Poetic strategies in political rhetoric and political tools in poetry.
I’ve been to this restaurant and can vouch for it, but Murray is still an ass.
Ezra Pound: Canto LXIX
This is a relatively short Canto compared to last few – less than five and a half pages. It mixes English with some tidbits in French and what I believe is Dutch.
Still addressing Pound’s obsession with finance, this Canto focuses on inflation as a means of depreciating debt and the consequences to the nation. The ‘time’ is Revolutionary War period.
While there’s little poetic about it, some things were interesting.
Once again, what he writes seems relevant in the wake of the last economic crisis.
The depreciation, he writes
but by no means disables the people from carrying on the war
Merchants, farmers, tradesmen and labourers gain
they are the moneyed men,
The capitalists those who have money at interest
or those on fixed salaries
lose.
If you think of ‘war’ as standing in for the ‘real economy’ – the economy of real assets, like physical items or labor, as opposed to the shifting of financial instruments – then doesn’t this point to the current inequity between those who live and work in the ‘real economy’ (most of the 99%) and the 1% who so often are those ‘who have money at interest’ as Pound says. Pound suggests that, really, we could do quite well and shouldn’t worry about the latter.
Reverend Doctor King – Labor Organizer
In case you forgot, the Rev. Dr. King believed that justice was inextricably linked to the right of workers to organize. When he was shot on this day in Memphis, he was helping to organize public employees – just like the ones the right has been demonizing.
Midweek Staff Meeting – We Still Miss Adrienne Rich
I never knew much about her social activism. I knew she was a social activist, but I only followed her actions in that realm in a cursory fashion. But you only had to read her poetry to see she was deeply committed to the hope of just society and to remembering the failings of one that was still unjust.
Postscript: Adrienne Rich 1929-2012
Adrienne Rich Interviewed
In memory of the great American poet Adrienne Rich, who passed away late last month, may I suggest this 2011 interview she gave to the Paris Review?
She is often lumped together with Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath (mainly because she was their contemporary, she was a woman, and she is associated with feminist poetics) but perhaps not given the same level of reverence. Sad to say, but maybe now that she’s dead, she will start to receive it.
Thursday Morning Staff Meeting – Penguins Are Cute
Midweek Staff Meeting – What’s Your Happy Place
Tea House Culture & Dissent
There’s something of a throw away line in this interview with Chinese poet-dissident Ran Yunfei:
There is this teahouse culture here—you have these places where you can meet publicly. Not a lot of Chinese cities have these. Everywhere there are tea houses and people meet and talk.
Ran is explaining why the Sichuan province is known for its disproportionate number of dissidents.
But it does get one thinking, doesn’t it?
Like most people, I tend to idealize portions of the time of my youth. In this case, it is the coffeehouse culture that grew up in the early nineties. I’m also love reading about the early coffeehouse culture in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as cafe culture in France.
Right now, America does not have a cultural venue for discussion of the type Ran describes in Sichuan.
Starbucks is a place to get coffee and go. Even places where one hangs out are primarily venues for wireless internet.
We don’t have a place where the primary beverage is non-alcoholic (we want discussions and debates, not sloppy brawls), even if some alcohol is served, where discussion and debate, including with relative strangers, is fomented. And that has to be hurting our national political and intellectual culture/capital.
I will give a shout out to the Globe in downtown St. Petersburg which makes a special effort to engender that sort of environment
Marco Rubio & The VP Slot
Marco Rubio has been feverishly preparing himself to become the Republican nominee for vice-president, even as he goes through the motions of denying interest.
One has to suspect that his real interest is in being president in 2016, but that he sees the veep nod in 2012 as the best way to get himself in front of a possible Jeb candidacy that would vacuum away much of of his home state money and leave him a minor candidate.
He could run for president in 2016 as the ‘next in line’ by virtue of having been the veep nominee four years previously. While this would mean forgoing re-election to the Senate, with the 2018 governor’s race as a door prize, that might not be such a deterrent. And, of course, in the increasingly unlikely even Romney were to win… well, Rubio would be a sitting vice-president in 2020.
If Rubio is nothing but a junior Senator for the next four years though, well that has a way of sapping one’s star power pretty quickly. He’s not a real right wing rock star in truth, but someone who has recently played one on tv. He’s just a basic insider player, in truth, and he’s smart enough to know that. Six years in the Senate will sap whatever enthusiasm people have for him and he’ll start 2016 behind a potential Jeb Bush candidacy.
By the way, I won’t pretend any of this is new or secret info. Adam Smith at the St Pete Times (still not going to call it the Tampa Bay Times) had this to say on the subject earlier.
the coffee philosopher 