On Fri, 11 Aug 2000 06:05:24 GMT  En Lin Wei <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I am truly puzzled by a number of recent posts.
>

You can't play coy with me, Wei. Your protestations of puzzlement cum innocence are at best laughable. That old saw about "the freedom to ignore those posts one doesn't wish to read" is both obvious and evasive. The point being under normal circumstances, and unless one is clairvoyant, one never knows what a message says until it is opened. Unless of course, a paradigm such as the one which you have induced develops. That is the pseudo-interaction we all know and have come to loathe. And therefore avoid. Leaving the list barren of discussion.

Your need to make your presence known for one thing and one thing only on this list reminds me of a cocktail party I once attended at the Tate. In the midst of the usual array of self-styled intellectuals and artists and gallery mavens of varying degree there roamed this singular prat. This Situationist who as people stood admiring various examples of the human form, both Twentieth Century and earlier, reminded them that all of these figures had bodily functions. To be more precise he wanted them all to understand that "these people"--his choice of words not mine--were (or had been) pissing shitting individuals. He presented this to them as a sort of revelation. I think it was, to him. As apparently is Pound's fascism to you. Perhaps to a few others on this list but not very many.

Because they, unlike you and unlike the eejit at the Tate are aware of the single fact. Art has no insides. It is a single two-dimensional surface. It has no obverse. It may have deep corrugations which give the illusion of depth, and quite rightly so as much great art should. But it is all a single up front terrain, to be mapped. You have pointed out a feature that is as much biographical as it is geographical. Unfortunately for you it is something of which everyone was well aware long before your preening self appeared.

Now you may go on endlessly prating about how no one need respond to your missives, but under current conditions that leaves nothing to respond to--since you basically spam this list on a daily basis. And since response only encourages you to recite the Pound-as-fascist litany once again, it becomes a primary example of how, as Brennan put it, a single-minded and determined bore can take a fairly free-form unmoderated and democratic medium of self-expression and manipulate the entire flow of discussion toward their self-aggrandisement.

You're certainly not the first to attempt this on this list Wei, and doubtless you won't be the last, for as long as Burt Hatlen wishes to maintain this discussion group. The "Yes but he was a fascist" argument is one that has dogged this list with a steady hiccough ever since I signed on, something that judging from your one-note samba I tend to believe you are blissfully unaware. You do understand this, Wei--that there are many people on this list with academic credentials far exceeding your own who have devoted a good portion of their lives to the study of Pound's various follies--they know everything of which you write, every delicious little morsel of opprobrium by way of Pound's politically idiotic stances, and yet they still find themselves in thrall to his poetry. Your endless repetition is I would imagine an ever-widening chasm of boredom for them as it most certainly is for me.

I turn your little popgun on you Wei. Try a new topic. Or give up.

M Deporres