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Category Archives: William Eaton

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Class Warfare Poverty Death

December 1, 2015 by William Eaton

Out of the hundred million people living in Soviet Russia, we should be able get 90 million behind us. The others, there’s no talking with them, they have to be annihilated. — Bolshevik leader Grigory Zinoviev, September 1918   Results. Approximately 245 000 deaths in the United States in [the year] 2000 were attributable to low education, 176 000 to racial segregation, 162 000 to low social support, 133 000 to individual-level poverty, 119 000 to income inequality, and 39 000 to area-level poverty. — Sandro […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Bolsheviks, capitalism, death, disease, exploitation, hunger, immigration, minimum wage, poverty, Russia, Soviet Union

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Trow Television Love No Context

November 10, 2015 by William Eaton

(1) One week this past October, The New Yorker’s television critic, Emily Nussbaum, wrote a piece which began by dissing—as making “little sense”; “élitism in the guise of hipness”—one of the great works of American cultural criticism, previous New Yorker writer George W.S. Trow’s “Within the Context of No Context.”[1] The week after Nussbaum’s piece appeared, another New Yorker writer dissed Henry David Thoreau’s writing as “Pond Scum.” Thus I might write about Americans’ struggle not to be held, or […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: advertising, cultural criticism, Edward VIII, gay lives, George W.S. Trow, love, New Yorker, postmodernism, televison

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Kingsley Amis Human Behavior

October 27, 2015 by William Eaton

(1) About two hundred pages into Kingsley Amis’s well-known and still wonderful comic novel Lucky Jim there is a paragraph that seems to rise above the rest, to take the novel’s vision of human behavior to another level, beyond particulars to revelation. Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, British musical comedians of Kingsley Amis’s generation, had a nice line about how “the purpose of satire . . . is to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cozy half-truth, and […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: agency, ethics, fiction, Flanders and Swann, Kingsley Amis, Merleau-Ponty, satire, Sixties

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What might poetry give us?

September 3, 2015 by William Eaton

. . . re-embracing one of lyric poetry’s most traditional themes: the hopes and dismay of intimate, romantic relationships. . . . the LANGUAGES OF SELLING AND POLITICS never stop invading all of us and putting the same emptinesses on all of our tongues. Writing poetry today, I am tempted to say, is as difficult as learning to live by oneself.

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, Emily Dickinson, language, love, philosophy of language, poetry, relationships, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Wittgenstein

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Larkin, Not Really in Translation

August 13, 2015 by William Eaton

“Counting” is a beautiful little Philip Larkin poem that I had not read before encountering it in a bilingual collection, with French translations: La vie avec un trou dedans. Thinking in terms of one Is easily done — One room, one bed, one chair, One person there, Makes perfect sense; one set Of wishes can be met, One coffin filled. But counting up to two Is harder to do; For one must be denied Before it’s tried. This may also […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: New York Review of Books, Philip Larkin, poetry, translation, Victor Hugo

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Cocteau, Americans, Dignity, Slinkys

August 6, 2015 by William Eaton

In 1949, the French writer, artist, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau wrote a few lines about French politics at that time, lines that might help Americans today view their own political battles with more optimism than usual. In my translation: I know well that in 1949 politics are a big deal and the clashes of different factions seem more important than lovers’ quarrels. But, just between us, don’t these political battles feature the same injustice and bad faith as lovers’ quarrels? […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: art, France, Hollywood, Jean Cocteau, Le Journal des Goncourt, Museum of Modern Art, Picasso, technology, toys, United States of America

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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

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Dedicated, well-armed sociopaths who’ll stop at nothing

July 16, 2015 by William Eaton

1 I’m just waking up. News radio. Listening for the weather. The solemn voice of a commentator: . . . what we’re dealing with . . . dedicated, well-armed sociopaths who’ll stop at nothing to impose their will on as much of the world as possible. It’s July 2015. I’m in the USA. Even groggy I know who the commentator has in mind. But halfway to the shower the thought occurs: Not a bad description of another bunch, of a […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, Hillary Clinton, Octavio Paz, sociopaths, T.S. Eliot, United States of America

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Sex, Sex, Celibacy, Diversity

July 9, 2015 by William Eaton

One Believe it or not, sex is a very important part of a relationship for many women, despite what we may say or what nonverbal messages we may send. From a female standpoint, I enjoy the intimacy. I enjoy knowing that I have that kind of power over another, that I can bring them to their knees, move them to lose control so completely in spite of stretch marks and saggy boobs. This becomes more important to me as I […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Alfred Kinsey, diversity, Freud, homosexuality, LGBT, masturbation, sex, Supreme Court

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