ZETEO

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

To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames. Still, it seems good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is the world we share with others. Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting […]

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

Reading, Violence, Solidarity

December 5, 2016 by Steven A. Burr

By Steven A. Burr Acquiring the ability to read, it transformed me, man. Like we say it in Spanish, la cultura cura. Culture heals. And that’s what healed me was culture. It made me positive. One thing for sure it did, it helped me to stop seeing my so-called enemy as my enemy and to start seeing him as my brother. — Max Cerda, “Death Is Contagious”[1] The first encounter between Max Cerda and Raymond Cruz, members of rival […]

Categories: Essay • Tags: featured, Levinas, literature, reading, Rorty, Susan Sontag, the other, violence

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Zeteo’s Spontaneous Fall Issue, 2016

December 1, 2016 by William Eaton

While We Were Weeping A lot of people are put in solitary confinement “and they find the end of the world. For me, I found a new world. I found a world of self. That’s where I learned how to think. It’s where I learned how to read. It’s where I learned how to cry. I needed that so much.” — Max Cerda, “Death Is Contagious.” As quoted by Steven A. Burr, Reading, Violence, Solidarity, Zeteo, 5 December 2016. In […]

Categories: Fall 2016 Issue • Tags: Bob Dylan, Existentialism, Heidegger, human rights, McCarthyism, poetry, reading, Susan Sontag, women

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Cartier-Bresson, Senior, Trump (Gaps)

November 30, 2016 by John Sumser

The famous French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson writes that the attraction of a photograph is not that it captures reality but that it just barely glimpses it. His photograph Derrière la Gare Saint-Lazare captures, in mid-air, a man in a suit and hat attempting a hopeless leap over a large puddle of water.[1] If we had been standing behind the Saint-Lazare train station we would not have been able to see what the photograph shows us—we cannot register images in 1/64th of […]

Categories: ZiLL • Tags: Donald Trump, Henri Cartier-Bresson, meaning

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Existentialism / Biography / Being in the World

November 29, 2016 by Walter Cummins

By Walter Cummins Review of At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell (New York: Other Press, 2016) One reason Sarah Bakewell’s The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails is such an engaging read was her decision to organize her examination of philosophy around the lives of the central thinkers, with tantalizing tidbits about their friendships and fallings out, their wives and lovers, their personal tensions over evolving and conflicting theories. But her approach […]

Categories: Review • Tags: Camus, Existentialism, France, Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre

Dylan: “Gotta Serve Somebody”

November 28, 2016 by William Eaton

You may be an ambassador to England or France You may like to gamble, you might like to dance You may be the heavyweight champion of the world You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed You’re gonna have to serve somebody Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord But you’re gonna have to serve somebody — Bob Dylan, “Gotta Serve Somebody,” 1979 […]

Categories: ZiLL • Tags: Bob Dylan, Christianity, Jesus, popular music, The Bible

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Portrait of Marie-Olympe de Gouges, painted by Alexander Kucharsky (1741-1819), private collection

Woman, Wake Up! Know your Rights

November 21, 2016 by Emily Sosolik

The French Revolution, the Declaration, and Olympe de Gouges’s “Rights of Woman” By Emily Sosolik Homme, es-tu capable d’être juste ? C’est une femme qui t’en fait la question ; tu ne lui ôteras pas moins ce droit. Dis-moi ? Qui t’a donné le souverain empire d’opprimer mon sexe ? Ta force ? Tes talents ? (Man, are you capable of being just? It’s a woman who is asking this question; you will, at least, not take this right from her. […]

Categories: Article • Tags: feminism, feminists, France, French Revolution, human rights, women, women's rights, women's studies

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Philip Guston, Untitled, 1971, Ink on paper, 26.7 x 35.2 cm = 10 1/2 x 13 7/8 in, Private Collection. © The Estate of Philip Guston, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth [GUSTO77446]

Guston Presidents Cartoons Questions?

November 4, 2016 by William Eaton

In a number of Philip Guston’s more than 100 cartoon-style drawings of Richard Nixon, which are currently on view at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York City, the former President’s nose and jowls are transformed into a cock and balls (or scrotum).[1] We recognize the long-standing association of the nose and the penis, and can understand that Guston, in his sixties, was making his way back from Abstract Expressionism toward the cartooning of his adolescence. He was exaggerating the […]

Categories: ZiLL • Tags: anti-Semitism, cartoons, Cyrano de Bergerac, drawing, Jews, John F. Kennedy, Ku Klux Klan, McCarthyism, noses, Philip Guston, Philip Roth, Presidential campaigns, Richard Nixon, United Nations

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Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Anima dannata, 1619, white marble. Embassy of Spain in Vatican City, Holy See, Rome

Americans’ Anger / Poetry / Trump / Furies

October 24, 2016 by Walter Cummins

Review of H.L. Hix, American Anger: An Evidentiary (Etruscan Press, 2016). “I’ve got a family to feed, a neighborhood to defend.” “I’ve got a family to feed, a principle to defend.” “I’ve got a family to feed, my honor to defend.” — H.L. Hix, American Anger These lines taken from separate poems in the first section—“Aggression Cues”—of H. L. Hix’s recent poetry collection, American Anger, can serve as elements of a mantra for the entire book. The voice […]

Categories: Review • Tags: anger, Donald Trump, poetry, United States of America

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