Jonathan,
I am ready and willing to give any points you make a charitable reading, and
I hope for the same.  But you really have me baffled here with the comment
about representation being somehow Jewish.  I guess you're heading towards a
psychological intepretation of Pound's anti-semitism as a kind of
self-loathing --  that he was in his heart of hearts not a pure red-blooded
man but a pink-haired hedonist and living specimen of the orchestrated
race-rot?
Tim Romano

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan P. Gill" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2001 12:35 PM
Subject: YIDDERY


> I believe we must read "Yiddery" with the flexibility that Pound intended;
> i.e. it is a figure for the Jew, which in turn is a figure for a
> political, economic, cultural, ethical standing that Pound found dangerous
> enough to want to resist, even if only through language.
>
> I'm surprised that we can't all agree on what seems to me to be a very
> reasonable middle ground: whether Pound, like most Europeans, knew of the
> Nazi genocide is unknowable, but evidence of the possibility of the
> systematic destruction of the European Jews was there for him to
> disbelieve or ignore--it's right there in his own rhetoric!
>
> If we could agree on that, then perhaps we might begin to talk about
> how a poet for whom precise terminology was everything could be or become
> such an abuser of his mother tongue, at least in this period.
>
> My belief is that (bear with me...) representation was for Pound somehow
> "Jewish," hence his destructive and self-destructive tendencies at the
> typewriter and microphone.
>
> Jonathan Gill
> Columbia University
>
>