann picked Heine’s poetry to […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR

The solitudes of this America

July 23, 2015 by William Eaton

In the woods of Michigan in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville recounts, he found a not entirely unfamiliar solitude, but what was unusual was that, unlike previously, when he had visited the ruins of ancient European civilizations, the solitudes of America led his mind to project forward, losing itself “dans un immense avenir” (in a vast future). He and his traveling companion, also from France, asked themselves why fate had given them this quite singular opportunity to see both a portion […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: de Tocqueville, indigenous people, natu, solitude, translation, United States of America, Western civilization, Willard Van Orman Quine, Wittgenstein

RealDoll prosthetic device, leg, being repaired

RealDolls and Other Humanoids

July 21, 2015 by Walter Cummins

By Walter Cummins Second in a series Last time I wrote of the relationship of various prosthetic devices to the people who wear them. This time my topic is humanoids. At first glance, they may seem to be very different subjects. Prosthetics often and humanoids always, however, do share roots in robotics and artificial intelligence. But, more significantly, they question the relationships of human beings to devices that possess human characteristics. Recently, humanoids have become a particular subject […]

Categories: Essay • Tags: literature, movies, robots, sex, technology

Better than a Great Song

July 21, 2015 by Ana Maria Caballero

Several years ago, British poet John Fuller wrote a poem with a bright future as a chart-topping pop song. Perhaps its catchy flow is due to the fact that it’s a strict villanelle, or perhaps it’s due to the fact that the poem is about unrequited, but not tortured, love. There’s just enough heartache to make it interesting, but no one is suffering too badly. Fuller is known for mastering traditional form and making it palatable. The villanelle for example can […]

Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR • Tags: books, John Fuller, literature, poetry, reading, writing

Representative Democracy is a Waste of Time

July 19, 2015 by fritztucker

Greece is, in many ways, representative of the world right now. Its economy is floundering due to, among other things, bad loans taken out by self-interested ruling parties aided and abetted by Goldman Sachs. Greek unemployment has reached record highs despite employed Greeks working longer hours than any other members of the Eurozone. The German response to this is austerity: including having Greece cut pensions, and sell its utilities and airports. Even the IMF has determined these measures to be […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: capitalism, civil rights, History, politics, social justice, technology

Face it, You’re a Computer!

July 19, 2015 by Ed Mooney

Face it, you’re a computer! I’d be happy if I could remember where in my browsing I encountered this argument clincher. I was many hours removed from that first (and only) encounter — “Face it, you’re only a computer!” — when I realized that the triumphant argument clincher didn’t really stop the discussion. It would be equally true to blurt out “Face it, you’re flesh and blood!” or “Face it, you’re DNA!” or “Face it, you’re a Highly Evolved Mammal!” […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR

About sex, again . . .

July 18, 2015 by William Eaton

One meets the most interesting people in the obituary pages of The New York Times. On Monday, July 13, 2015, for those of us who didn’t know him before by reputation or his 20 books, we learned about Charles Winick, a professor of anthropology and sociology. He taught at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and is known for his warnings about the blurring of lines between the sexes in The New People: Desexualization in American […]

Categories: Gayle Rodda Kurtz, ZiLL • Tags: Charles Winick, girls, Lena Dunham, Manohla Dargis, Mario Vargas Llosa, sex, sexuality

ZETEO

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

Monthly Archives: July 2015