Proust, playthings, reading, solitude
. . . la lecture, . . . ce miracle fécond d’une communication au sein de la solitude, . . . (reading, this fertile miracle of communication in the midst of solitude) — Marcel Proust, Pastiches et...
View ArticleZeteo’s Spontaneous Fall Issue, 2016
While We Were Weeping A lot of people are put in solitary confinement “and they find the end of the world. For me, I found a new world. I found a world of self. That’s where I learned how to think....
View ArticleReading, Violence, Solidarity
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...
View ArticleGlory, Surprise, Salmon Rushdie
Five mysteries hold the keys to the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice...
View ArticleIn Favor of Fantasy
Fantasy has it rough. It bears a reputation of being trivial, flashy, adolescent, and entertainment-driven. Indeed, some fantasy is. But, such a judgment is unfair to good fantasy, which is none of the...
View ArticleImagination, Rowling, Happiness, Carnival
Memorable lines from William Blake: Twofold, twofold always May God us keep From single vision And Newton’s sleep Imagination lets us see the world as other than a Newtonian assembly of spinning...
View ArticleConsumers, Apprentices, Failed Universities
I have no complaints about living in Maine. I find good music, good restaurants, good friends in the small city of Portland. I’ve taught inland and upstate in Bangor – just this side of Old Town,...
View ArticlePrivacy and Power
Two weeks ago I wrote about the relationship between privacy and power, and how may of today’s spokespeople for the oppressed focus more on stopping surveillance in the name of privacy than daring to...
View ArticleIdentity, Erikson, and the Third Phase of Life
I remember in the ’60s being fascinated by the writing of Erik Erikson. I’m not sure if he’s read much today. But there I was last week in the quiet of my new home, Portland, Maine, in the quiet of...
View ArticleAffect, Irony, Idiom
Decide: Does Post-secular spirituality feature 1) posthuman ethics; 2) posthuman subjects; or 3) totalistic re-positioning I’ll read anything — almost. Once a month it’s my habit to browse stacks...
View ArticleBrains, Literature, Disposable Selves
The Self is Disposable, Isn’t It? Not for most of us for most of the time. But its reality can be brought into question. There are exotic cases of apparent persons who seem to lack a self....
View ArticleLynch Mobs
Shortly after posting my previous week’s article about Donald Trump, fascism, and communal violence, the New York Times published footage of a woman being lynched in Kabul, Afghanistan. The preceding...
View ArticleWhales, Meteors, Terrorists, Saviors
Herman Melville was mesmerized by a mysterious white whale. A new movie in town, In the Heart of the Sea, recounts the more or less true story of a whale ramming a ship in 1820. The Essex from...
View ArticlePorn, then Poetry
If poetry and pornography could meet on the Web, what would it look like? Of course, [pornography and poetry] probably benefit [from the Internet] for different reasons: pornography because people...
View ArticleConnecting the Dots
What triggers a Zeteo rumination? Sometimes — usually — it’s an item from the media or from a book I’m browsing. Sometimes it’s the flash in memory of a line of poetry or philosophy. Things beg for...
View ArticleThoreau Bashing
Am I that unusual or touchy to think that “scum” is an unpleasant, if not vulgar, label to have squarely pinned to your back? In “Pond Scum” (The New Yorker, October 19th) Kathryn Schultz does just...
View ArticleEyes on the Street
Perhaps Jane Jacobs’ most acclaimed contribution to urban studies in The Death and Life of Great American Cities is her “eyes on the street” theory. “[T]here must be eyes upon the street, eyes...
View ArticleA Sudden Collapse of Ice
Poems can sometimes behave like short stories, like very short stories. They set the scene, bring the reader in and then leave them with an uncertain longing. In just fifteen lines, the poem below...
View ArticleEarly Mid-Life Crisis
There is an undocumented age crisis that occurs in the early thirties. Indeed, the onset of this decade might mark the actual “coming of age.” Eighteen is still shrouded by the incredulous, protective...
View ArticleFortune’s Cookies
A friend recently sent me an upbeat, effortless Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919) poem that I immediately liked. And then immediately didn’t know if I liked. The poem is from Ferlinghetti’s...
View Article