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Author Archives: Walter Cummins

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The Andrews Sisters in uniform

Rum and Coca, the Congo and Brazil

February 13, 2019 by Walter Cummins

How 1940s American pop songs framed the world beyond the United States as exotic playgrounds or lands of folly and belittled non-Europeans. The songs discussed: “Civilization (Bongo, Bongo, Bongo),” “The Coffee Song,” “The Maharajah of Madagor,” “Managua, Nicaragua,” and “Rum and Coca Cola.”

Categories: ZiR • Tags: colonialism, Donald Trump, international relations, neo-colonialism, popular music, songs

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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

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John Coltrane, "Wise One" score

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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Existentialism / Biography / Being in the World

November 29, 2016 by Walter Cummins

By Walter Cummins Review of At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell (New York: Other Press, 2016)   One reason Sarah Bakewell’s The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails is such an engaging read was her decision to organize her examination of philosophy around the lives of the central thinkers, with tantalizing tidbits about their friendships and fallings out, their wives and lovers, their personal tensions over evolving and conflicting theories. But her approach […]

Categories: Review • Tags: Camus, Existentialism, France, Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre

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Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Anima dannata, 1619, white marble. Embassy of Spain in Vatican City, Holy See, Rome

Americans’ Anger / Poetry / Trump / Furies

October 24, 2016 by Walter Cummins

Review of H.L. Hix, American Anger: An Evidentiary (Etruscan Press, 2016).   “I’ve got a family to feed, a neighborhood to defend.” “I’ve got a family to feed, a principle to defend.” “I’ve got a family to feed, my honor to defend.” — H.L. Hix, American Anger   These lines taken from separate poems in the first section—“Aggression Cues”—of H. L. Hix’s recent poetry collection, American Anger, can serve as elements of a mantra for the entire book. The voice […]

Categories: Review • Tags: anger, Donald Trump, poetry, United States of America

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Aging, Geriatricians, Elder Care: Knot

February 25, 2016 by Walter Cummins

Outliving Society’s Capacity to Care   Despite the rapidly growing number of aged in America, the ranks of geriatricians is not keeping up with the needs for old people’s medical care. So reports the New York Times. According to projections based on census data, by the year 2030, roughly 31 million Americans will be older than 75, the largest such population in American history. There are about 7,000 geriatricians in practice today in the United States. The American Geriatrics Society […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: aging, elderly, geriatricians, health care, home-care aides

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English servant, washing in tub

Downton Abbey and the End of a Way of Life

February 8, 2016 by Walter Cummins

Downton Abbey, now in its sixth and final season, has been a TV phenomenon, with audiences in more than 200 countries, including 160 million viewers in China. In the US it is the most popular PBS program ever, and, during the 2014-15 viewing year, it came out twentieth in popularity among all network and cable programming, just behind Monday Night Football. Why has it had such broad appeal? It’s difficult—perhaps impossible—to generalize for the planet, for viewers in places as […]

Categories: ZiLL • Tags: Downton Abbey, economic crisis, labor, televison, United Kingdom, work, working class

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Nones Crossfit Spirituality

December 11, 2015 by Walter Cummins

Seeking Spirituality in a Secular World   An article in the New York Times about people who enjoyed a religious experience in a gym led me to think about the range of human quests for some sort of spiritual connection, and beyond that what such a spiritual connection might mean. The Times article, “When Some Turn to Church, Others Go to CrossFit” by Mark Oppenheimer, reports on Harvard Divinity School researchers’ attempts to define religiosity in contemporary America. Their project, […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: André Comte-Sponville, atheism, Christianity, God, Hortus deliciarum, religion, Wittgenstein

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People console one another outside the emergency room entrance to Loma Linda Medical Center after two shootouts in San Bernardino. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

Guns, Death, Terrorism, the United States

December 3, 2015 by Walter Cummins

  Details are still emerging about the San Bernardino shootings, but evidence mounts that this was terrorism. Public reaction appears to be much more disturbed and fearful than it was a few days earlier when a lone domestic gunman shot people at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood office. The extent of the San Bernardino reaction is understandable because it reveals once more a network of organized forces hostile to Americans, impersonally seeking victims in a variety of public settings. The […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: death, guns, Planned Parenthood, San Bernardino, statistics, terrorism, United States of America

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Welcome to Zeteo, since 2012

Zeteo is for people who are readers, lookers, listeners, thinkers. Increasingly we are interested in short texts that call attention to other texts, works of art or music that deserve more attention than they are getting. And we are interested similarly in historical phenomena, ignored aspects of contemporary life, . . . We look forward to hearing about your ideas, your reading, what you’ve seen . . .

  • Aaron Botwick
    • Reviving Shylock
  • Adrian Wittenberg
    • Identity, Illness, Guillain-Barre
  • Ana Maria Caballero
    • In Favor of Fantasy
  • claratimsit
    • THE VIRUS, MEXICO, POVERTY, DEATH
  • danielpage49
    • Elizabeth Bishop and Howard Moss
  • Daniel Taub
    • The Chosen Comedians
  • Ed Mooney
    • In Poetry Pre-Linguistic?
  • Emily Sosolik
    • Spiritualism, Summerland, Slavery in the Afterlife
  • fritztucker
    • Look Rich or Go Bankrupt Trying
  • Alexia Raynal
    • Narcissism in children
  • Jennifer Dean
    • Storytelling
  • John Sumser
    • Cartier-Bresson, Senior, Trump (Gaps)
  • Martin Green
    • Foreign Meddling, President’s Ego: World War I
  • Steven A. Burr
    • Reading, Violence, Solidarity
  • sjzeteo2015
    • Reading a poem/A poet reading
  • stewchef
    • Culinary Star Wars
  • Walter Cummins
    • Rum and Coca, the Congo and Brazil
  • William Eaton
    • Sue Tilley after Lucian Freud (Art as Conversation)

Recent Posts

  • Sue Tilley after Lucian Freud (Art as Conversation)
  • In Poetry Pre-Linguistic?
  • THE VIRUS, MEXICO, POVERTY, DEATH
  • Cy Twombly, Charles White — Art & the Unspeakable
  • Valéry, Landscapes, the Whole Human

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