Essay | ZETEO

Frank Kermode, August 2000, photo by Charlie MacDonald

Kermode Cats Barnes Stories

May 10, 2018 by Walter Cummins

By Walter Cummins Life is a Fiction Over a half century ago, shortly before the twentieth-century British literary critic Frank Kermode’s seminal The Sense of an Ending was published, I found myself in a debate with the campus chaplain, a priest named Joe Casey, whom I barely knew at the time. The topic—Life is a Fiction—came from me, although I don’t recall how Father Joe and I ended up on a stage in front of several hundred students. My […]

Categories: Essay • Tags: Camus, cats, fiction, life, literary theory, storytelling

Mechanical Reproduction, “Wise One,” Aura, Politics

April 6, 2018 by Walter Cummins

By Walter Cummins Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. … In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. — Walter Benjamin, as translated by Harry Zohn The other day when I asked Alexa on an Amazon Echo to play John Coltrane’s “Wise One” and, a split second later, when McCoy Tyner’s piano chords filled the room, two references […]

Categories: Essay • Tags: Beethoven, cultural criticism, Donald Trump, jazz, Jean Baudrillard, John Coltrane, movies, televison, Walter Benjamin

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Reading, Violence, Solidarity

December 5, 2016 by Steven A. Burr

By Steven A. Burr Acquiring the ability to read, it transformed me, man. Like we say it in Spanish, la cultura cura. Culture heals. And that’s what healed me was culture. It made me positive. One thing for sure it did, it helped me to stop seeing my so-called enemy as my enemy and to start seeing him as my brother. — Max Cerda, “Death Is Contagious”[1] The first encounter between Max Cerda and Raymond Cruz, members of rival […]

Categories: Essay • Tags: featured, Levinas, literature, reading, Rorty, Susan Sontag, the other, violence

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17th century Schandmask (or shame masks) - a German form of punishment

Inequality, Experts, Krugman, Masks

January 19, 2016 by William Eaton

By William Eaton . . . the intellectuals of the time . . . went on playing with ideas que no tenían más función que la de mascaras—that served only as masks. Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude)[1] At a few moments in his recent, fruitful discussion of class warfare (“Challenging the Oligarchy,” New York Review of Books), the economist Paul Krugman presents a vision—not a pretty vision—of the role of academic experts. Krugman’s […]

Categories: Essay • Tags: academia, Brecht, class warfare, climate change, Emerson, global warming, Kant, Paul Krugman, Quaker meeting

Coates, Allport, Maynard—Inter-Ethnic Mixing

January 18, 2016 by William Eaton

What happened after Ta-Nehisi Coates visited our city? By Sue Ellen Christian Everything and nothing, as you would expect. But also, for me, old ideas from the American psychologist Gordon Allport and the journalist Robert Maynard got a new hold on my imagination. The auditorium was packed with 2,500 people and could have held more but word circulated that it would be standing-room only, so many people stayed away, though they didn’t need to, as the upper balconies still […]

Categories: Essay • Tags: Gordon Allport, journalism, Kalamazoo, race relations, Robert Maynard, segregation, Ta-Nehisi Coates

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Johns Hopkins professor Richard Macksey’s library, said to contain more than 70,000 books.

Our Unread Books

August 4, 2015 by William Eaton

By Andrew Bass Literature is a kind of intellectual light which, like the light of the sun, enables us to see what we do not like; but who would wish to escape unpleasing objects by condemning himself to perpetual darkness? — Samuel Johnson When asked whether he had read all the books in his library, my father once replied that he had: “Every title and most of the jackets,” he said. Tongue planted firmly in his cheek, […]

Categories: Essay

Intimacy, Knowledge, Reality

August 2, 2015 by Ed Mooney

Do we know what knowledge is, or what intimacy is, or what matters in our lives? Well, we could start with the observation that we have plenty of room to maneuver in exploring these questions. The terrain is shifting, and that’s a good thing. I want to shift the long shadow knowledge casts over alternative life-ideals — things that matter. But I’ll start a bit off-center, looking at the terrain “liberalism” used to claim, and no longer can. It helps […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, Essay

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RealDoll prosthetic device, leg, being repaired

RealDolls and Other Humanoids

July 21, 2015 by Walter Cummins

By Walter Cummins Second in a series Last time I wrote of the relationship of various prosthetic devices to the people who wear them. This time my topic is humanoids. At first glance, they may seem to be very different subjects. Prosthetics often and humanoids always, however, do share roots in robotics and artificial intelligence. But, more significantly, they question the relationships of human beings to devices that possess human characteristics. Recently, humanoids have become a particular subject […]

Categories: Essay • Tags: literature, movies, robots, sex, technology

Where Do Humans End?

July 7, 2015 by Walter Cummins

By Walter Cummins Robotics and artificial intelligence are now in the news almost every day, and at the movies and on TV. Some hi-techers believe we have entered into new relationships with our digital devices. The boundaries between Us and Them may be vanishing. If we are becoming “transhumans,” is it more threat than benefit? This is the first in a series of posts that explore—from an amateur’s perspective—a few of the actualities and possibilities. Captain Ahab’s peg […]

Categories: Essay • Tags: Merleau-Ponty, Moby Dick, prosthetics, technology

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