William Eaton | ZETEO

Plato’s Shaggy and Sly Victory

May 23, 2016 by William Eaton

A comparison with a shaggy dog tale—with “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”—may help us appreciate and begin to think about an “elusive passage” in Plato’s Symposium. In Twain’s text, the narrator goes seeking news of the Reverend Leonidas W. Smiley and ends up hearing stories about an inveterate gambler named Jim Smiley. In Plato’s case, Apollodorus, who was not at a wonderful party many years prior, tells what he has heard about this party from Aristodemus, who […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: competition, eros, love, Mark Twain, Plato, Socrates, Symposium, theater

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Whig primary, 1848 - An Available Candidate, The One Qualification for a Whig President

Trump, de Tocqueville, Democracy, Materialism

March 14, 2016 by William Eaton

Many people in Europe believe without saying, or say without believing, that one of the great advantages of universal suffrage is that it calls men worthy of the people’s confidence to take charge of public affairs. The people do not know how to govern themselves, but, it is said, they always want the State to thrive, and they but rarely fail to choose for leaders people who both share this desire and are the most fit to wield political power. […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, corruption, de Tocqueville, democracy, Donald Trump, New York Times, Presidential campaigns, Socrates, United States of America, Yeats

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Drink's, sign in Troncones, Mexico; photo credit: Jonah Warner, February 2016

O que é felicidade (Corcovado, Kalamazoo)

March 7, 2016 by William Eaton

Backfiring, shall we call this? First bursts. Sue Ellen Christian, one of Zeteo’s long-time contributors, e-mailed us a draft response to one of the random, crazed shootings with which the United States is now plagued. As has been reported, several residents of her town, Kalamazoo, Michigan, were allegedly gunned down by an Uber driver. Random victims, and thus also reminders of how we are all random victims or the random fortunate (and some combination of the two). For example, thanks […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: airships, bossa nova, Dada, First World War, happiness, labor unions, language, poverty, random shooting, Stuart Hall, translation, Uber, work, Zen koan

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Lawrence Goldhuber in straitjacket, photo by Josh Gosfield

Bad Marriage; Spanish Dancer

March 1, 2016 by William Eaton

A touching story, and likely more common, in one variation or another, than it may at first seem. Among other things, I have in mind lives that come to be defined by one event which casts its spell, be it evil, enlightening, forgiving—over all the other years. The story I am going to tell, or retell, comes from Windmills in Brooklyn, a novel-memoir by a now forgotten Spanish-American writer, Prudencio de Pereda (b. 1912). Before getting to all this, […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Brooklyn, Cuban cigars, dancing, life, memoir, New York, novels, Spanish

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Airplanes, environment, capital, giving up!

February 23, 2016 by William Eaton

A.k.a., Littlering There is a strain of environmental thinking that proposes (with more than a little sense) that we need to learn how to do more with less. Or perhaps we need (yet again?) to discover how less is more. Fewer human beings always seems like a good place to start. There is of course the problem that biggering (as Dr. Seuss called it) has come to seem essential to our economic “growth” and “health,” and to the health […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: airplanes, Bob Dylan, capitalism, climate change, economic crisis, England, environmentalism, global warming, technology

Dickinson — Sex, Spanish, Stew

February 11, 2016 by William Eaton

Emily, in not so foreign tongues The first law of American literature: Somewhere, somehow, in God only knows what language, you are always going to come across one more, intriguing—if not indeed great—Emily Dickinson poem. A poem that you have previously overlooked, or not even heard of. And yet, there it is, ready to reward your attention. A rider: The poem might be about sex. Not sex like Henry Miller with his beloved Germaine du Café de l’Éléphant, soaping […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Barcelona, dogs, Emily Dickinson, fairy tales, Henry Miller, poetry, sex, Spanish

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from Amazon site for African Mask Wall Decor World Peace Wise Man Bamboo Root Mask Bali Mask

“Independent” analysis; class warfare (think tanks)

February 2, 2016 by William Eaton

A follow-up to a previous discussion of how experts, and the media that aids and abets them, and the class interests that pay these experts’ salaries—they’re in the mask-making business. A January 26 New York Times story reported that “according to an independent analysis” the proposed trade pact between North American countries, the United States in particular, and Pacific rim nations “would increase incomes, exports and growth in the United States . . . and would not cost overall […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: academia, Barack Obama, capitalism, class warfare, corporations, journalism, New York Times, Paul Krugman, trade pact, Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)

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long exposure photo of lightning strikes; credit, n5mbm.net

Facebook Critical Distance Reading

December 31, 2015 by William Eaton

Happiness courts us in her best array? An old friend, 70, after a perfectly successful career as a curator of nineteenth-century sculpture, has been reborn as a Facebook post-er. So many good posts, often several in a day, sometimes featuring photos she has taken, sometimes bits from the news, the Web. She is French, lives in Paris, and while in past decades I have, from New York, listened to French radio and read Le monde, now, for the first time, […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Alcoholics Anonymous, critical distance, Facebook, Frederic Jameson, Holocaust, lightning, postmodernism, Romeo & Juliet, Shakespeare

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Magritte, L'Oasis (The Oasis), 1925-1927

Woolf, Eliot, Global Warming, Christmas

December 23, 2015 by William Eaton

Let the broken glass and the china lie out on the lawn and be tangled over with grass and wild berries. Listening (had there been any one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: climate change, global warming, God, Magritte, religion, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf