In one of the wartime radio broadcasts (I don't have them handy and can't remember which -- it's an especially nostaligic one) Pound is remembering his days at home as a boy; he reveals a fondness for the black man who helped out around the house and for the excellent culinary skills of the family's black cook . The memories, while racially stereotypical and patronizing (e.g. the man could be found playing checkers as often as he could be found working) do not jibe at all with the radical view En Lin Wei paints of Pound. From Wei's discussion of Canto 40, and then of Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia and subsequent order to kill all adult males in villages where any resistance to Italian troops had been raised, one might conclude that Pound's racism was so utterly hard-hearted and vicious that he could relate without blinking the tale of the murder and flaying of three of the "savages", and that he would have condoned, or at least been able to rationalize, Mussolini's atrocities. By flame for three days to South Horn, the bayou, the island of folk hairy and savage whom our Lixtae said were Gorillas. We cd. not take any man, but three of their women. Their men clomb up the crags, Rained stone, but we took three women who bit, scratched, wd. not follow their takers. Killed, flayed, brought back their pelts into Carthage. I have a clear sense of the ideological foundations of Pound's racism. But the man does not seem to me to have been capable of this kind of monstrosity. Has someone assembled convincing evidence that Pound was truly this inhumane in his race-thinking? And to En Lin Wei: What is your understanding of the refrain: "Out of which things seeking an exit"? Tim Romano