Paul. Let's get one thing straight. I, Carlo Parcelli, initiated this
discussion and I'm not a professor or academic. The other most cogent
comments made on this matter were those of Joe Brennan who is also
emphatically not an academic. Right now as I write this, Brennan is
hustling pool with about 50 other non-academics.
What you say about journalist's schedules is true in the abstract, but
in this case inappropriate. Carolyn See is a novelist and a book
reviewer, not a hard pressed journalist (though given the quality of
work at the Post material comfort always seems uppermost in their
minds.) In this particular instance, See sounds like she's on an all
expenses paid vacation arriving in a chauffered Mercedes Benz. But the
real point is that she makes no effort to learn anything about her
subject even when she is given the opportunity. Her article consists of
irrelavent chit-chat, very basic background material that's she probably
cribbed from John Espey, and her dismissive opinions that are uniformly
inane (and this from one of the literati). Her piece could have been
written in an hour. Like many at the Post Book World, I'm certain that
she would not be the least bit concerned that she doesn't know what
she's talking about. My experience with the Post is that since they
consider themselves the elite, they view their readership with a certain
contempt and don't care, not only about errors and omissions, but don't
care about out and out lies. If you don't believe me check out their
reporting on Central America in the 1980's.
Be that as it may, like Joe Brennan, I have lived all my life in
Washington, DC. We are townies and we have watched the undemocratic and
anti-egalitarian bent of the Post since before the Vietnam War. See fits
into the Post's long pattern of social, economic and political
paternalism, a set of assumptions of benign and not so benign
censorship, that has its roots in Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays.
(see Bernays 1928 book called Propaganda.)   
For Brennan and I to be called elitist smacks of the same kind of
Burkean contempt for the lower classes prevalent in late 18th/early 19th
century England. It seems to be lost on a lot of people that you can
learn outside the confines of an institution and that your opinions
might have value even if you aren't on the payroll of a major newspaper.
I might have talked Pound & modernism for many years with the
brilliantly independent yet institutionally legitimated Rudd Fleming,
but I also discussed Pound, Joyce, Eliot et al with the very
knowledgable Bill Howley. Bill was a union organizer and a Trotskyite.
We were very, very politically sympatico. When Bill came back to the
U.S. after World War II he became a postman. Dorothy Pound's Washington
apartment was on Bill's route. Bill who had read Pound for years did
Dorothy a number of small favors in deference to Pound's plight and
talent and in spite of the poet's racism and politics. What I learned
about Pound from Bill was as valuable as anything else I learned about
the poet. And ain't none of us, Bill, Joe, myself, elitist or academics.
Everybody's free to read. Even Carolyn See.- Carlo Parcelli
 
     Jane Morrison wrote:
> 
>         I find the academy/real world debate fascinating, but I think the
> professors have the wrong idea about journalists. It is as if they -- the
> tenured professors, anyway -- were looking for a 1995 Burgundy and were
> disappointed they didn't find it in the  all-night 7-11 store. (I don't
> claim infallibility on any subject, but I feel qualified to talk about
> newspaper reporting since I have been doing it for 40 years. For a
> reference, I wrote the full-page obituary of Pound in The New York Times.)
>         Writers for newspapers are hurried, harrassed by editors,
> constrained by space. But I've never met any who have time when doing an
> article to think about whether they work for the ruling classes, the common
> man, intellectuals or what have you. You just get it out as best you can,
> 1,000 words an hour in desperate circumstances.
>         Surely there is room in the world for all sorts of readers of Pound
> --  novices and adepts, poets and annotators. I take hope from the fact
> that in this entire debate the most sensible person has been not a scholar,
> not a journalist, not a poet, but a computer programmer.
> 
> Cheers.
> Paul Montgomery
> Lausanne, Switzerland
 
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