ZETEO

Bust portrait of a young man representing the nativist ideal of the Know Nothing party, from Harp Week collection of American political prints, 1766-1876

Anti-Immigration Politics Pre Trump

April 24, 2017 by Emily Sosolik

“I Know Nothing”: Faith, Fear, and Politics in Antebellum America By Emily Sosolik Let our opponents torture and distort the truth as they may, no specious reasoning, no political sophistry can alter the fact that those who are constantly laboring to fight down Americanism and Protestantism are enemies of their country, and tories or traitors of their native land. — The Know Nothing Almanac and True Americans’ Manual for 1856 The fear of the other has manifested wildly […]

Categories: Article • Tags: Catholic Church, citizenship, Fourteenth Amendment, immigration, Know-Nothing Party, nativist, naturalization, United States of America, US history, US politics

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Pierre Bonnard, Le Boxeur (portrait de l'artiste), 1931, Musée d'Orsay

Collage, TV President, Bonnard, Miró

March 28, 2017 by William Eaton

In the aftermath of Trump’s election, artists and writers have had the feeling that all is changed, and their work, too, has to change somehow; they—we—have to come up with an effective response. One way I have approached this is, in my museum wanderings, to see which works from the past seem most right to me now. My two top choices from the modern-art galleries—Pierre Bonnard’s portrait of himself as a boxer (which he wasn’t) and Joan Miró’s Ceci est […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: African art, Bonnard, collage, David Koch, Donald Trump, James Baldwin, Marcel Duchamp, Mirό, Rosalind Krauss, Vladimir Mayakovsky

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Wendy Artin, Tamara on her Side with Foot in Hand, 2003, watercolor on Fabiano Ingres paper, 12 x 9, © 2003-2014

The New Shadows, Judd, Artin

February 7, 2017 by William Eaton

At sea in these thunder-clouded days we write out of habit and wishing that we might find some magical, Archimedean fulcrum that would right the ship or allow us to gather the pieces and start building anew. At present we cannot be sure how, or if, these pieces fit together. In any critic’s work, we may find an underlying set of values which inform the critic’s assertions that work ‘a,’ artist ‘b,’ public policy ‘c’ is superior or inferior to […]

Categories: Comment, William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: Donald Judd, Gatsby, Thomas Jefferson, United States of America

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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 FranceYou may like to gamble, you might like to danceYou may be the heavyweight champion of the worldYou may be a socialite with a long string of pearls But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeedYou’re gonna have to serve somebodyWell, it may be the devil or it may be the LordBut you’re gonna have to serve somebody — Bob Dylan, “Gotta Serve Somebody,” 1979 Bob Dylan, who first achieved […]

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

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