ZETEO

ZETEO

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

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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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Frank Kermode, August 2000, photo by Charlie MacDonald

Kermode Cats Barnes Stories

May 10, 2018 by Walter Cummins

By Walter Cummins   Life is a Fiction Over a half century ago, shortly before the twentieth-century British literary critic Frank Kermode’s seminal The Sense of an Ending was published, I found myself in a debate with the campus chaplain, a priest named Joe Casey, whom I barely knew at the time. The topic—Life is a Fiction—came from me, although I don’t recall how Father Joe and I ended up on a stage in front of several hundred students. My […]

Categories: Essay • Tags: Camus, cats, fiction, life, literary theory, storytelling

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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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John Coltrane, "Wise One" score

Mechanical Reproduction, “Wise One,” Aura, Politics

April 6, 2018 by Walter Cummins

By Walter Cummins Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. … In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. — Walter Benjamin, as translated by Harry Zohn   The other day when I asked Alexa on an Amazon Echo to play John Coltrane’s “Wise One” and, a split second later, when McCoy Tyner’s piano chords filled the room, two references […]

Categories: Essay • Tags: Beethoven, cultural criticism, Donald Trump, jazz, Jean Baudrillard, John Coltrane, movies, televison, Walter Benjamin

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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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Bob Dylan. Photograph: Jan Persson/Redferns - cropped for Zeteo cover, full image inside

As Dylan Went Out One Morning

December 11, 2017 by William Eaton

By Oriana Schällibaum and Marcel Grissmer As I went out one morning may strike the casual listener as one of the more insipid songs Bob Dylan ever wrote. Recorded for the 1967 John Wesley Harding album it has never been very important to Dylan; he recorded the song in only five takes and, to date, has performed it in concert only once (in 1974).[1] Yet, “As I went out one morning”—apart from being a joy to listen to—is worth a […]

Categories: ZiLL • Tags: Bob Dylan, celebrity, literary theory, popular music, The Bible

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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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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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