Category: REVIEWS

Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto XVIII & XIX

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This entry is part 18 of 60 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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Tania: Memories of a Lost World by Tania Alexander (And Thoughts of My Father the Story-Teller)

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This is only the second biography of Moura Budberg that I have read — the first was Nina Berberova’s biography, which I picked up in Seattle in 2006 and, as it goes with me, took until 2010 for me to read. (In that respect, I’m doing much better with Tania Alexander’s memoir Tania: Memories of a Lost World — I received it back in March, amid a shipment of Pound-related books, and have read it only a couple of months later.) I don’t have a lot to say about the book, but I think as a memoirs go it was well-written, thoughtful, …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto XVII — Toward “A Draft of Cantos 17-27”

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This entry is part 17 of 60 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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Rainer Maria Rilke’s Stories of God

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Those who know me well can guess that my feelings about this book are, but they might guess for the wrong reasons, so I’ll just come out and say it: I have nothing against fiction with deities in it. Hell, I’m reading Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, and if you can find a modern English text (except perhaps by Neil Gaiman or N.K. Jemisin) more chock full of deities than that, I’ll be surprised. I was on a Rilke kick back in 2009, when I was traveling through the US. While I’d read Letters to a Young Poet over a decade before …

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Who Thought Dryco Wasn’t Plausible?

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Well, I just cracked open the novel Heathern, by Jack Womack, which pretty much describes a world on its way from our familiar, 1980s world into the horror of the most dystopian of his Dryco novels. Here’s the first couple of paragraphs: A baby almost killed me as I walked to work one morning. By passing beneath a bus shelter’s roof at the ordained moment I lived to tell my tale. With strangers surrounding me I looked at what remained. Laoughter from heaven made us lift our eyes skyward. The baby’s mother lowered her arms and leaned out her window. …

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Movies I’ve Seen Recently

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I’ve seen a few movies recently that I liked, or thought were interesting: The Avengers: Yeah, it’s Joss Whedon. I do love some of his stuff; others, not so much. I think he did a fine job on this movie, but I was not as blown away by it as other people I know. It was fun, but not so fun I felt I needed to see it again. (Though maybe I could be talked into seeing it in IMAX.) I think, though, the bottom line for me was that not only was Loki just kind of unexciting as a …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto XVI — Ending “A Draft of XVI Cantos”

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This entry is part 16 of 60 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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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Cantos XIV-XV (“The Hell-Cantos”)

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This entry is part 15 of 60 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)

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

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This entry is part 14 of 60 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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