>From: charles moyer <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: - Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine
>    <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Mr. Davis Once More
>Date: Tue, 1 Jan 2002 06:02:23 -0800
>
>Hey Jack,
>     You may have something there when you think about it. The Bible has as
>many crudities in it as the Cantos, but people don't stop reading it. Maybe
>it's the Oz-like authority behind all those "thee's" and "thou's".
>     If you like a good rant, and I do too, look at Phillip Roth's on the
>"tyranny of propriety" on p.153 of his latest, "The Human Stain".
>     Oh well, since we can't pry that sonnet out of the boney fingers of
>Columbia U. Law Schole, and it's 5:30 AM and I can't sleep with a sprained
>ankle, here it goes for fun:
>
>  p.153   "...the coercions of propriety. The tyranny of propriety. It was
>hard, halfway through 1998, for even him to believe in American propriety's
>enduring power, and he was the one who considered himself tyrannized: the
>bridle it still is on public rhetoric, the inspiration it provides for
>personal posturing, the persistence just about everywhere of this
>de-virilizing pulpit virtue-mongering that H. L. Mencken identified with
>boobism, that Philip Wylie thought of as Momism, that the Europeans
>unhistorically call American puritanism, that the likes of a Ronald Reagan
>call America's core values, and that maintains widespread jurisdiction by
>masquerading itself as something else - as everything else. As a force,
>propriety is protean, a dominatrix in a thousand disguises, infiltrating,
>if need be, as civic responsibility, WASP dignity, women's rights, black
>pride, ethnic allegiance, or emotion-laden Jewish ethical sensitivity. It's
>not as though Marx or Freud or Darwin or Stalin or Hitler or Mao had never
>happened - it's as though Sinclair Lewis had not happened. It's, he
>thought, as though "Babbitt" had never been written. It's as though not
>even that most basic level of imaginative thought had been admitted into
>consciousness to cause the slightest disturbance.
>
>Happy New Year,
>Chas
>
>
>
>----------
> >From: Jack Savage <[log in to unmask]>
> >To: [log in to unmask]
> >Subject: Re: Mr. Davis Once More
> >Date: Mon, Dec 31, 2001, 6:44 PM
> >
>
> > ... and I have listened to groups of Xtians endlessly discuss
> > the Bible.... what the good Lord might have intended;
> > which preacher has the "real skinny" on the Book of
> > Revelations (sic); ,,, but I have noticed they never seem
> > to actually open the Book and read what's written in
> > the damned thing.
> >
> > Too often, the Joycean or the Poundian seems none too
> > different with his sacred texts.
> >
> > At any rate, Politics is not the only milieu in which we
> > find the Reactionary.
> >


Well, yes, when I think about these things I think about,
I sometimes think I may "have something there" ...
but then I always wonder if it might be contagious.

All seriousness aside, ...

one of the more primitive and superstitious views of such
books as "the Bible" (... most any Sancta Scriptura) --
leftover from the earliest days of using symbols scratched
and painted on this or that to represent "things" the mind
takes for Real -- is that there is some Magic in the text
beyond the meanings of the words

-- I have been told that if one reads with "an open heart"
some mysterious "spirit" will "reveal" the Secret Meaning
presumedly concealed in the white spaces in and around
the text itself ...

and so the convenience of this medium to supply screens
crammed with words does not compare with the feel of a
pound of paper, thread, ink and glue, containing between
its boards, Secret Doctrines

Now, one of the problems I have seen among new readers of Pound
ris a certain uneasiness when finding they actually
like something Mr Pound wrote. concern
:" ... but if I like this, will people think I am
anti-Semitic? unAmerican? mad?"

the only cure is Time.

Today, the Protestant and the Atheist
can read Dante without embracing the doctrines and dogmas
of Mother Church.  Dante's support of the murderous Albigensian
crusade does not change the beauty of his line; and if his weak
grasp of English syntax does not deter the reader, Milton can be
read without the implication that the reader approves of British
genocidal policies towards Irish Catholics.

I recommend "The Genealogy of Demons" by
by Casillo ... with this under his belt,
the reader can easily navigate the Cantos
without the nagging suspicion that he is unwittingly responding
with approval to Pound's bigotry.  The reader will spot it every time
it rears its ugly "suburban" head.

I am sure that the subscribers to this list are not unaware, of course
that Mr Pound's social & political views have been wrenched out of
context.  Just as Dante and the Troubadours were not arcane subjects
in Pound's youth, neither were anti-Semitism and a growing distrust
of republican democracy uncommon attitudes.

In the late 30s ... and certainly after WWII, the more prudent bigots
took their views underground. Pound, of course, being Pound,
became more subtle in his expression but never changed his mind.

Well, I just made the mistake of  scrolling back and reading what
I have written, and before I wander any further in these several
directions, I will

stop

and wish you all a happy new year ... the minute it arrives
in the Spring

if it does





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