William Eaton | ZETEO

Bible / Translation / Kushner / Genesis

October 29, 2015 by Walter Cummins

Biblical Uncertainties I came to Aviya Kushner’s The Grammar of God well prepared, having, a month before the book was published, heard her talk about her arduous ten-year writing process. When I first learned of her topic, Biblical translation, I expected a discussion of the typical complexities of rendering a work in a language other than its original. But she began her talk with a riveting revelation. Kushner, having grown up in a Hebrew-speaking home in an Orthodox community […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Aviya Kushner, Genesis, The Bible, translation, war

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Film, Marxism: Tanner, Berger, Jonas

October 13, 2015 by William Eaton

If now largely ignored, Alain Tanner and John Berger’s 1976 film Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000 (For Jonas Who Will Be 25 In The Year 2000), remains warm, charming, lovable.[1] And the movie is particularly hard not to like now when the hopes and “Marxist humanist” analysis underlying it have come to seem a Romantic pipe dream. “[A]lles Heilige wird entweiht, und die Menschen sind endlich gezwungen, ihre Lebensstellung,” Marx and Engels wrote in the not-Marxist-humanist […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: Alain Tanner, capitalism, dreams, film, Frederic Jameson, French, Jean-Luc Godard, John Berger, Marx, Marxism, politics

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Playwriting: Churchill “Cloud Nine”

October 6, 2015 by William Eaton

Martin (to his wife): So I lost my erection last night not because I’m not prepared to talk, it’s just that taking in technical information is a different part of the brain and also I don’t like to feel that you do it better to yourself. I have read the Hite report. I do know that women have to learn to get their pleasure despite our clumsy attempts at expressing undying devotion and ecstasy, and that what we spent our […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: comedy, playwriting, sexuality, theater, writing

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Testifying (John the Baptist, Flores, MacNeice)

July 31, 2015 by William Eaton

1 A man seen on a Sunday—a very hot and humid Sunday. He’s slight, middle-aged, not quite shabbily dressed. He’s standing under a highway underpass, one of the hundreds if not thousands of highway underpasses in Connecticut. (And may I say, too, that Connecticut is one of the worst states to try to drive through. Suburban sprawl, highway-widening projects. In North Carolina some political figure came up with the horrible idea that highways should keep being built until every North […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: Christianity, God, Jesus, poetry, Quaker meeting, religion, sports

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Renoir, Love

May 22, 2015 by William Eaton

{click for Renoir, Love: Pdf} Harvard’s Fogg Museum does not think of itself as “portrait gallery”—it includes more than “just” portraits. Nonetheless, I am prepared to make the following, likely unprovable, assertion: The percentage of wonderful portraits to total number of artworks on display is greater at the Fogg than at any other museum in the world. Among my favorites is Renoir’s Victor Chocquet, shown at right. Renoir’s reputation as an Impressionist painter is rather in decline. His bathers, […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: Eakins, Harvard University, Impressionism, love, male gaze, painting, Renoir

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Almost Pure Pleasures

May 13, 2015 by William Eaton

At the end of a nature-preserve cove, I saw in the water some dark, complex something. Two box-like shapes, attached to one another. An abandoned part of a car engine? Approaching a little closer, I saw that it was two midsized, black-backed turtles, one clamped on the back of the other. They were rolling in the shallow water, and a stubby leg of the one on the bottom at times waved helplessly, and the one on top seemed at times […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: bicycling, Dr. Zhivago, inequality, money, nature, sex, turtles

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Kiki Smith, image of "Pee Body," as photographed at Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis

Urine, glass beads, poetry

May 5, 2015 by William Eaton

Discussion of Kiki Smith’s wax sculpture of a naked woman who has peed; streams of yellow glass beads spread on the floor behind her. The genius of the sculpture–Pee Body–is in the beads. ) This work likely was conceived as feminist art. The present essay also invokes a core idea of Surrealism: artists make visible the unconscious.

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: art, Ezra Pound, feminism, Fogg Museum, Kiki Smith, poetry, sculpture, T.S. Eliot, Wordsworth

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Divine Wisdom (and of course emotions)

April 2, 2015 by William Eaton

Love, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has been translated (perhaps inaccurately) as saying, involves giving something you haven’t got to someone who doesn’t exist. It might be more simply proposed that movies involve offering illusions to people who are in the dark. And the next step for a purist would be to propose that the best movies are those that concern, or at least touch on, this very fact. I read in the New York Times that the American-French […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: families, incest, isolation, Lacan, marriage, movies

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“I don’t know what to believe any more”

March 26, 2015 by William Eaton

False Claims / Empty Beliefs: Why is this not a comedy? A month or two ago it was brought to my attention that, as there are Holocaust deniers, so there are now those (in Iran, for example) who say that some or all of the “Charlie Hebdo” events in Paris did not happen. The events were, in this view, in some way staged as part of the battle between Islam and the West. I will quote right below from […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: advertising, Charlie Hebdo, Colin Powell, FBI, Iran, James Madison, lying, media, truth