In the Thirty-Fourth Canto, inside of a triangle:
“CITY
OF
ARRARAT
FOUNDED BY
MORDECAI NOAH”
And just below that:
These words I read on a pyramid, written
in English and Hebrew.
And before that, even, this throwaway remark:
Mr Noah has a project for colonizing jews in this country
And wd. like a job in Vienna….
The Canto, with early allusions and references to Napoleon and Russian campaign, mostly consists of fragments by and about the generation of American statesmen that followed the Revolutionary Era – John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams (it wasn’t clear if “Quincey” in the Thirty-Third Canto was truly him, but here we see the abbreviation J.Q.A.)
Am I letting the doubts inspired by Kenneth Rexroth’s remarks overwhelm my ability to appreciate one of the great and epic works of High Modernism?
A while back, I wrote about how Ayn Rand’s novels are really meant for alienated young people to read and then move on from once they’ve grown up.
Recently, I read this piece about a particular person’s commonsensical journey away from Rand.
The Thirty-Third Canto continues both the overall theme of history and the narrower and recent topic of the earliest years of the United States.
It opens with a fragment of a letter from 1815 by “Quincey” on how, though he says it in a roundabout fashion, democracies and representative democracies can be just as despotic as a tyrannical king. Though it’s never said, I wonder whether “Quincey” isn’t the artistocratic and idealistic John Quincy Adams?
The whole thing consists of these incomplete fragments of letters and diaries, seeming to chronicle a democracy’s corruption by “land jobbers and stock jobbers,” as he once writes. Clearly, part of this is directed at the United States, though not exclusively, as Bonaparte is mentioned, and virtually any reference to Bonaparte must always, to me, seem to entail the idea of a democratic revolution betrayed (not that he was the only betrayer of the better angels of the French Revolution, of course).
Also, there is mention of reading Marx and Das Kapital and I always appreciate a good reference to Marx.
I don’t know exactly when anthropologists & sociologists decided upon the phrase ‘cultural omnivore.’ I only know that I hadn’t heard of such a thing until I read an article about it a little over two months ago.
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) suggested in their report on attendance at cultural activities that it is not perhaps that the creature known as the cultural omnivore is dying, but that their preferred medium is changing. In other words, they interact with the arts through television and the internet.
This is not actually reassuring.
Ballet and live theatre cannot be maintained exclusively through YouTube clips nor opera exclusively through broadcasts of the Met onto movie screens.
A separate NEA report concluded that half of all attendees at arts events (live performances of classical music, art openings, etc.) come from two groups that the author classifies as ‘high brow’ and the aforementioned ‘cultural omnivores.’
Omnivores dropped by a third – from 15% to 10% of the population – between 1982 and 2008 and high brows dropped from 7% to 5% over the same period.
What is to become of our culture? I have been attending the opera at least once a year for a decade and have gone at least three times a year since 2006. I regularly attend performances of classical music and even dated a violinist for a while when I lived in Los Angeles. And that’s not even to speak how this might impact my great love, poetry!
If I had any skills as a mechanic or craftsman, I would build this truly awesome contraption.
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.
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.
This article provides a nice addition to the discussion I referenced here.
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?).
the coffee philosopher 