Take Kenner, the major specialist on Ezra. http://www.bookwire.com/bookwire/bbr/reviews/March2001/hugh_kenner_thegrandtour.htm He once wrote a book about "Poetry of Ezra Pound". Then discarded it, it's not in print anymore, but there's "Pound Era". No poetry then, but time, Zeitgeist, yeah? (Check "Time and Western Man" by Lewis to get a good taste for Zeitgeists). Now the interview linked above. === HB: It's fascinating to think of Beckett writing in algorithms before anybody had heard of computer languages. How does that pertain to what many of us find to be the despair in Beckett? HK: I think the fact that I approach Beckett without the word absurd in my mind is a good thing. When people start thinking "Theater of the Absurd," that's all they can see. There was nothing the least bit absurd about Sam. He was the sweetest man I ever knew, period. HB: I find lots of Beckett funny. HK: He is very funny, much of the time. HB: Do you think some of his humor comes from the way he portrays people as if they were cybernetic organisms? HK: Yes, it's a kind of humorous game. HB: The way, say, Chaplin is funny when he shows people acting like machines in "Modern Times." HK: It ought to be seen as a humorous game, not as looking down in sarcasm. === And here: === HK: I've told the story many times of Marshall McLuhan and I meeting Ezra Pound. The difference between me and Marshall comes out there. I suddenly knew that I was in the presence of the center of modernism. Marshall, meanwhile, on the ride home, was disagreeing with almost everything Pound said: "He was just, you know, a crank." === Now what saw McLuhan? He saw an old man That has lost his center fighting the world. And what Kenner saw? He saw a center of literary movement, dead, a shade, that is in hell So full of knowing that the beefy men know less than he. Tremendous, said Hugh Kenner, ... === I made friends and I kept going back. And then one day Pound said, "You have an obligation to visit the great men of your time." I didn't realize it, but he was sending me on a grand tour". === And he, full of blood... I will sail after knowledge, said Hugh, Knowledge the shade of a shade, Yet must thou sail after knowledge Knowing less than drugged beasts... Pretty, pretty... === HB: And you translate between those languages. In "Mechanic Muse," you wrote a Pascal computer program that basically conveys the meaning of a passage from Samuel Beckett. You did that to show that some passages by Beckett anticipate the strictly imperative mood of computer algorithms. HK: I knew I had to meet Beckett after reading one sentence on the first page of "Molloy": "You grow dumb as well and sounds fade. The threshold scarcely crossed that's how it is." I said, my god, I've got to meet him. I'd not heard of him when I made my grand tour, you see. The next year I made a special trip, a special trip to France to meet Samuel Beckett. We got on very well. === Now what's the virtue of the talker? To answer the question you're asked or to evade it? And knowledge... Understanding Media, Ch. 6. "Media as Translators": "Under electric technology the entire business of man becomes learning and knowing." And Hugh was good, wrote a book on Geodesic Math, whereas McLuhan even refused to use a typewriter. And here is Ezra's interview which Wyndham Lewis says made him think he's done with: "It is possible to imagine music being taken out of the chamber, and entering social and industrial life so completely and so splendidly that the whole clamor of a great factory will be rhythmically regulated, and the workers work, not to a deafening din, but to a superb symphony. The factory manager would be a musical conductor on an immense scale, and each artisan would be an instrumentalist..." (dated before 1926) In Canto CXI, we read "Disney against the metaphysicals", and the Carrol Terrol's (Carrol Terrol, author of "Stephen King: Man and Artist") companion says Ezra lately became a fan of movies. (McLuhan, says Kenner, would go to a movie, watch it for 20 minutes, then say "enough" and leave, and then 'analyze') Now Kenner wrote a book about 'the great "Bugs Bunny" animator, Chuck Jones'. McLuhan calls the state of Narcissus "benumbent". Is is that nice to be ruled by old men benumbed with cartoons? And Confucius, the Way, such stuff... Remember "Ghost Dog, the Way of Samurai"? The first rule of the Samurai, the second... -- and a real cool guy that Samurai. His master old demented Mafioso, watching, right, Bugs Bunny all the time, running him on errands of destroying other demented Mafiosi. America, Patria Mia... And this, wait, is not an ad we're reading? Make it Nude. Poetry is Noise that stays Noise. Great artist are the winners of the Race. ??? Yeah??? ========== p.s. What McLuhan adored, and what he wrote an essay on, was "Ezra Pound's style, his _method_." p.p.s EP is definitely my favorite poet. I'd call him 'the heart of modernism'. The heart, that is, not brain.