At 03:53 PM 6/28/00 -0500, Carrol Cox wrote:

> . . . The *Cantos* sort of teach
>themselves if one simply browses and rebrowses through them
>for a enough years without becoming impatient. Does it take as
>much time now as it did back in the '50s? (It took me five or
>six years.)

The best single classroom experience I've had with the Cantos occurred in
the 70s, when I was lucky enough to have a middle-aged Frenchwoman in the
room. I guess she'd had at least a lycee education; at any rate she was a
lot more sophisticated about language than the average American
undergraduate, and when we got to Pound's poilu slang in Canto 16 she
responded so passionately that I just sat back and let her do the teaching.
This wasn't just a case of a Frenchwoman being happy to read French,
either; as we sat there and listened, we all learned that Pound was a poet
who heard and recorded the language of the actual -- actual speech, actual
history. As a fringe benefit, we also learned that Pound is right in _ABC
of Reading_ about the necessity of getting some perspective on your own
language by learning another.

Could that have happened in the 50s, could it happen again in the 00s? I
hope so.

Jonathan Morse