Brett. I agree with your remarks. But I would like to add a comment or
two. Carolyn See sees herself as more than a journalist (a novelist of
importance e.g.) as well as the other folks at the Post Book World. But
more importantly, the Post is a major venue read around the world and I
presume you and I are not. Yet we are more responsible in our remarks.
Their approach toward 'serious' literature and thinking in general is
not only dismissive and even hostile (witness recent no nothing attacks
on Joyce (they couldn't undertsand Ulysses), Schopenhauer, Derrida,
Heidegger etc.) But more significantly , it reflects the same way they
treat the aspirations of poor people, populist movements, trade unions,
grass roots organizations et al. In other words it is the combination of
bourgeois elitism and ignorance that fuels so much of the violence
toward the denied and destitute all over the world (witness the current
demonization of Hugo Chavez or the resolute standing down on mentioning
the U.S. role in the past and current turmoil in Indonesia/Timor or the
situation with Pinochet or the Caspian Sea oil/natural gas factor in
Serbia/Kosovo etc. etc. ad nauseam. And when I look at Pound's poetic
method (not his ideology) I don't see this as too wild a
conflation.-Carlo Parcelli        
Brett Zombro wrote:
> 
> R. Gancie/C.Parcelli wrote:
> 
> <In the Sunday Aug. 29 Book World section of the Washington Post
> <(supposedly the second 'best' newspaper in the country) Carolyn See
> <published a piece
>                                     [...]
> 
> For what it's worth, you can read the article online at
> 
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-08/29/026l-082999-idx.html
> 
> I don't personally hold book reviewers in daily newspapers to
> particularly high standards, but occasionally they say things
> that can provide reality checks (for, OK, not *just* academics,
> but also 'serious readers', writer-readers, people who don't
> get out enough, and anyone else who subscribes to lists like
> this for whatever reason -- am I being inclusive enough?).
> Carolyn See may be an idiot, and there's no excuse for some
> of the sloppy journalism there, but is her dismissive attitude
> toward the Cantos really atypical?  It seems like there is a norm in
> popular journalistic writing about  Pound which goes
> something along the lines of "one of the
> century's great poets, who made important contributions to
> blah, blah, blah... but hardly anyone reads him and no wonder --
> who would want to bother with such difficult... blah, blah,
> incoherent blah in blah-teen different languages... and anyway
> he was a crypto-modernist-fascist traitor to boot."
> A qualified dismissal, usually without the slightest hint of curiosity,
> even curiosity motivated by hostility, on the part of the writer.
> I don't have any great conclusion to draw from this (and there are
> so many factors here which have nothing to do with Pound that I
> doubt it's worth pursuing, unless as an exercise in pop. culture
> studies); I merely note a phenomenon.  See's article isn't particularly
> viscious or errant (except for that misleading chronology); it's just
> another tally mark.
> 
> I wonder what she means by 'atonal poetry' though?
> <smirk>
> 
> --
> Brett Zombro
> [log in to unmask]
 
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