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

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Category Archives: William Eaton

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“There is nothing remotely objective about photography”

July 27, 2014 by William Eaton

[print_link] [email_link] (1) The quotation of the title, the photograph at right, and the words below are from Object Lessons, an article by the photojournalist Nina Berman, who also teaches at the Columbia University Journalism School.  The article caught my eye because it features some powerful images and also because, concurrently, I was reading an intriguing Zeteo submission about how news stories fit within long-long-standing narrative traditions (e.g. of parables or moral tales). That said, I turn you over to Professor Berman, from the […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Africa, art, corporations, crime, journalism, photography, women

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A Romantic Interjuxtaposition

July 20, 2014 by William Eaton

[print_link] [email_link] In a spirit of fun, romance, and experimentation, today I am going to interpose and juxtapose reworded extracts of two texts: one a classic adventure novel and the other the script of a well-known romantic comedy. Readers may well guess the titles. Reading the one, I thought it fit neatly with the other, for all more than one hundred years separated them. The two passages seemed in dialogue, two approaches to the same den. The interjuxtaposition I had […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: literature, loneliness, love, movies

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At least — ’tis Mutual — Risk —

July 13, 2014 by William Eaton

[print_link] [email_link] With marriage women and men had to—or have to—adjust to life with a person who is, in essence, a member of an alien group? My interest in  Emily Dickinson has led me to another classic academic paper, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century,” originally published in the journal Signs in 1975. Reproduced below are two of the concluding paragraphs of the piece, which is based on the correspondence and diaries of women and men […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Emily Dickinson, marriage, nineteenth century, sexual difference, sexuality, twentieth century

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Psycho-Socio-Therapeutic Discussion

July 6, 2014 by William Eaton

[print_link] [email_link]   A query came into Zeteo—I wish I could remember who it was from. It reminded me of one of my favorite “found” books: This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class. I have a particular fondness for found books, even for The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women into Bed, which someone—frustrated by his own lack of success?—left out in the rain not far from a lonely New York bar. […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: psychotherapy, reading, social class, work, working class

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On Nakedness and Awkwardness

June 29, 2014 by William Eaton

Toward the end of his seminal chapter on the objectification of women in European painting, in Ways of Seeing (1972), John Berger discusses an exception to the rule: Rubens portrait of his second wife, Hélène Fourment: We see her in the act of turning, her fur about to slip off her shoulders. Clearly she will not remain as she is for more than a second. In a superficial sense her image is as instantaneous as a photograph’s. But, in a more […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: art, male gaze, narrative, Rubens, sexuality, women

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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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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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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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The silence at the end of the tunnel

June 1, 2014 by William Eaton

  In La société de la consommation (1970; The Consumer Society) the sociologist Jean Baudrillard wrote of how the urbanization and industrialization of human life had created new rarities: “space and time, clean air, greenery, water, silence . . . Some goods, previously free and readily available, are becoming luxury goods that only a privileged few can enjoy, while manufactured goods or services are widely available.” This fits with my sense that luxuries can now be defined negatively: not owning […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Bob Dylan, consumerism, death, music, noise, Pascal, silence

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