Tag: Ezra Pound

The Five Types of Moon Viewers, According to Zhang Dai

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I’m reading Jonathan Spence’s book about Zhang Dai at the moment, and Spence certainly succeeds early on in making Zhang seem like the guy of person you would want to hang out with… at least for a while. He was swept up by random, sweeping passions, and a powerful drive to write and write and write about everything that interested him. Manifestoes were kind of a thing with him, and those passions were constantly renewing, eclectic but thoughtful, if a bit over the top… or that’s how it seems thirty pages into the book, anyway. So far, among many other things, Spence …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LVI & LVII

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This entry is part 43 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 marks a return to this project of blogging the Cantos after half a year away from it. I figured I might as well try to finish the slog through the Chinese and Adams Cantos, so that I can at least reach the Pisan Cantos, which it is said is worth the effort. We’ll see, though: the Chinese Cantos, at least, …

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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?)

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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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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LIV

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This entry is part 41 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 LIV.

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LIII

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This entry is part 40 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 LIII.

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