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.
 
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.
 
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?
What could literary influence possibly mean here?
...simply running on interminably and incomprehensibly
in vers libre about nothing?
...Jerry Seinfeld?
don't know?
thanks
bob
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Erik Volpe <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thursday, January 20, 2000 9:06 AM
Subject: Re: Thanks and query
 
 
>Marshall McLuhan in "Understanding Media" also makes a
>brief point about the rhythms of the typewriter and
>its influence on poetic form. He asks what kind of
>poetic influence the typewriter could have had on
>Hopkins. He also goes on to discuss speed mingling
>with "the cultures of prehistory with the dregs of
>industrial marketeers, the nonliterate with
>semi-literate, and the postliterate." Then uses W.
>Lewis' "Childermass" as a model for what he calls
>"accelerated media change as a kind of massacre of the
>innocents."
>I also agree with your statement that "The Cantos" has
>influenced other writers as a group of interconnecting
>short poems. Last year, my for my undergraduate senior
>seminar the topic of the class was "The Composite
>Novel": a group of short interelating stories that
>"can" also exist as a whole. Earlier this week I posed
>a question to the listserv regarding the influence
>Pound had on Faulkner (only one person was kind enough
>to respond). Faulkner's "Go Down, Moses" serves as a
>perfect example for your statement that "The Cantos"
>influenced other writers in developing not long poems,
>but short composite stories and poems. Oppen's poetry
>also has this element-"Of Being Numerous"? Other
>composite novels? Woolf's Monday or Tuesday.
>Canterbury Tales?
>Dubliners.
>Katherine Mansfield "A German Pension"
>
>Thanks
>Erik Volpe
>--- Everett Lee Lady <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> >From:  "Booth, Christopher"
>> <[log in to unmask]>
>> >Subject:      Re: Thanks and query
>> >Date:  Tue, 18 Jan 2000 07:16:13 -1000
>>
>> >I suspect a stronger influence on writing/thought
>> was the typewriter. The
>> >typewriter had a profound effect on modernism's
>> brevity and layout, I
>> >suspect; it lends itself to a kind of mechanical
>> stutter; I wonder if the
>> >ease with which the keyboard flows will actually
>> bring back a more graceful
>> >mode of expression, in which sentences will follow
>> the breathing of the
>> >musical phrase rather than the imperative of the
>> carriage bell and the
>> >return bar. The quill pen & inkwell technology
>> suited well the phrasing of
>> >the prose style of its day; a period or a stop
>> marked by heavy punctuation
>> >meshed well with the time that a dip of a pinna
>> would last.
>>
>> Hugh Kenner wrote a very short fascinating book
>> called FLAUBERT, JOYCE
>> AND BECKETT: THE STOIC COMEDIANS, in which he claims
>> that the most
>> decisive influence was the invention of modern
>> printing.  And his reason
>> is that only when books became typeset did it become
>> clear that we are
>> working within a finite universe, i.e. that there
>> are only a finite
>> number of books (of any reasonable length) which can
>> be written.
>>
>> Whether or not one accepts Kenner's main thesis here
>> (I, for one, do
>> not), the book offers a lot of very interesting
>> insights into these three
>> authors and the ways in which they changed the shape
>> of literature.
>>
>> --Lee Lady
>>
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