Month: June 2024

Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Cantos LXXII and LXXIII (“The Fascist Cantos”)

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

…. and, we’re back.  Years ago, I started a series of posts covering each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, one (or a few) at a time. I’m picking up that series now, since I have a little time again. (Who knew having a kid would make someone so busy?) The readings are probably still going to remain atypical, not so much for the reasons made clear in my first post in this series as because atypical is my general approach to the Cantos. II seem to have abandoned the fiction project that inspired this series, but I’d like to …

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Night Music (1989-90)

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The recent passing of David Sanborn (it happened back in May) recently got me thinking about the TV show he cohosted with Jools Holland back when I was a teenager. It was called Night Music. Well, apparently, the show was originally titled Sunday Night, and I’m not sure when the name changed, or whether I caught any episodes of it back when it was called that. I do vividly remember tuning in to watch Night Music, though.

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A Positive Change

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There’s an exercise I do in my writing class. It’s actually designed to give students practice working with modals like “should,” and “must” and “might” and “can.” One of the places where we use these kinds of modals a lot is when we are giving advice, since of course using the imperative is less polite and bears a higher chance of offending the recipient of the advice.  So I’ve devised this “Dear Abby” type exercise. Students choose one of five letters requesting advice. The situations are all different: Someone is feeling depressed in general and burnt out from work After months …

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