life | 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

Lawrence Goldhuber in straitjacket, photo by Josh Gosfield

Bad Marriage; Spanish Dancer

March 1, 2016 by William Eaton

A touching story, and likely more common, in one variation or another, than it may at first seem. Among other things, I have in mind lives that come to be defined by one event which casts its spell, be it evil, enlightening, forgiving—over all the other years. The story I am going to tell, or retell, comes from Windmills in Brooklyn, a novel-memoir by a now forgotten Spanish-American writer, Prudencio de Pereda (b. 1912). Before getting to all this, […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Brooklyn, Cuban cigars, dancing, life, memoir, New York, novels, Spanish

Parenting: Infinite Responsibility

May 21, 2014 by William Eaton

Steps toward a larger, if alien view of what parenting involves By William Eaton Click here for PDF version (1) Few parents, and only occasionally, allow themselves to think, It is because of me that my child must suffer. Rather we sometimes think of all the many others and other things—rapists, wars, car accidents, bad teachers, infections—that (though we hope not!) may be our children’s lot. We wish we could save our children from some one pain and from all […]

Categories: Essay, Spring 2014 Issue • Tags: birth, children, Freud, innocence, life, parenting, parents

A Week of Reading: 7-13 October 2012

October 7, 2012 by William Eaton

From Phillip Rhinehart, Zeteo Assistant Editor 7 October 2012 Editorial spin, an exercise; or how to make bigotry palatable with continual reference to a Chuck Bartels article: Samples from the original: Arkansas Republicans tried to distance themselves Saturday from a Republican state representative’s assertion that slavery was a “blessing in disguise” and a Republican state House candidate who advocates deporting all Muslims. Fuqua, who served in the Arkansas House from 1996 to 1998, wrote in his 2012 book God’s Law that there is “no solution to […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: life, simplicity