4 ms·

ABC of Reading is a good but extremely curmudgeonly guide to poetry in English through the ages. (He would rather have written a guide to european poetry, and i

by dri_ft 6y ago

ABC of Reading is a good but extremely curmudgeonly guide to poetry in English through the ages. (He would rather have written a guide to european poetry, and it shows, but his publisher (Faber?) insisted it focus on English for the sake of accessibility.) A large part of it is basically an anthology with commentary. His commentary in it (as elsewhere) is maddeningly condensed and hermetic - one senses the insight within it without always being able to work out what he is saying. It's hard to say who it's for - in some sense it takes the shape of a kind of 'beginner's guide', but he doesn't exactly offer the friendly helping hand a beginner might wish for. No politics, fascist or otherwise, are anywhere to be seen in it. I haven't read Guide To Kulchur but it seems like it edges towards the 'crazier' (late, fascist) side of Pound.

082349872349872 6y ago
I think ABC doesn't have the friendly helping hand (but it does! he translates the first few...) because Pound is trying to imitate Aggasiz's technique, to force (though not going as far as banishing explication to the back of the book) the reader to engage with the primary texts. I'm about 10% into Guide and it does have a bit of (pre-internet) crackpottery to it: he's veered off from Confucius into goldbuggery at the moment, and has his syntactic quirks, such as the modals wd. cd. and shd. However, just as those latter abbreviations do make sense on their own terms (sound them out, which also explains kulchur), he is very well read, thinks for himself instead of regurgitating, and has kept my google tab incredibly busy. So I'm very likely to continue, to see where he winds up. (A straight-up guess at this point: he wound up at fascism because he's looking for a universal system that not only explains how things are, but is also a modus vivendi, saying what people should do. Personally, I see "Party On" as the balancing counterweight to that viewpoint. Many people in the twentieth century interpreted "Be Excellent To Each Other" to mean breaking eggs was OK as long as it was going to lead to an excellent omelette. But if one equally weights the injunction to Party On, one can't borrow uncertain utilities from the future to justify certain disutility now. In any case, I take the scientific tack on How Things Are, which by and large is completely indifferent to What People Should Do for the simple reason that it is completely indifferent to People.) Tangentially related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oven_of_Akhnai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oven_of_Akhnai

by dri_ft 6y ago

082349872349872 6y ago

I think ABC doesn't have the friendly helping hand (but it does! he translates the first few...) because Pound is trying to imitate Aggasiz's technique, to force (though not going as far as banishing explication to the back of the book) the reader to engage with the primary texts. I'm about 10% into Guide and it does have a bit of (pre-internet) crackpottery to it: he's veered off from Confucius into goldbuggery at the moment, and has his syntactic quirks, such as the modals wd. cd. and shd. However, just as those latter abbreviations do make sense on their own terms (sound them out, which also explains kulchur), he is very well read, thinks for himself instead of regurgitating, and has kept my google tab incredibly busy. So I'm very likely to continue, to see where he winds up. (A straight-up guess at this point: he wound up at fascism because he's looking for a universal system that not only explains how things are, but is also a modus vivendi, saying what people should do. Personally, I see "Party On" as the balancing counterweight to that viewpoint. Many people in the twentieth century interpreted "Be Excellent To Each Other" to mean breaking eggs was OK as long as it was going to lead to an excellent omelette. But if one equally weights the injunction to Party On, one can't borrow uncertain utilities from the future to justify certain disutility now. In any case, I take the scientific tack on How Things Are, which by and large is completely indifferent to What People Should Do for the simple reason that it is completely indifferent to People.) Tangentially related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oven_of_Akhnai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oven_of_Akhnai