ZETEO

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

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

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

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

Leave a comment

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

Leave a comment

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

Dylan’s lyrics written after his protest songs had made him famous came to parallel his evolving public persona. Both are adamantly unwilling to be of service to any one meaning, interest, or point of view. In fact, it seems it is Dylan’s songs, even more than his public appearances, that demonstrate his reluctance to be the prophet of his generation.

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

Leave a comment

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

Leave a comment

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

Leave a comment

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

Leave a comment

← Older posts

Newer posts →