Catherine Vigier | ZETEO

Modiano’s Paris

October 17, 2014 by William Eaton

[print_link] [email_link] I was very happy that Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize for literature. Modiano’s novels were among the first I read when I came to France seventeen years ago, and for a long time they were the only books I read in French. I remember going into a second-hand bookshop near the Censier metro station not far from the Sorbonne-nouvelle, one summer morning. I was looking for Modiano’s book, Rue des boutiques obscures (published in English as Missing […]

Categories: Catherine Vigier, ZiR • Tags: literature

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The return of Poldark

October 10, 2014 by William Eaton

[print_link] [email_link] The British Broadcasting Corporation is currently remaking Poldark, an immensely successful television drama first broadcast in 1975-77. The drama is based on a series of novels by Winston Graham. The video version of Poldark has outsold every other costume drama except the 1995 version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The new series will be screened by the BBC in the UK in 2015. For the United States, PBS Executive Producer Rebecca Eaton has announced that the new series will […]

Categories: Catherine Vigier, ZiR • Tags: literature, televison

Aftermath – contesting gender equality

October 3, 2014 by William Eaton

[print_link] [email_link] I approached Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath (2012) like someone visiting a fortune-teller at a fairground. In the book, she was to describe the break-up of her ten-year marriage and her struggle to restart life after the divorce. I wondered if I would see my own future written in her story. Cusk’s husband was the kind who’d given up his job to help look after the children and be a home-maker, letting her get on with her writing and work […]

Categories: Catherine Vigier, ZiR • Tags: gender, literature, parenting, women

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Pynchon’s cartoons

September 26, 2014 by William Eaton

One of the things I enjoy about Thomas Pynchon is the space he gives to cartoons and comic strips in his books. His last novel, Bleeding Edge, (2013) is a zany celebration of television culture – sit-coms, made-for-tv-movies and series, cartoons, the lot. For those of us who grew up in the 70s, one of the characters is addicted to the Brady Bunch. For the cable tv and satellite generations, there are references to the Game Boy spinoff Pokémon and […]

Categories: Catherine Vigier, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, literature

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Normal Relationships

September 19, 2014 by William Eaton

“Normal relationships are dynamic and unpredictable most of the time, while human beings are fickle.” This statement was made by South African judge Thokozile Masipa when she gave her reasons for acquitting star athlete Oscar Pistorius of the charge that he murdered his girlfriend. Her words seem to refer to the reports of conflict in Pistorius’s relationship with top model Reeva Steenkamp (pictured at right) and to text messages in which she said she was scared of Pistorius. Judge Masipa […]

Categories: Catherine Vigier, ZiR • Tags: murder, relationships, women

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Land grabbing and conservationism

September 12, 2014 by William Eaton

A recent article in The Guardian by international security journalist and academic Dr. Nafeez Ahmed draws attention to the eviction of thousands of Kenyan rural-dwellers from their homes: In west Kenya, as the UK NGO Forest Peoples Programme (FPP) reported, over a thousand homes had been torched by the government’s Kenya Forest Service (KFS) to forcibly evict the 15,000 strong Sengwer indigenous people from their ancestral homes in the Embobut forest and the Cherangany Hills. Since 2007, successive Kenyan governments […]

Categories: Catherine Vigier, ZiR • Tags: Africa, corporations, environmentalism, indigenous people, The Guardian, World Bank

Human Social Genomics

September 5, 2014 by William Eaton

Evolutionary theory has accustomed us to thinking of our genes as stable and essentially unchanging. Genetic change takes place over generations through mutations that give the bearer a competitive advantage in a specific environment. Genes are what we inherit from our parents and pass on to our children. But the emerging field of human social genomics looks at how environmental factors — low socio-economic status, stress, or pollution, for example — can influence our genes over the course of our lives. […]

Categories: Catherine Vigier, ZiR • Tags: genetics, health, inequality, science, stress

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An American Romance?

August 29, 2014 by William Eaton

[print_link] [email_link] “I hate to see somebody get screwed,” Maggio said. “Then you might as well get use to it,” the Chief said. “You probly be seein it often before you die.” These lines summarize the dilemma dramatized in James Jones’s 1951 bestseller, From Here to Eternity; do we get used to injustice, accommodate to it, accept it, or do we do something about it? Readers may be surprised at this interpretation, for the cultural imprint left by the […]

Categories: Catherine Vigier, ZiR • Tags: fiction, Hollywood, homosexuality, literature, social justice

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ZETEO

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

Category Archives: Catherine Vigier

Modiano’s Paris

The return of Poldark

Aftermath – contesting gender equality

Pynchon’s cartoons

Normal Relationships

Land grabbing and conservationism

Human Social Genomics