In a message dated 01/20/2000 11:23:36 PM Eastern Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
 
<< Erik,
      Regarding typewriters, i.e. technology's formal effect
 on "writing", there's Nietzsche's famous saying that he
 philosophized "with a hammer;" punning on the mechanism
 of the typewriter, but meaning the iconoclastic force of his exposition.
 
 So... The animistic notion of technology is really just
 a old red-herring, arising from the bourgeois
 fetishizing of technology, trotted out biennially by
 the latest photogenic "intellectual sex-pot" like McLuhan.
 There is no essential effect.
>>
 
well, there is certainly not this effect, but outside of such a loaded
observation, there is certainly some effect, which is probably not
generalizable from person to person, as regards both the influence or the
extent of that influence.
 
<< Similarly, the question regarding the influence of Pound's
 Cantos,  seems also to imply a suspect notion of literary influence:
 bourgeois reification, copyright, of that (the platonic)
 which can't be commodified.  And, where it occurs,
 (as in say, Browning's influence of Pound) this type of influence
 is just trivial, footnote-ish stuff. >>
 
again, the issue of influence can't be brushed off so easily, although the
exact extent of such influence is probably, in most instances, impossible to
gauge.  however, one can certainly understand the "commodification" objection
to the use of influence in critical exegesis, especially in those instances
where the "influence" is held to be decisive, usually to support some
(admittedly trivial) overarching perspective.
 
 
 The essence of the Cantos is, as we say today, deconstruction;
 and its thematic well as stylistic is the
 logically necessary outcome of an attempt at
 radical platonic exposition,
 the laying open human truth
 sans embellishment (the hallowed paltry dodges,
 metaphysical and  rhetorical); that's to say, an
 anti-art art...the diabolical inversion of "art pour l'art,"
 or nihil-ation.
 
 But, having once seen this, the inexorable hermeneutical
 progression is to thematize, metaforize, totalize,
 ...nso on, IT ("deconstruction");
 which, as we used to say, is the box we're in today,
 "the wind which will not subside."
 The Cantos poetizes the wind which we all feel.
 ...'n everbody's doin it, no?
 So do we more properly speak of the influence
 of The Cantos or the zietgiest [the spirit of the times]?
 
this is true among literary critics, but what of those who engage the method
of the cantos at the level of investigation and presentation -- that is, of
poets actually engaging this thematic and this stylistic in their poetic
expression?
 
 What could literary influence possibly mean here?
 ...simply running on interminably and incomprehensibly
 in vers libre about nothing?
 ...Jerry Seinfeld?
 don't know?
 
the fallacy here stems from the desire to put everyone into the same bag of
hot air.  everyone is not a critic, nor does every critic approach the cantos
at the level of deconstruction, nor does every act of deconstruction reflect
the same parts.
 
joe brennan
 
 
 thanks
 bob
  >>