Sorry I've been away and missed the fuss with the interjections from the
Idaho teenager, I was more interested in the Passolini reference in the
below message, have you seen Salo Joe? For those who haven't seen this work,
and I'd very strongly recommend it, at the end, when the 'innocents' are
being grotesquely tortured, while the Fascist archetypes watch via opera
glasses the radio plays two works Carmina Burana and then Pound reading the
99th Canto. I think the fact that Passolini used not one of Pounds real
radio broadcasts from the time but a recording of a Canto written much later
[the film is set in late 1944] is significant. He isn't making a 'Pound the
fascist' point but rather including Pound in the litany of art that forms
the films backdrop...art like anything else is a commodity, which makes
sense given that the film seems to say, to me at least, that capitalism has
no 'victims' or 'innocents' since we are all complicit in our
acquiescence...we quite literally will eat shit, or pay to watch a film we
people eat shit.
 
I seem to remember that Passolini interviewed Pound in the 60's for Italian
television, though I don't have any further details. Anyone confirm this, or
supply a digest of the conversation?
 
Leopold Green
De Montfort University
UK
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Joe Brennan [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 29 July 1999 15:36
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: troll
 
well put.....  criticisms like the one richard is responding to reveal more
about the critic than the subject under consideration.  to criticize pound
in
any meaningful way is to make him as honorable as one honestly can; only
then
will the true magnitude of pound's malevolence come into focus.  perhaps the
most devastating criticism of pound's embrasure of fascism was made by pier
paolo passolini in his last film: Salo: 120 Days of Sodom.