days:
you're talkin' to degs, right?
i seldom google anything but degs was so strident about my abe beame 'conspiracy'...plus ezra (whose personal enemies were jews in his circle of influence--think his dad worked at a mint?) there may be a difference between your enemies (direct conflict...like the fed book be co-authored) and anti-semitism (and the holocaust) and his reading poetry on fascist italian radio during ww2. here is the delmore schwartz take on pound's antisemitism:
A year later, 1939, Schwartz writes Pound once more. He has just read ''Culture.'' ''Here I find numerous remarks about the Semite or Jewish race, all of them damning. . . . A race cannot commit a moral act. Only an individual can be moral or immoral. No generalization from a sum of particulars is possible, which will render a moral judgment. . . I should like you to consider this letter as a resignation: I want to resign as one of your most studious and faithful admirers.'' It is interesting to note another essay on Pound, written 22 years later. Schwartz examines with distaste the improbabilities in the echoing chambers of Pound's mind, but a book is an object in the world and not an exact equivalent of the whole person. The essay ends: ''The first and most important thing to say about Pound's Cantos is that they ought to be read again and again by anyone interested in any form of literature.''
One pauses over the Pound letters because there is in them a narrative of cause and effect, completely literary. And yet there are almost no letters in the volume that do not arise from the liking or not liking a poem by a friend or colleague, or from the murky snubs and rocky alliances of the academy. Most of all, the letters are called upon to display the gifts necessary to an editor; that is, evading, delaying, sliding, balancing friendship, courtesy and prudence against what are seen to be the immediate needs and possibilities of a periodical. In the case of Schwartz, Partisan Review was seen, and especially by poets, as an instrument of power. Mr. Shapiro stresses this in his foreword: ''Acceptance in PR was acclamation; it conferred a special ideological status on the accepted.''
the same can be said of a posting 'and a checkmark' at slate if the exponent is missing (pound and schwartz would be 10 to the nth...and slate would be near -35? a neutrino's impact compare to pound and schwartz.)
remember the gold stars of david (run wore one and deserved more in my opinion--run doesn't need my affirmation nor do i ask his) at slate? christ, that was hip!?
and since the inhuman network, degs and topaz and early hold court and caucus in the fray that really only smells like the old fray...that originality is what run and i remember and enjoyed.
it's o k to write from experience and compare...i had to google to find yet another group of conspirators who know what's good for all of us to consider...within their personal reference, of course
mr. schwartz would have straightened us all out...like he told pound in writing. (he also lobbied to spring pound from st. elizabeth).
