I'm going to extract the main pasage I want to respond to and quote
it out of context it at the beginning of this message, so that my
comments will be easy to find without reading through a lot of quoted
material.  Further below, I have requoted it in context.
 
>Date:  Fri, 19 Nov 1999 01:55:53 -1000
>From:  [log in to unmask]
>Organization: University of Maine
>Subject:      Fwd:
 
[ The quoted words were apparently written by Burt Hatlen rather than
Nielsen. ]
 
..........
 
>another.  We cannot separate the beauty and critical acuity of Pound
>from its simultaneous undermining.  Schweickert ends by calling for "a
>dual hermeneutic" that discloses the text's varied ideological
>complicities and "recuperates the utopian moment."  Again, I might
>argue with her choice of terms, but I think that any reading of Pound
>that is to be useful to us today must offer us exacty this sort of dual
>hermeneutic.  The argument that Pound was not an antisemite, or that he
>wasn't antisemitic in any way that had material consequences simply
>will not hold up to a full reading of all that he wrote.
 
I don't think anyone is trying to deny that Pound had anti-semitic
views and widely expressed them in his conversations and private
letters.
 
As to the claim that his anti-semitism has significant material
consequences, Jonathan Morse has been good enough to point out
to me that a web search under the subject "Eustace Mullins"
shows that the anti-semitism Mullins continues to promote owes
a fair amount to Pound's ideas.
 
I think, however, that this is more an indication of Mullins's
continuing admiration for Pound than of the effectiveness of Pound's
ideas on anti-semitism.  As far as I know (and I'm sure
that Professor Morse and others will correct me if I'm wrong),
Pound's anti-semitism was quite unoriginal and he had nothing to
say that had not been said in more effective form by many others.
 
Of course the fact that Pound was not able to express himself
very convincingly in his anti-semitic views is not really a
point in his favor.  But I think it would be a mistake to
see Pound as a major influence fostering anti-semitism in the
way that Henry Ford or Charles Lindbergh were (not to mention
Father Coughlin, etc.)
 
Now maybe it's because my own field is mathematics rather than
literature, but I'm not completely clear on what is meant above by
 
>"a dual hermeneutic" that discloses the text's varied ideological
>complicities and "recuperates the utopian moment."  Again, I might
>argue with her choice of terms, but I think that any reading of Pound
>that is to be useful to us today must offer us exacty this sort of dual
>hermeneutic
 
but presumably when we talk about a reading of "Pound" we are
talking of the Cantos and other poetry and the literary essays.
Now the quoted comments here refer to the case of Nietzsche and
Heidegger (see the more complete quoted material below), pointing
out that they can in fact be used (or perhaps misused) in
support of Naziism.  There is apparently an implication that
something analogous is true for Pound's literary works.
 
Sorry that I'm being a bit clumsy in expressing all this, but
apparently Hatlen (or perhaps Nielsen) is saying that portions
of the Cantos and Pound's other literary works can be read as
lending support to totalitarianism or anti-semitism.
 
I would be very interested in seeing this explained further,
because except for some extremely brief anti-semitic passages
in the Cantos, I'm not aware of anything that could be read
that way.
 
It is true that Pound thought that Mussolini was a good leader,
and was the type of Confucian leader who he had hoped for.  This
was bad judgement on his part.  But I see nothing in his literary
works that could be used as ideological support for totalitarianism.
 
[ Jumping now back to the beginning of the quoted message. ]
 
>Burt:  I'm responding directly to you because the Pound listserv started
>bouncing my posts right after our university made some transparent
>alteration to our server --
>
>First a note of caution:  I have not read the Lilla essays yet (but
>will on your recommendation); still, I know enough to be deeply
>suspicious of the argument that _Being and Time_ "leads us
>straight to Hitler and to National Socialism."  This is simply
>_ad hominem_ and untrue.
>
>Similarly, I'd be a bit careful about the assumption that "whatever
>Pound did affected only himself."  This assumes that the people with
>whom Pound corresponded and the people who read his works had no
>material effects in the world as a result.  That's a limb I wouldn't
>want to go out upon.
>
>More importantly, you raise some fundamental questions about how we
>read that I think have been given short shrift in the recent list
>discussions, and this is what I value most in your message today.  I
>would liken the issues to discussions I find in the works of Patrocinio
>Schweickart and Derrida, neither of whom writes on Pound to my
>knowledge.  In _The Ear of the Other_, Derrida makes arguments about
>our readings of Nietzsche that I think have crucial implications for
>reading Heidegger, and Pound.  Derrida rejects the argument that
>Nietzsche's texts "lead us straight to Hitler and to National
>Socialism," but neither is he willing to accept the argument that the
>Nazi reading of Nietzsche is simply and clearly a gross misreading.
>Instead, he wants us to engage in  readings that can account for the
>fact that Nietzsche's texts produce both the Nazi and anti-Nazi
>interpretations.  We must come to understand how both can proceed from
>the same texts, and how both are active in our cultural response to the
>texts.
>
>Similarly, Schwieckart, in her 1984 essay "Reading Ourselves," starts
>from the question she finds herself confronted with in her continued
>desire to read (and to find important) texts that appear to be
>demonstrably sexist.  "Why do they remain appealing even after they
>have been subjected to thorough feminsit critique?"  She concludes that
>the particular works she has in mind continue to call upon her
>"authentic liberatory aspirations." While I'd quibble with the use of
>the term "authentic" here, I think she's absolutely right that an
>artist such as Pound continues to appeal to a utopian impulse in my
>reading, an impulse that he so often seems to betray, and that both the
>utopian moment and its betrayal are inextricably bound up in one
>another.  We cannot separate the beauty and critical acuity of Pound
>from its simultaneous undermining.  Schweickert ends by calling for "a
>dual hermeneutic" that discloses the text's varied ideological
>complicities and "recuperates the utopian moment."  Again, I might
>argue with her choice of terms, but I think that any reading of Pound
>that is to be useful to us today must offer us exacty this sort of dual
>hermeneutic.  The argument that Pound was not an antisemite, or that he
>wasn't antisemitic in any way that had material consequences simply
>will not hold up to a full reading of all that he wrote.
 
I don't think anyone is trying to deny that Pound had anti-semitic
views and widely expressed them in his conversations and private
letters.
 
 
 
>             Many on the
>list seem to be dismissive of serious attempts to read Pound's racism
>and political ideology.  This to my mind simply mirrors the errors of
>those who would dismiss Pound and all who read him on the basis of his
>politics.
>
>We are all still struggling with these issues -- I take the same final
>stand that you do -- whatever poetry can be in our time _has_ passed
>through Pound, and must continue to do so.  To understand what poetry
>can be in our time, what it is now and might come to be, requires
>readings that account for ALL of the mountain.
>
>X-SMTP-From: [log in to unmask] X-SMTP-To:
>[log in to unmask] Received: from 157.242.50.240
>(157.242.50.240 [157.242.50.240]) by voyager.umeres.maine.edu with SMTP
>id MSGVYEYO; Thu, 18 Nov 1999 21:08:37 GMT Received: from
>[157.242.66.40] by popmail.lmu.edu (NTMail
>4.30.0013/NT2109.01.19acd5a3) with ESMTP id gszjcaaa for
><[log in to unmask]>; Thu, 18 Nov 1999 13:06:19 -0800
>Message-Id: <[log in to unmask]> X-Sender:
>[log in to unmask] X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version
>4.1 Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1999 13:07:18 -0800 To:
>[log in to unmask] From: "Nielsen, Aldon"
><[log in to unmask]> Subject:  Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type:
>text/plain; charset="us-ascii"