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Kenneth Rexroth, Ezra Pound & Anti-Semitism


Kenneth Rexroth, godfather of the various renaissances of San Francisco and Northern California poetry in the years after the Second World War, was one of the inspirations for diving into the Cantos.

It is impossible to overlook Ezra Pound’s influence on Rexroth. Those great and sometime sprawling efforts to incorporate all his vast corpus of knowledge into poetry. The deep relationships with and advocacy on behalf of other poets (though perhaps no poet can truly match Pound in the tirelessness, efficacy, and importance of his advocacy of other writers). Each was very political and deeply influenced by their politics, yet neither is particularly known for their politically tinged poetry.

But Rexroth, with his liberal politics (veering in anarchism and communism – famously saying, ‘I write poetry to seduce women and to overthrow the Capitalist system. In that order.’)could not countenance Pound’s politics at all.

Regarding the Cantos, he once said:

“Oh, the Cantos! Everybody thinks it’s modern art. But the Cantos are a very specific thing. They are a long survey of history and the point to them is that what is wrong with the human race is usury. And who practices usury? The Jews! the Cantos are the longest anti-Semitic diatribe in literature.”

Of course that’s not true. But sometimes there is something to the third sentence – ‘They are a long survey of history and the point to them is that what is wrong with the human race is usury.’

I have seen something almost Rand-ian about the Cantos thus far, but instead of ‘Producers’ versus ‘Looters,’ it is ‘Producers’ versus ‘Financiers.’

One can also feel the seduction of that. Not the Anti-Semitic undertones which infected so many discussions of the financial system in the twentieth century. Those are unforgivable.

But the anger, the mistrust towards the financial system. After the financial collapse of 2008, who can fail to feel angry towards Wall Street financiers? Nor fail to see the correspondences between the 1929 financial collapse (which Pound lived through) and the recent one that still holds our economy in thrall?

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Ezra Pound: Canto XXIV


The Twenty-Fourth Canto begins with one of Pound’s depictions of fifteenth century Italian record keeping and logistics. A little more interesting than usual (they are epistolary) and then followed by several pages of narrative and descriptive poetry:

And he in his young youth, in the wake of Odysseus
To Cithera (a. d. 1413)  ” dove fu Elena rapta da Paris “
Dinners in orange groves, prows attended of dolphins,
Vestige of Rome at Pola, fair wind as far as Naxos

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Boskovic Out for the Season


Branco Boskovic, after finally starting to round into form, is out – almost certainly for the season – with a left ACL tear. That’s a minimum of six months out.

Though he was starting to earn his keep, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Montenegrin was on his way back to the Balkans next season. He just wasn’t producing enough to justify his salary.

But this still leaves the question of where the creativity will come from.

Fortunately, Coach Olsen is no longer pushing Dax McCarty forward into the playmaker role, which is a plus. And left midfielder Chris Pontius is really starting to show his stuff. His off the ball movement (what one does without the ball is as important as what one does with it; it’s when you don’t have the ball that you slip into dangerous positions to receive the ball and force opposing players to take their eye off the ball to keep an eye on you) is looking very good. On the opposite wing, teenager Andy Najar has reclaimed his spot on the right side of midfield from Quaranta (who is playing more centrally now).

There’s nothing wrong with a traditional 4-4-2, where most of the chance creation comes from the work of the players on the wings – as long as you have the players to pull it off. For now, it looks like DC United might.

Of course, their record is still mediocre, at best (3 wins, 4 draws, 3 losses), but if they’re finally finding their best offense shape and players, that’s a start.

Now if we could only fix the defense…

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Book Reviews


What is the value of professionalism in book reviewers? How much more valuable are they, if at all, than amateur book reviewers? What are the criteria for ‘professionalism’ in book reviewing?

As blogs (like this one) and other new media invested in books proliferate and as Amazon’s customer reviewers rival the New York Times for influence, this becomes more of an issue.

Though I am clearly on the amateur side (with sad pretension of more, but that is all) in terms of my own reviewing, I come down on the side of ‘professionalism’ in reviewing as a necessary aspect of maintaining our culture.

It is not just a question of gatekeepers. It is also a question of specialized knowledge and education and the benefits they impart.

Read this article for more on the suggested limitations of a reliance on sources like Amazon reviewers.

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Ezra Pound: Canto XXIII


The Twenty-Third Canto is a mixture of high and low art. Some irritating colloquialisms (mimicking uneducated language by spelling ‘Italian’ as ‘Eyetalian’). But also some beautiful stanzas:

Leaf over leaf, dawn-branch in the sky
And the sea dark, under wind,

This one also had the most lines and stanzas in foreign languages of any Canto thus far. I identified (if didn’t always understand) French, Latin, and Greek.

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E-Readers Not Ready for College


The University of Washington attempted an experiment to measure the relative utility of e-readers in a collegiate environment.

The result? Paper books still reign supreme.

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The Decline of Paperbacks


As e-books become a larger and larger part of the book market, it seems that the biggest target will be mass market paperbacks.

For what this article calls a “book reader” (as opposed to a “book owner”), e-books are an obvious replacement for mass market paperbacks.

Purchasing hard cover books and even trade paperbacks is more of an event buy. One is putting down a little bit more money for the unique experience of a desired physical book. But mass market paperbacks are the books printed to be read on subways and airplanes or impulse buys because they monetary outlay isn’t great. As a result, they are the closest competitors to e-books.

I’d hate to see them go. If you, like me, are a genre fan, then you have spent a lot of time with the mass market paperback. In my case, it’s science fiction and fantasy, where only the biggest names see the light of day as a hardback tome and where thousands of new books are produced as those small paperbacks that populate my shelves.

There’s something wonderfully egalitarian in the nature of the sci fi paperback, as well as an attachment to its history in the pulps. It’s inexpensive nature made it so easy as a young man browsing the shelves at Waldenbooks or B. Dalton’s in some mall or other to take a chance on an unknown writer based on a combination of cover art and the description on the back.

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New Conan Movie Will Be Terrible


The new Conan is inevitably going to suck donkey balls. There’s no way around it.

The original short stories, written by suicidal masculinist Robert E. Howard, were masterpieces of high pulp. In theory, this new movie would hew much closer to Howard’s vision of the character – a wily, wary, and highly mercenary creation.

The 1982 movie freely abandoned most aspects of the story save a few names and the main character’s physique.

Nonetheless, its crazy right wing subtext; weird, pseudo-Nietzschean mythology (how many men my age first discovered that German grump from the quote opened Conan the Barbarian?); and utter self-seriousness was, in retrospect, the only way to capture the spirit of an outdated (especially in its racial and gender politics).

That an Austrian body builder with compensated for his almost complete verbal unintelligibility and the sort of bad acting normally associated with Keanu Reeves by means of Schwarzenegger’s incredibly improbably charisma.

Instead, we are likely to soon suffer through the bland antics of a beefed up pretty boy starring in a cut rate Kevin Sorbo knock off.

To brilliantly conclude, let ask you this one question:

What is best in life?

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The Cantos Are on Hold for a Few Days


I am in Philadelphia for a few days and will not be keeping up with my daily reading of the Cantos. The book was simply to heavy and too thick to bring up. Instead, I brought my new Virgil and my Nook.

I’ll return to Pound when I get back. Technically, that’s Sunday night, but let’s be honest – Monday is a more realistic deadline.

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Used Books


The annual Flower Mart was taking place at the National Cathedral the other weekend. A wonderful used book sale was also taking place on the Cathedral grounds underneath a long tent.

I found some lovely books and LPs, though I missed out on an anthology of stories by John Campbell, better known as the editor of Astounding Stories, where he ushered in the Golden Age of Science Fiction,  publishing early stories by Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, A.E. Van Vogt, Robert Heinlein, and Andre Norton. I would even go so far as to say that Campbell was the Maxwell Perkins of sci fi – driving his writers in the direction of more and better characterization and hard science. Of course, after the Golden Age era of the late thirties and the forties, both he and the magazine he edited became better known for crackpot conservatism, new age-y hocus pocus, and a racism that was both weirdly expressed and unforgivable.

What I did pick up included Virgil, Jorie Graham, Otto Rank, and Goethe; along with vinyl records including a Glenn Gould performance of Bach’s The Well Tempered Clavier and Leonard Bernstein conducted performances of Mahler and Beethoven (which, much like reading Heidegger on Nietzsche, one listens to more for Bernstein’s vision than the composer’s).

Will I live to see the day come when printed books, like vinyl, are only available used? Or else in limited release, deliberately anachronistic editions that merely supplement the work in some other form (like REM’s orange tinted vinyl pressed single of Orange Crush, released to help generate buzz for the album on which it appeared, Green)?

After all, I am still old enough to faintly remember the days before cassette tapes fully replaced vinyl LPs.

In such an event, it becomes to easy to envision one’s self as a cantankerous old recluse, surrounded by the detritus of a dead age: manual typewriters with each ribbon wrung dry of the last particle of ink before being replaced, fountain pens, mouldering books with brittle pages, and vinyl records etched by time with deep scratches, skips, and crackles.