>Date:  Sun, 5 Dec 1999 02:16:13 -1000
>From:  Wayne Pounds <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject:      Re: Getting things dead wrong
>
>From:  Jonathan Morse <[log in to unmask]>
> >Subject:      Re: Getting things all mixed up
>             >SNIP<
>No
> >economist of any standing has ever paid the
> slightest attention to Pound's
> >ideas about money, for instance,
>
>Dead wrong. Read Giano Accame, _Ezra Pound
>Economista_, 1995. Massimo Bacigalupo reviewed it for
>Pai. (Accame a journalist whose field is economics and
>cites reputable sources.) The review inspited y.t. to
>read this book --hasn't anybody else read it?
 
Since it's in Italian, it's probably not widely available
in the United States.  Any sort of summary you could post
here would be welcome.
 
Even if it were in English, however, and more readily
available in university libraries in the United States,
most academics specializing in Pound would probably not
bother to read it, because as we see by their comments
in this list, they simply can't be bothered to learn
the territory.
 
I don't have a problem with people who claim that the
only interesting thing about Pound is his poetry and
literary criticism and that his life and non-literary
interests can be ignored.  I do have a problem with people
like Morse, who was actually teaching a graduate seminar
in biography this semester focussing on Pound (as well
as Walt Whitman), and who can't be bothered to learn the
background that would enable them to understand Pound
in context.
 
I have a problem with people who look at the Agresti
letters and only see the 5% which deals with Jews
since that's the only part they can make any sense of
because they simply don't know anything about any of the
books and other things Pound really cared about.
 
To even talk about "Pound's ideas about money" is to
show that one has completely missed the point of who
Pound was.  Pound was not a thinker, he was an enthusiast.
He had some very acute perceptions, about literature at
least, and he liked to look at old and obscure books
and discover things which had been long forgotten, and
he had a keen intuition (although not always a reliable
one) in seeing connections that most people had not seen
before.
 
But you cannot discuss his works in the way one generally
discusses the works of thinkers, in terms of the reasoning
and evidence cited, because Pound does not provide a
systematic intellectual exposition.  This was not the
level Pound's mind worked on, and it's one reason so
many of the ideas he championed (which were not "Pound's
ideas" but the ideas of others) in the realm of government
and economics turned out to be so foolish.  (They were
not so obviously foolish, though, in the context of the
era in which Pound first learned of them.)
 
So instead of a reasoned discussion of Pound's ideas in
the fashion of in which one discusses the ideas of thinkers,
we see here absolutely childish criticism, such as
"The fact that Confucianism is worthless is proved by the
way the Chinese have treated women."
 
-----
It is a question not of being happy or fulfilled, but of being on fire.
 --- Anais Nin
 
Lee Lady           <Http://www2.Hawaii.Edu/~lady>