Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Cantos XIV-XV (“The Hell-Cantos”)

This entry is part 15 of 57 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, one by one (so far — I may deal with a few at a time on occasion). These are not exactly typical readings of the poems, so much as readings I’m doing with a specific research project in mind — how to write Ezra Pound as a figure in a novel in which modernist artists, poets, and musicians secretly waged an occult war in the earlier half of the 20th century. If you’d like to know more about the project, I recommend …

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도착 (The Arrival) — The Red Leap Theater Performance, Seoul (5 May 2012)

I mentioned a while back that the Red Leap Theater would be in Seoul soon to perform their adaptation of Shaun Tan’s wonderful masterpiece The Arrival . Well, tonight, my friend Sanko, Miss Jiwaku, and I attended the second-to-last performance. We were all quite impressed with it. I have to admit, I don’t often go for “modern dance” performances — often because, without some kind of narrative to hang on to, I find myself lost and bored — and so I wondered whether a dance troupe could really bring to life Tan’s wordless, intensely beautiful art. Without question, they did. They used all of …

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Noise by Hal Clement

Noise is the first Hal Clement novel I’ve read. (I would like to read Mission of Gravity, but the library where I work only has it in Korean!) It’s an odd choice to read, for my first Clement novel — it was his last published work, apparently, as he passed away a month after it was first published in 2003. I can certainly see why he was a “Grand Master of SF” (as it says under his name on the cover of the paperback I read): Noise takes place in an interesting ocean world with a harsh-as-hell environment (and effectively …

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Brewing Tasks…

Well, I’m back at the point now of having some brewing tasks that seriously need doing. I figured I’d make a list of them, mainly so I have an idea in my mind of what I need to do, and when, in what order. Wonmisan Micro-aj pi ɛ?: Currently finished first round of dry-hop and ready to be racked to a keg. Add second round of dry hops in keg. Wonmisan aj pi ɛ? (Mega): Rack to secondary. Dry hop with Pacific Gem pellets. Re-rack to empty keg, and second-round dry hop with more Pacific Gem, or alternative dry hop. Silvered …

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Pound and the Occult: Leon Surette’s The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult

This entry is part 14 of 57 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

Depending on where you stand in terms of the literary establishment, my past week’s break from Canto-reading and Canto-blogging was either well spent, or a waste: personally, I consider it very well spent, but Leon Surette gives the impression that the majority of academic literary critics would disagree. Their antipathy towards him is perhaps understandable: they may not be emperors, but they dislike having a dissenter point out their lack of clothes as much as anyone, while Surette does so not just intelligently, but consciously… and not just because they’re dubious about Pound’s occult interests, but also because of what …

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