>Date: Sun, 5 Dec 1999 02:16:13 -1000 >From: Wayne Pounds <[log in to unmask]> >Subject: Re: Getting things dead wrong > >From: Jonathan Morse <[log in to unmask]> > >Subject: Re: Getting things all mixed up > >SNIP< >No > >economist of any standing has ever paid the > slightest attention to Pound's > >ideas about money, for instance, > >Dead wrong. Read Giano Accame, _Ezra Pound >Economista_, 1995. Massimo Bacigalupo reviewed it for >Pai. (Accame a journalist whose field is economics and >cites reputable sources.) The review inspited y.t. to >read this book --hasn't anybody else read it? Since it's in Italian, it's probably not widely available in the United States. Any sort of summary you could post here would be welcome. Even if it were in English, however, and more readily available in university libraries in the United States, most academics specializing in Pound would probably not bother to read it, because as we see by their comments in this list, they simply can't be bothered to learn the territory. I don't have a problem with people who claim that the only interesting thing about Pound is his poetry and literary criticism and that his life and non-literary interests can be ignored. I do have a problem with people like Morse, who was actually teaching a graduate seminar in biography this semester focussing on Pound (as well as Walt Whitman), and who can't be bothered to learn the background that would enable them to understand Pound in context. I have a problem with people who look at the Agresti letters and only see the 5% which deals with Jews since that's the only part they can make any sense of because they simply don't know anything about any of the books and other things Pound really cared about. To even talk about "Pound's ideas about money" is to show that one has completely missed the point of who Pound was. Pound was not a thinker, he was an enthusiast. He had some very acute perceptions, about literature at least, and he liked to look at old and obscure books and discover things which had been long forgotten, and he had a keen intuition (although not always a reliable one) in seeing connections that most people had not seen before. But you cannot discuss his works in the way one generally discusses the works of thinkers, in terms of the reasoning and evidence cited, because Pound does not provide a systematic intellectual exposition. This was not the level Pound's mind worked on, and it's one reason so many of the ideas he championed (which were not "Pound's ideas" but the ideas of others) in the realm of government and economics turned out to be so foolish. (They were not so obviously foolish, though, in the context of the era in which Pound first learned of them.) So instead of a reasoned discussion of Pound's ideas in the fashion of in which one discusses the ideas of thinkers, we see here absolutely childish criticism, such as "The fact that Confucianism is worthless is proved by the way the Chinese have treated women." ----- It is a question not of being happy or fulfilled, but of being on fire. --- Anais Nin Lee Lady <Http://www2.Hawaii.Edu/~lady>