ZETEO

Thucydides, Herbert, History, Kerry

January 5, 2016 by William Eaton

Here Is Why the Classics Zbigniew Herbert’s poem “Dlaczego klasycy” (Why the Classics) has called out to me for a long while, as did W.B. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” until I wrote about it. And so I am writing about Herbert’s poem. It gives its history lesson by pulling the reader into the here and now. Yeats instructs by displaying for the reader Yeats’s golden perch outside history. Herbert plants his and the reader’s feet in history, concluding (in […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: Edward Snowden, History, humility, John Kerry, poetry, Thucydides, Zbigniew Herbert

Lynch Mobs

January 3, 2016 by fritztucker

Shortly after posting my previous week’s article about Donald Trump, fascism, and communal violence, the New York Times published footage of a woman being lynched in Kabul, Afghanistan. The preceding disclaimer did not prepare me for the video’s contents; though I can’t think of anything that would have. It was definitely the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I don’t necessarily recommend the reader watch it. I would recommend it, however, for those who genuinely think that Trump’s followers are in danger […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: African-Americans, books, crime, death, History, literature, Marx, New York Times, politics, race, reading, writing

Narrative, Performance, Selves & Solitude

January 3, 2016 by Ed Mooney

Nothing is more fascinating — and frustrating to others — than our capacity to manipulate the image or story we present to others. In an acute way this capacity to pretend or impersonate raises the question of who we are beneath public appearances. The clash between public appearance and underlying reality plays into the hands of those who deceive, sometimes in criminal activities, sometimes just as part of a harmless game of charades or a sober theatrical performance. Some persons […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: ethics, philosophy, politics, social justice

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long exposure photo of lightning strikes; credit, n5mbm.net

Facebook Critical Distance Reading

December 31, 2015 by William Eaton

Happiness courts us in her best array? An old friend, 70, after a perfectly successful career as a curator of nineteenth-century sculpture, has been reborn as a Facebook post-er. So many good posts, often several in a day, sometimes featuring photos she has taken, sometimes bits from the news, the Web. She is French, lives in Paris, and while in past decades I have, from New York, listened to French radio and read Le monde, now, for the first time, […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Alcoholics Anonymous, critical distance, Facebook, Frederic Jameson, Holocaust, lightning, postmodernism, Romeo & Juliet, Shakespeare

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Dancing with Woolf, Treading with Eliot

December 27, 2015 by Ed Mooney

♦ What would happen if God leaned down and gave you a full, wet kiss? — Daniel Ladinsky Some words, like people, move us before we’re really aware of what’s happening. We return the glance from across the room instantaneously, spontaneously. Sometimes words are like that, a contagious spark. We dance in the space of words and things worded. A quickness of phrase or movement will quicken an alert return. The glance and spark not just of looks […]

Categories: Ed Mooney • Tags: death, philosophy, poetry, women, writing

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Magritte, L'Oasis (The Oasis), 1925-1927

Woolf, Eliot, Global Warming, Christmas

December 23, 2015 by William Eaton

Let the broken glass and the china lie out on the lawn and be tangled over with grass and wild berries. Listening (had there been any one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: climate change, global warming, God, Magritte, religion, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf

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Whales, Meteors, Terrorists, Saviors

December 20, 2015 by Ed Mooney

Herman Melville was mesmerized by a mysterious white whale. A new movie in town, In the Heart of the Sea, recounts the more or less true story of a whale ramming a ship in 1820. The Essex from Nantucket was stove in, in the South Pacific. Moby Dick is a distant relative of that event. It turns out that Melville was fascinated by a white whale and also by an ominous white meteor streaming through the sky — not […]

Categories: Ed Mooney • Tags: books, death, film, literature, Meteors, movies, reading, Thoreau, whales

The Greatest Movies of All Time

December 15, 2015 by William Eaton

The films touched upon here and below are: The Third Man, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Farewell My Concubine [English title], Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, or The Bicycle Thief), L’Amant (The Lover), Touki Bouki, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), Anna Karenina (1935 version), Un air de famille (Family Resemblances), Carol, Youth, Orson Welles : Autopsie d’une légende, Strangers on a Train, The American Friend, Eaux Profondes, Plein Soleil (Purple Noon), The Leningrad Cowboys, Festen, Satyajit Ray’s […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: Bob Fosse, Dr. Caligari, Farewell My Concubine, Jaoui et Bacri, Lawrence of Arabia, Mao, movies, Paolo Sorrentino, The Third Man, Virginia Woolf, Woody Allen

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Solzhenitsyn, War Horse, Lotus Seed—Tag

December 14, 2015 by William Eaton

The typical question regarding a book, any book, is, “What’s it about?” Perhaps an equally important question is: “How does this author tell the story?” My sophomore year of high school, I had to read a book. The class was World Civilization; the book was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The curious thing is, I loved it. Against all odds, one Sunday afternoon, this book captured my attention, word for word. I consider […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: children's books, fiction, graffiti, lotus, Solzhenitsyn, War Horse

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