If I had any skills as a mechanic or craftsman, I would build this truly awesome contraption.
Morgan Meis to David Orr: Your Book Is Pointless
David Orr wrote the depressingly titled book about modern poetry, Beautiful and Pointless. The more I think about that title, the more I hate David Orr down to his DNA.
Well, if you feel the same way, enjoy this take down of Orr and his book by Morgan Meis.
Ezra Pound: Canto XXXII
The Thirty-Second Canto continues the theme of the American Revolution and Founding Fathers (though John Adams, this time).
It opens in a very interesting juxtaposition. Adams says that “The revolution… Took place in the minds of the people.” But then follows with a list of war materiel, thereby contrasting that intellectual view of revolution with the actual necessities of winning military victories, as any violent revolution must do.
Towards the latter half of the Canto, he appears to mock the unpreparedness of the old European monarchies for the coming changes, ending with what I take to be a metaphor for the wars that rocked Europe in the nineteenth century and possibly also the First World War (not that WWI didn’t rock Europe, but whether Pound’s eye was fixed so far forward).
A guisa de leon
The cannibals of Europe are eating one another again
quando si posa.
More About Literary Criticism
This article provides a nice addition to the discussion I referenced here.
Ezra Pound: Canto XXXI
The Thirty-First Canto is all about a series of missives sent by Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and other.
As per usual, Pound focuses on logistics and financial exchanges, including several references to slaves and slavery, though I can’t quite figure out if he is trying to make a particular statement with them.
Knowing as we do, Pound’s obsessions, I wonder whether he is attempting to chronicle the moment when the United States became entangled in finance and interest payments (would he call any such things usury, I wonder?).
Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters
Way back in 1998, I was writing a thesis on a book by an obscure Southern apologist for slavery named Edmund Fitzhugh. His tract was published under the title of Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters.
I was researching why it was that Fitzhugh’s particular apologetics not only did not gain traction within supporters of slavery, but inspired intense criticism and were dismissed as quickly as they had appeared.
What did I see but this little gobbet from The Atlantic talking about that very book.
Ta-Nehisi Coates commented on what I (and indeed, anyone else who ever read the book) saw, and that was weird strain of proto-communism inherent in the book.
Oddly enough, for a slavery apologia, it rejected the most overtly racist aspects of other apologias (though any argument in favor of a system that kept Southern blacks in bondage is inevitably going to be racist). He did not see Africans as inferior or particularly suited for slavery (as many apologias argued). He argued for slavery in the abstract and even explicitly said that slavery would have been just as “good” had a different group been targeted for slavery. Which also goes to the core of his curious argument (and where the strain of proto-communism came from) – which was an economic argument (most apologists used, odd as it may seem today, moral and religious arguments, not economic ones).
Ezra Pound: Canto XXX
The Thirtieth Canto is explicitly archaic in its language, for example:
Compleynt, compleynt I hearde upon a day,
Artemis singing, Artemis, Artemis
Agaynst Pity lifted her wail:
Pity causeth the forest to fail,
After the first stanza, the levels of anachronism fall considerably, but never disappears.
Perhaps referencing his own creation and publication of literature, it ends with a fragment of a letter about the production of book of some kind (the implication is a religious book) in the early sixteenth century.
The Canto ends with this:
Explicit Canto
XXX
I enjoyed reading this, being pleasantly and slightly challenging, it also appealing the historian in me.
Waterstone’s Rescuer Wants to Focus on Core Mission
If you were depressed about the Barnes and Noble bid, here’s some news to cheer you – though it is in England and not here.
A Russian billionaire bought the famed English bookseller for 53 million pounds.
The founder of Daunt’s Books, James Daunt, was installed as managing director and given a directive to refocus Waterstone’s as a local community bookshop.
What a thought! Focus on becoming part of the community and on selling books.
Ezra Pound: Canto XXIX
The Twenty-Nineth Canto contains our first little smidgeon of sex. Granted, nothing more than “lay with” and “begat.”
I’m reminded that Pound, despite his exhortations to others to “make it new,” had a conservative streak running through his poetry (read his older stuff -it’s pretty traditional). Despite this, we do see some avant garde and experimental streaks running through this Canto.
(Let us speak of the osmosis of persons)
The wail of the phonograph has penetrated their marrow
(Let us…
The wail of the pornograph….)
The cicadas continue uninterrupted.
New Nook Refocuses on Act of Reading
I was frankly disappointed in the Nook Color. While it was great in terms of sales – and those sales help support the existence of brick and mortar, Barnes and Noble bookstores – I didn’t like the move from e-ink to LCD. The idea behind e-ink was to better mimic the experience of reading a physical, paper book by eliminating the back lit effect of reading on a computer.
By moving to LCD screens, the Nook Color made itself into an affordable entry in the tablet computer market and is possibly better for perusing photograph heavy magazines, but seemed to move away from the central function of reading (and as far as the magazines go, I prefer magazines heavier on the written word than on photographs).
Well, Barnes and Noble is now unveiling a new Nook that returns to the e-ink screen, while adding a touch screen.
To me, going back to e-ink sounds like progress.
the coffee philosopher 