dreams | ZETEO

Film, Marxism: Tanner, Berger, Jonas

October 13, 2015 by William Eaton

If now largely ignored, Alain Tanner and John Berger’s 1976 film Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000 (For Jonas Who Will Be 25 In The Year 2000), remains warm, charming, lovable.[1] And the movie is particularly hard not to like now when the hopes and “Marxist humanist” analysis underlying it have come to seem a Romantic pipe dream. “[A]lles Heilige wird entweiht, und die Menschen sind endlich gezwungen, ihre Lebensstellung,” Marx and Engels wrote in the not-Marxist-humanist […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: Alain Tanner, capitalism, dreams, film, Frederic Jameson, French, Jean-Luc Godard, John Berger, Marx, Marxism, politics

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Of Dreamlessness

November 16, 2014 by William Eaton

Zeteo’s staff is a mix of the graduate-student aged and the emeritus aged, and this helps me (on the emeritus side) see more clearly where my generation is ending up. At a meeting the other day, one young staff member, whose great interest is participatory democracy, was expressing his hopes voire belief that electronic tools can facilitate a revival of participatory democracy. My sense is rather that we can already see, and will soon see more clearly, how electronic […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: dreams, education, New York Review of Books, youth

Childhood: the value of secrecy

January 20, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

(Or “Everybody is entitled to dream, even those who came before MLK”) Eugene Field was an American writer best known for his children’s poetry, reports Wikipedia. I, on the other hand, report that translating a poem of his can be quite a challenge. Mr. Field—no doubt—had his own understanding of what childhood meant. And in this particular case, I am sure he sensed that children value secrecy—perhaps just as much as we do. These are the last three verses of […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: childhood, children, dreams, literature, Martin Luther King, poetry, secrecy

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Reading First Sentences

September 15, 2013 by William Eaton

A Week of Reading from . . . William Eaton, Zeteo Executive Editor [One in an ongoing series of posts. For the full series see Zeteo is Reading. This one was first posted 15-21 September 2013.] 15 September 2013: K.J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality As this is a season for reading manuscripts that are being submitted for Zeteo’s Fall 2013 issue [see current Call for Papers], I have become interested in first sentences and what one can learn from them. So I want […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: American Revolution, Ancient Greece, bees, dreams, Eichmann, Freud, Gatsby, Kant, Nietzsche, Plato, sexuality

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A Week of Reading: 30 September-6 October 2012

September 30, 2012 by William Eaton

From Maryam Moeini-Meybodi, Zeteo Publicity/Outreach Coordinator 30 September 2012 The first thing I saw this morning was the below quote from Marc and Angel Hack Life‘s website. After a long and busy week, this was the first thing I needed to see: It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you aren’t really living at all – you’re merely existing. You cannot always wait for the perfect time; sometimes you must dare to jump. Sometimes all you need […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: courage, dreams, poetry, proverb, Rainer Maria Rilke, spirituality, Thoreau, women