>From: charles moyer <[log in to unmask]> >Reply-To: - Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine > <[log in to unmask]> >To: [log in to unmask] >Subject: Re: Mr. Davis Once More >Date: Tue, 1 Jan 2002 06:02:23 -0800 > >Hey Jack, > You may have something there when you think about it. The Bible has as >many crudities in it as the Cantos, but people don't stop reading it. Maybe >it's the Oz-like authority behind all those "thee's" and "thou's". > If you like a good rant, and I do too, look at Phillip Roth's on the >"tyranny of propriety" on p.153 of his latest, "The Human Stain". > Oh well, since we can't pry that sonnet out of the boney fingers of >Columbia U. Law Schole, and it's 5:30 AM and I can't sleep with a sprained >ankle, here it goes for fun: > > p.153 "...the coercions of propriety. The tyranny of propriety. It was >hard, halfway through 1998, for even him to believe in American propriety's >enduring power, and he was the one who considered himself tyrannized: the >bridle it still is on public rhetoric, the inspiration it provides for >personal posturing, the persistence just about everywhere of this >de-virilizing pulpit virtue-mongering that H. L. Mencken identified with >boobism, that Philip Wylie thought of as Momism, that the Europeans >unhistorically call American puritanism, that the likes of a Ronald Reagan >call America's core values, and that maintains widespread jurisdiction by >masquerading itself as something else - as everything else. As a force, >propriety is protean, a dominatrix in a thousand disguises, infiltrating, >if need be, as civic responsibility, WASP dignity, women's rights, black >pride, ethnic allegiance, or emotion-laden Jewish ethical sensitivity. It's >not as though Marx or Freud or Darwin or Stalin or Hitler or Mao had never >happened - it's as though Sinclair Lewis had not happened. It's, he >thought, as though "Babbitt" had never been written. It's as though not >even that most basic level of imaginative thought had been admitted into >consciousness to cause the slightest disturbance. > >Happy New Year, >Chas > > > >---------- > >From: Jack Savage <[log in to unmask]> > >To: [log in to unmask] > >Subject: Re: Mr. Davis Once More > >Date: Mon, Dec 31, 2001, 6:44 PM > > > > > ... and I have listened to groups of Xtians endlessly discuss > > the Bible.... what the good Lord might have intended; > > which preacher has the "real skinny" on the Book of > > Revelations (sic); ,,, but I have noticed they never seem > > to actually open the Book and read what's written in > > the damned thing. > > > > Too often, the Joycean or the Poundian seems none too > > different with his sacred texts. > > > > At any rate, Politics is not the only milieu in which we > > find the Reactionary. > > Well, yes, when I think about these things I think about, I sometimes think I may "have something there" ... but then I always wonder if it might be contagious. All seriousness aside, ... one of the more primitive and superstitious views of such books as "the Bible" (... most any Sancta Scriptura) -- leftover from the earliest days of using symbols scratched and painted on this or that to represent "things" the mind takes for Real -- is that there is some Magic in the text beyond the meanings of the words -- I have been told that if one reads with "an open heart" some mysterious "spirit" will "reveal" the Secret Meaning presumedly concealed in the white spaces in and around the text itself ... and so the convenience of this medium to supply screens crammed with words does not compare with the feel of a pound of paper, thread, ink and glue, containing between its boards, Secret Doctrines Now, one of the problems I have seen among new readers of Pound ris a certain uneasiness when finding they actually like something Mr Pound wrote. concern :" ... but if I like this, will people think I am anti-Semitic? unAmerican? mad?" the only cure is Time. Today, the Protestant and the Atheist can read Dante without embracing the doctrines and dogmas of Mother Church. Dante's support of the murderous Albigensian crusade does not change the beauty of his line; and if his weak grasp of English syntax does not deter the reader, Milton can be read without the implication that the reader approves of British genocidal policies towards Irish Catholics. I recommend "The Genealogy of Demons" by by Casillo ... with this under his belt, the reader can easily navigate the Cantos without the nagging suspicion that he is unwittingly responding with approval to Pound's bigotry. The reader will spot it every time it rears its ugly "suburban" head. I am sure that the subscribers to this list are not unaware, of course that Mr Pound's social & political views have been wrenched out of context. Just as Dante and the Troubadours were not arcane subjects in Pound's youth, neither were anti-Semitism and a growing distrust of republican democracy uncommon attitudes. In the late 30s ... and certainly after WWII, the more prudent bigots took their views underground. Pound, of course, being Pound, became more subtle in his expression but never changed his mind. Well, I just made the mistake of scrolling back and reading what I have written, and before I wander any further in these several directions, I will stop and wish you all a happy new year ... the minute it arrives in the Spring if it does _________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com