Cowboys in Space: A Mixed Metaphor

I’ve always wondered why people were so fascinated by stories of cowboys in space. For me, it’s always been a non-starter. Granted, maybe I’d like these stories better if I liked the characters and writing better, but the widespread for Firefly kind of baffles me, though of course we could chalk it up to different tastes with the writing, or my lack of fannish devotion to Joss Whedon. Lately, though, I’ve been trying to think in terms of why things do or don’t appeal to me… to figure out my own tastes, as it were. After all, I’ve liked very few …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LV (Plus, What Do Ezra Pound, Robert Howard, J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, and Sun Ra Have In Common?)

This entry is part 42 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, a few at a time. The readings are atypical, for reasons made clear in my first post in this series. This post continues my work on the “Chinese” Cantos, covering Canto LV, but may also interest people more interested in SF, fantasy, and so on. It includes a discussion of some pulp and weird authors contemporaneous to Pound, such as Robert Howard (specifically Conan) and Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft. The puzzle, here, is a question: What does Pound’s Chinese Cantos have in …

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