William Eaton

San Juan, Puerto Rico, Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, from CNN video clip, 29 September 2017

Puerto Rico, Mayor Cruz, Shakespeare

September 30, 2017 by William Eaton

Speeches of San Juan, Puerto Rico, Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, in the Company of Consonant Words from Patrick Henry, Karuna Ezara Parikh’, Martin Luther King, Jr., Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Shakespeare 29 September 2017, as revised 4 October 2017 San Juan Mayor Cruz’s speeches to cable-news reporters and the world were heroic and heart-rending, and examples of great leadership in a time of crisis. If and when documentaries come to be made of the Trump years, sadly, these clips […]

Categories: ZiLL • Tags: CNN, death, disaster, Donald Trump, hunger, Martin Luther King, Paris, Patrick Henry, Puerto Rico, Shakespeare, Shelley, speeches

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William Patrick Roberts, 1895-1980; A Reading of Poetry (Woman Reading)

Proust, playthings, reading, solitude

September 19, 2017 by William Eaton

. . . 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 mélanges This year Gallimard published, in French, an amalgam of some of Proust’s writing on reading. Herewith my gloss of a passage that speaks across the span of a century since Proust wrote it: An idleness or frivolity prevents some people from […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Abraham Lincoln, denial, depression, Facebook, free will, GPS, Pascal, Proust, reading, solitude

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Pierre Bonnard, Le Boxeur (portrait de l'artiste), 1931, Musée d'Orsay

Collage, TV President, Bonnard, Miró

March 28, 2017 by William Eaton

In the aftermath of Trump’s election, artists and writers have had the feeling that all is changed, and their work, too, has to change somehow; they—we—have to come up with an effective response. One way I have approached this is, in my museum wanderings, to see which works from the past seem most right to me now. My two top choices from the modern-art galleries—Pierre Bonnard’s portrait of himself as a boxer (which he wasn’t) and Joan Miró’s Ceci est […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: African art, Bonnard, collage, David Koch, Donald Trump, James Baldwin, Marcel Duchamp, Mirό, Rosalind Krauss, Vladimir Mayakovsky

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Wendy Artin, Tamara on her Side with Foot in Hand, 2003, watercolor on Fabiano Ingres paper, 12 x 9, © 2003-2014

The New Shadows, Judd, Artin

February 7, 2017 by William Eaton

At sea in these thunder-clouded days we write out of habit and wishing that we might find some magical, Archimedean fulcrum that would right the ship or allow us to gather the pieces and start building anew. At present we cannot be sure how, or if, these pieces fit together. In any critic’s work, we may find an underlying set of values which inform the critic’s assertions that work ‘a,’ artist ‘b,’ public policy ‘c’ is superior or inferior to […]

Categories: Comment, William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: Donald Judd, Gatsby, Thomas Jefferson, United States of America

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A Syrian man holds lifeless body of his son, killed by Syrian Army, Aleppo, Syria, October 3, 2013, photo by Manu Brabo - AP

Sontag, Hell, Thinking, Politics

December 20, 2016 by William Eaton

To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames. Still, it seems good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is the world we share with others. Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Aleppo, Camus, Donald Trump, Freud, Goya, hell, Hillary Clinton, La Fontaine, Marx, politics, Susan Sontag, Sympathy for the Devil, war

Zeteo’s Spontaneous Fall Issue, 2016

December 1, 2016 by William Eaton

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. It’s where I learned how to read. It’s where I learned how to cry. I needed that so much.” — Max Cerda, “Death Is Contagious.” As quoted by Steven A. Burr, Reading, Violence, Solidarity, Zeteo, 5 December 2016. In […]

Categories: Fall 2016 Issue • Tags: Bob Dylan, Existentialism, Heidegger, human rights, McCarthyism, poetry, reading, Susan Sontag, women

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Dylan: “Gotta Serve Somebody”

November 28, 2016 by William Eaton

You may be an ambassador to England or FranceYou may like to gamble, you might like to danceYou may be the heavyweight champion of the worldYou may be a socialite with a long string of pearls But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeedYou’re gonna have to serve somebodyWell, it may be the devil or it may be the LordBut you’re gonna have to serve somebody — Bob Dylan, “Gotta Serve Somebody,” 1979 Bob Dylan, who first achieved […]

Categories: ZiLL • Tags: Bob Dylan, Christianity, Jesus, popular music, The Bible

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Philip Guston, Untitled, 1971, Ink on paper, 26.7 x 35.2 cm = 10 1/2 x 13 7/8 in, Private Collection. © The Estate of Philip Guston, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth [GUSTO77446]

Guston Presidents Cartoons Questions?

November 4, 2016 by William Eaton

In a number of Philip Guston’s more than 100 cartoon-style drawings of Richard Nixon, which are currently on view at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York City, the former President’s nose and jowls are transformed into a cock and balls (or scrotum).[1] We recognize the long-standing association of the nose and the penis, and can understand that Guston, in his sixties, was making his way back from Abstract Expressionism toward the cartooning of his adolescence. He was exaggerating the […]

Categories: ZiLL • Tags: anti-Semitism, cartoons, Cyrano de Bergerac, drawing, Jews, John F. Kennedy, Ku Klux Klan, McCarthyism, noses, Philip Guston, Philip Roth, Presidential campaigns, Richard Nixon, United Nations

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eiffel tower flashing at night, blue with white lights

Dylan, Nobel, Paris, Chimes Flashing

October 19, 2016 by William Eaton

Le monde s’étire s’allonge et se retire comme un accordéon qu’une main sadique tourmente The earth stretches elongated and snaps back like an accordion tortured by a sadic hand Dans les déchirures du ciel, les locomotives en furie In the rips in the sky insane locomotives S’enfuient Take flight Et dans les trous, In the gaps Les roues vertigineuses les bouches les voix Whirling wheels mouths voices Et les chiens du malheur qui aboient à nos trousses And the dogs […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Blaise Cendrars, Bob Dylan, Clintons, French, John Donne, Paris, poetics, poetry, popular music, songs, translation