William Eaton | ZETEO

How does the good become good?

June 4, 2015 by William Eaton

Two disparate analogies to help us begin thinking about how the process works. A drug company tests its latest concoctions—e.g. statins—to see what effects they have. Discovering something one of these concoctions can do—lower high LDL cholesterol—the company engages its public relations and advertising arms in trumpeting the value of doing this thing. Lowering LDL cholesterol becomes something essential to prolonging human life. (And this in a time when, for example, obesity and poverty are much more life-threatening than LDL […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: ethics, Jean-Paul Sartre, journalism, Marx, Thoreau

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Pop Music (Econ Therapy)

April 30, 2015 by William Eaton

In memoirs published decades later, the Beatles producer George Martin recalls meeting with the band members in 1962 after they auditioned for him and his colleagues. Martin did not think the Beatles’ songs were very good, but, chatting with them afterwards he happened to ask if there was anything that they themselves did not like. To which George Harrison replied: “Well, there’s your tie, for a start.” Legend has it that this was the turning point. Harrison’s impish, gently […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Beatles, bossa nova, capitalism, consumerism, João Gilberto, Raymond Williams, Rolling Stones, Yeats

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Thou shalt not read

April 9, 2015 by William Eaton

At a brunch an American father mentioned his surprise that his teenage son did not believe that people were naturally good. My son doesn’t believe this either, but in my household this is not surprising. Of course this is a large subject which would quickly bog down were we to try to define the good. Heading toward a definition of evil, one of the other fathers at the table mentioned self-interest. As in, we humans are willing to do a […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: evil, Germany, Holocaust, indigenous people, Jesus, Kant, lynching, Rousseau, self-interest

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Martyrdom (Part III)

March 5, 2015 by William Eaton

I have written elsewhere about Martin Luther King’s call to martyrdom, his exhorting a crowd of black citizens in Montgomery, Alabama: “You must say, somehow, ‘I don’t have much money—I don’t have much education—I may not be able to read or write—but I have the capacity to die!” These days when we think of calls to martyrdom, we think of Muslims, suicide bombers. And we may note stark differences: King’s martyrs were not to kill but only to be killed, […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Boris Nemtsov, courage, Martin Luther King, martyrdom, N. Scott Momaday, Plenty Horses, suicide bombers, Wounded Knee

The American Splitting Experiment

January 24, 2015 by William Eaton

In The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, Rick Perlstein splits Americans of that recent period into two “tribes.” One comprised the suspicious circles, which had once been small, but now were exceptionally broad, who considered the self-evident lesson of the 1960s and the low, dishonest war that defined the decade to be the imperative to question authority, unsettle ossified norms, and expose dissembling leaders. The other tribe “found another lesson to be self-evident: never […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: American Dream, American history, class warfare, Declaration of Independence, History, Lewis Mumford, money, politics

The Cheevers and the Baldwins

January 18, 2015 by William Eaton

[email_link] Found at the Y, in a New York Times Magazine piece about Mary Cheever: According to him [the fiction writer John Cheever], their issues [marital conflicts] are myriad: He wants to have sex all the time, for example, and she wants to have sex almost none of the time. He acknowledges, in fairness to Mary, that he is quite often impotent—ostensibly because he has a ferocious appetite for alcohol and perhaps because he finds himself lusting steadily, irrepressibly, after men. Here, in […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Bette Davis, Freud, Hemingway, James Baldwin, John Cheever, New York Times, reading, sex

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Ditch the term pathogen

January 11, 2015 by William Eaton

A short comment, published in the 11 December 2014 issue of Nature and entitled “Ditch the term pathogen,” is the most interesting, thought-provoking piece that I have ever read in that distinguished science magazine, and, over the years, I have read quite a few. The argument of the authors, Arturo Casadevall and Liise-anne Pirofski, is that the idea that diseases are caused by external agents—pathogens, bad microbes—is incorrect and part of an oversimplistic paradigm. This paradigm, which can be associated […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: bacteria, Charlie Hebdo, FBI, Freud, history of science, medicine, Nietzsche, poetry, politics, science

“What are the unreal things, but the passions that once burned one like fire?”

January 4, 2015 by William Eaton

[print_link] [email_link] Given that Mike Leigh and Timothy Spall are now offering us such a rich, idiosyncratic portrait of the painter J.M.W. Turner, and given that the movie, for whatever silly reason, takes a detour to make fun of the art critic John Ruskin, I should begin with this: Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin’s views on Turner are sound or not? What does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so fiery-coloured in its […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: dialogue, History, J.M.W. Turner, John Ruskin, literature, Mike Leigh, movies, Oscar Wilde

Spiritual rats, money spells, and short boys

December 21, 2014 by William Eaton

[print_link] [email_link] “I am a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk.” — Sydney Greenstreet’s memorable line in The Maltese Falcon, made in 1941. Seventy years later, in our electronic age, we might rephrase this “I like following websites that websites like to follow.” The lines came to my mind in the wake of WordPress, magnanimously, honoring my blog—Montaigbakhtinian.com—with one of its special “Freshly Pressed” labels. This has led to an ever-growing wave of followers, with perhaps 5-10 new […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: blogging, faith healing, money, Montaigbakhtinian, Syndey Greenstreet, WordPress

ZETEO

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

Category Archives: William Eaton

How does the good become good?

Pop Music (Econ Therapy)

Thou shalt not read

Martyrdom (Part III)

The American Splitting Experiment

The Cheevers and the Baldwins

Ditch the term pathogen

“What are the unreal things, but the passions that once burned one like fire?”

Spiritual rats, money spells, and short boys