I've lately found myself thinking of the Cantos, particularly about the
ways they "blast" loose the luminous details as Pound saw them.  His
method is extremely idiosyncratic, as anyone notices reading the poem,
and it funcetions very much like a curricular outline.  For example, I
did not know that I would want to know so much about the
Jefferson-Adams correspondence, or about Maj. Douglas's Social Credit,
or about the local power-brokers of Renaissance Italy.  Now I do, if
only to "understand" the Cantos.

But these luminous details do not a history make, as far as history is
traditionally written, and this is where my thinking about the Cantos
finds its misty edges.  Trying to understand the relation between the
homogenous time of history and the "phalanx of particulars" that EP
blasts out of that continuum brought me to thinking of Walter Benjamin
and his Arcades Project.  Benjamin did something sort of similar to the
Cantos, though much more locally, about 19th century Paris.  There are
(of course) innumerable documents about Paris in those days in the
Bibliotheque Nationale, and Benjamin selected a large number of them to
take notes from, trying to arrange them montage-style into a
study-guide of sorts.  His goal was a full-blown essay about the
Arcades of Paris, but he committed suicide (due to wartime
vicissitudes) before he could get past the note-taking, initial
commentary stages.

In any event, the Arcades Project blasts loose details of the Parisian
scene at the time, and blasts loose so many fascinating pieces that no
one could doubt he was on to something.  Similar to the Cantos, no
formal, sequential attempt is made to narrate how one gets from 1820 to
1880: instead, perceptive readers are equipped with the stepping
stones, arranged in no fixed order.  They, the readers, aren't to
reconstruct Benjamin's line of thought, but are to do something else,
something more pedagogical.  So: Benjamin as teacher, Pound as teacher.
  Both modernists, both montagists, both present a guidebook to history,
if history is something we understand as having gone through the
blender.

If anyone knows anything about Benjamin and wants to talk about the
Pound connections, I'd love to listen.

Here's hoping that the entire EP list wasn't swept away in some
horribly specific conflagration.  I haven't heard peep from ya'll in a
while.

-Jon