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Zeteo (ζητέω): to challenge, question, dispute, explore the forgotten and ignored

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Jackson Pollock, Blue Poles - Number 11, 1952 (National Gallery of Australia)

Valéry, Landscapes, the Whole Human

May 22, 2019 by William Eaton

Re-translation and notes regarding a chapter from Paul Valéry’s Degas Danse Dessin. Thus: reflections on landscape painting and many other things, including the idea that « L’homme complet se meurt. » The whole human being is dying. With images from Aelbert Cuyp, Claude le Lorrain, Claude Monet, Jackson Pollock, Jenny Holzer, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mark Bradford, Judith Bernstein, the Cranachs, and William Eaton (the re-translator).

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: art, featured, France, Impressionism, landscape, literature, Marcel Duchamp, painting

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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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Basset hound on beach on back for belly-rub

Internet Porn Capitalism Men?

December 3, 2018 by William Eaton

Aspects of our social and sexual lives discussed in dialogue with poetry by a young woman who in adolescence became addicted to Internet porn. Among the questions: What if, as Freud proposed, civilization does indeed involve the repression of our emotional lives? And what if our selves have become what we have to sell? Also noted: a young heterosexual male would not be allowed to write about his addiction to Internet porn unless he were featuring himself as an example of “toxic masculinity.”

Categories: William Eaton • Tags: Internet, isolation, men, poetry, pornography, relationships, sex, sexuality, social media, women, writing

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Molly Renda, Water Glass, 2018

Dickinson’s Dying Tiger

August 7, 2018 by William Eaton

A discussion of Emily Dickinson’s poem “The Dying Tiger” which includes sensuality, mortality and even, perhaps, vulgarity, but no sex, no consummation and no communion either. The poem’s two bodies, and two selves, never even touch, and it is this distance that kills the male and condemns the female to waste away (though she lives on with her poetry and regrets).

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: desire, Emily Dickinson, Freud, incest, men, parents, poetry, sex, women

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Asano_Takeji-No_Series-Snow_at_Iwashimizu_Hachiman_Shrine_Kyoto

Kenko, Kerouac, Snyder, Prayer

June 29, 2018 by William Eaton

A book by an American scholar of Japanese literature briefly discusses one of the anecdotes of The Tsurezuregusa of Kenko, a classic which dates back to the fourteenth century. The scholar, Linda Chance, offers the following translation: A priest of the Ninnaji, regretting that he had not paid his respects at Iwashimizu [a Shinto shrine not far from Kyoto] before growing old, took it into his head to do so and set out alone on foot. He prayed at Gokurakuji […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Buddhism, California, denial, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Japan, prayer, religion, tourism, translation

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Wilfred Owen's mother, pictured center with her family

Dylan Ramona Other Poets Soul

April 10, 2018 by William Eaton

By William Eaton This appreciation of one of Bob Dylan’s love songs, “Ramona,” leverages its lyrics to make three basic observations about poetry and to call attention, to include in the endnotes, to several poems by other writers. While not all of these comments are positive, in general this short essay is watered with a love of poetry.   1 your magnetic movements still capture the minutes I’m in Many, many poems can be valued for the fact that—in the […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Bob Dylan, empathy, love, mortality, poetry, popular music

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E.E. Cummings, Self-Portrait, 1958, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian

Cummings, No Bliss, Robespierre, Optimism

February 6, 2018 by William Eaton

The present short text is also a calling card or an example of one of the kinds of piece that Zeteo is looking to publish. For more in this regard, see the Addendum. now air is air, and thing is thing:no bliss of heavenly earth beguiles our spirits Or so, E.E. Cummings wrote in the poem that begins with these words. From a Marxist, Communist Manifesto perspective, we might be said to be making progress (or to have been making […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Anselm Kiefer, disaster, E.E. Cummings, hope, Orwell, poetry, science, war

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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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John Singer Sargent, Gassed, 1919, Imperial War Museum

Foreign Meddling, President’s Ego: World War I

July 13, 2017 by Martin Green

Revisiting the US entry into World War I, including the Anti-War Movement, Propaganda, and the Sedition Act By Martin Green   One hundred years ago, in early April 1917, on a drizzly Washington evening, President Woodrow Wilson went before Congress seeking a declaration of war against Imperial Germany, thus placing the United States into the midst of what had become known as the Great War. According to Georgetown history professor Michael Kazin, the Great War, or World War I as […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: First World War, United States

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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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