William Eaton

One Candle Power

June 24, 2014 by William Eaton

Poems that soothe, that create a mellow mood can be difficult to find, particularly so in a collection of Sylvia Plath poems. For this reason, I was so thrilled to find the poem “By Candlelight.” Its backdrop is one of recent abandonment and of deep cold. But there is a candle well lit and a “small love” that shine throughout. I find it a very intimate, maternal poem. Perhaps this is why I like it, having had a baby not […]

Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR • Tags: literature, poetry, reading, Sylvia Plath

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Sartre’s Partridges

June 22, 2014 by William Eaton

{click for pdf} An e-mail discussion with the philosopher and Zeteo contributor Ed Mooney has led me back to two paragraphs in Sartre’s L’Être et le néant (Being and Nothingness). One of the oft-quoted (in English) lines from these paragraphs is “my acts cause values to spring up like partridges,” and I harbor hopes of someday grappling, in a short essay or two, with an extrapolation of this line. Very briefly here, this extrapolation would revisit the role of skepticism, […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: ethics, freedom, Jean-Paul Sartre, morals, translation, values

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Keeping it Professional, Even in the Nude

June 21, 2014 by William Eaton

I was just introduced to the long standing controversy regarding fashion photographer Terry Richardson’s “unprofessional” behavior in the studio, through this Jezebel article Meet Terry Richardson, The World’s Most F-ked up Fashion Photographer, by Jenna Sauers. While in many ways I didn’t want to humor the attention that he is getting of late, I do think there is an interesting debate buried somewhere deep in all of this, regarding the sexualized work that occurs in nude modeling and pornography, that […]

Categories: Caterina Gironda, ZiR

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Struggling to reach 87th country

June 19, 2014 by William Eaton

Zeteo is Reading Contributor Tucker Cox is currently traveling. He is expected to return next Thursday with his next post about great travel writing. He has a lifetime goal of visiting 100 countries on 7 continents. It might be said that he is now 87 percent of the way there. The photograph, of professional backpacker Andrew Skurka, appeared on a National Geographic website about “Today’s Ultimate Adventurers.” Tucker — though not featured on the site, and though (or because) he does more with […]

Categories: Tucker Cox, ZiR • Tags: travel

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Esthéthique de l’éjaculation

June 15, 2014 by William Eaton

A trip down memory lane, we could call this post. On an impulse-buy counter in a French bookstore I see a little yellow book with this title in neon pink letters: Esthéthique de l’éjaculation (the aesthetics of ejaculation). Fifty pages, used copy, on sale for less than four euros, hard to resist (though some might say of a book with such a title, Better not to buy secondhand). It turned out to be quite a good book, by one Antonio […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: advertising, Aquinas, Catholic Church, masturbation, Middle Ages, pornography, sexuality, sin

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“Into” + “Feeling: Jamison Explains Empathy

June 14, 2014 by William Eaton

I’ve gone the past week without internet as I was relocating into my new southern home and lifestyle, and taking regular dips in the public pool became more important than calling Time Warner to schedule an appointment. Alas, we have caved and are returning to “normalcy”, but in the mean time all I have been reading are Durham new-resident-guides and one phenomenal collection of essays that may not overtly seem connected to sexuality, but certainly harps on an interpersonal quality that […]

Categories: Caterina Gironda, ZiR • Tags: empathy, gender, medicine

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“Travel is fatal to prejudice” – part III of III

June 12, 2014 by William Eaton

Part 3 of 3 of Mark Twain’s memoir of his 134-day European and Holy Land cruise in 1867, the biggest selling book in his lifetime. Every great travelogue imprints memories of sights, experiences and perspectives. The Innocents Abroad or, The New Pilgrims’ Progress has too many to mention. For example, there is the “true cross… found in every church we go into… and as much as a keg of nails that held it together.” Imprints of Twain’s views, especially of the U.S., do not leave us : Just […]

Categories: Tucker Cox, ZiR • Tags: travel

Arabian Red Fox, photograph by Jem Babbington, appears on Birds of Saudi Arabia website

Translating Dickinson

June 11, 2014 by William Eaton

By William Eaton A discussion of four Emily Dickinson poems in the context of Françoise Delphy’s French translations appearing in Poésies complètes : Edition bilingue français-anglais by Emily Dickinson and Françoise Delphy (Flammarion, 2009). I. The Articulate Inarticulate An early reader of Emily Dickinson’s poems used this phrase—“the articulate inarticulate”—to describe her, and for me it provides a way into “translating” or seeking means of understanding one of my favorites among her poems, here quoted in its entirety: […]

Categories: Review • Tags: Emily Dickinson, French, poetry, translation

Robinson Crusoe, Goodbye Columbus

June 8, 2014 by William Eaton

{“Robinson Crusoe, Goodbye Columbus” pdf} Jackson Burgess, I believe it was, who told me when I was a very young fiction writer that a novel written in the first person should make clear the circumstances of the narrator when he (or she) was telling the story and why he was telling it. One might be at some pains to think of novels that indeed followed this rule, but Burgess, himself a novelist and professor at Berkeley, likely also […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: literature, Philip Roth, writing

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ZETEO

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

Author Archives: William Eaton

One Candle Power

Sartre’s Partridges

Keeping it Professional, Even in the Nude

Struggling to reach 87th country

Esthéthique de l’éjaculation

“Into” + “Feeling: Jamison Explains Empathy

“Travel is fatal to prejudice” – part III of III

Translating Dickinson

Robinson Crusoe, Goodbye Columbus