FER Chrrist’s sake realize you have given me no “case” to present.
I have your statement. I have a lot of documents proving that a company of players put on a Chesterton play (for which they ought to all be poisoned until dead of gangrene.)
—Ezra Pound, letter to James Joyce, April 11, 1919
That Pound could be quite a humdinger before he got all, you know.
In the above letter he is trying to advise Joyce with respect to a bit of an imbroglio the Irish genius (and borderling paranoid) got into with one Henry Carr, later to be immortalized in both Ulysses and Tom Stoppard’s Travesties.
The letter is reprinted in the New Directions book Pound/Joyce, which I’m currently having myself a time with. My Lovely Wife and I have gotten into a little routine whenever the book’s in her line of sight. “Pound/Joyce?” she asks. “What’s that?” And in my most mookesque voice I respond, “Huh, huh. It’s what I’m gonna do to Joyce when she gets home.”
My Lovely Wife is in many respects A Delicate Plant, and yet she never fails to crack up at this remarkably crude joke. It just goes to show. You think you know a person.…
Do detail what happens in ‘Pound/Joyce.’ Is it a collection of Pound-Joyce correspondence?
I remember eight years back when McSweeney’s (“.net”) was getting into publishing daily bits-‘n‑bobs by assorted folks, including me — a droll little kibble about pizza, or some shit. (My first ‘published’ anything, I think.) Anyway, one day they posted a piece, the angle of which was: “The Selected Movie Reviews of Ezra Pound.” One of the entries in “Pound“ ‘s collection was for ‘Bambi,’ and it is in its own way the equal of Serge Daney’s great testamental essay in Trafic. I reproduce here “Pound“ ‘s review of ‘Bambi’ in its entirety:
BAMBI
Nice.
The collection is of some 60-odd letters from Pound to Joyce (Joyce’s letters-those that survive, that is-are collected in Ellmann and co.‘s official collection) plus Pound’s various essays on Joyce’s work. Nothing really “happens,” except Pound extends a shitload of help to Joyce who is grateful but at the same time not having any of Pound’s advice or critical perspective. Which Pound seems to recognize as completely as-it-should-be.
It’s an exhilarating and sometimes rather frightening portrait of a literary age that we’re not gonna see the likes of again, ever. I can say that with every confidence, alas.
PS: Speaking of McSweeney’s, I would point Some Came Running readers to a recent Salon essay (yes, that Salon) about salvia divinorum by Neal Pollack (yes, THAT Neal Pollack).
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/06/18/salvia/
It’s an interesting piece – but also interesting is the dialectic that occurs between the Pollack article and its link to salvia-YouTube’age, and the salvia-YouTube’age that begins to rear its head upon an afternoon’s further exagmination-round-the-factification:
[seven YouTube links followed, but The Typepad Djinn kept telling me I might be posting spam, and so… maybe I’ll put them on my blog instead]
Well, you know what crudities Shelley would say about sensitive plants…
Delightful. I read a lot of both when I took a literature class focused on their era. Quite interesting people.
Damn wives