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Category Archives: William Eaton

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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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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

Among other things, Kerouac makes much of a phrase he describes as “the famous Zen saying, ‘When you get to the top of a mountain, keep climbing.’” To me this exemplifies the worst of American post-war plundering of Asian religions. The booty, once brought to American soil or literature, could go on one of our T-shirts (and probably has).

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

An appreciation of one of Bob Dylan’s “Ramona,” which goes on to make some observations about poetry and to call attention to several poems by other writers. An essay watered with a love of poetry.

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

As the shadows of the twenty-first century lengthen, the exuberance or optimism of our predecessors seems more and more striking. In addition to Cummings and other poets, I have been reading in the speeches of “L’Incorruptible,” The Incorruptible, Maximilien Robespierre. Robespierre believed in the goodness of the common people and in the possibility of national unity (as opposed to endless class warfare), and in the possibility of a triumph of virtue.

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

Proust’s proposal is that salvation, recovery of ourselves and our mental capacities, may come—only—from reading and on account of the particular connection between reading and solitude.

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

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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

Have our circumstances [in the age of the Chief Tweet] changed less than our focus, what we are now able to see? It may well be that there are some vital aspects of human existence and interdependence that we are coming to see more clearly, but this at the cost of losing sight of any number of other, more diverting phenomena.

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

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Photo of third suicide bomber behind Stade de France blasts - photo released by French police, 22 Nov 2015 - AFP; Getty Images

Numantia, Cervantes, Vicksburg, Terrorists

June 2, 2016 by William Eaton

. . . though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us. — U.S. Grant, writing, years later, about the Confederate surrender at Appomattox[1]   Ellos con duros estatutos fieros y con su extraña condición avara pusieron tan gran yugo a nuestros cuellos que forzados salimos […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Cervantes, civil war, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roman history, Spain, terrorism, theater, Vicksburg, war

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