Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto V

This entry is part 8 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). They 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 …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto IV

This entry is part 7 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). They 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 …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: The Ur-Cantos

This entry is part 6 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

For those who don’t know, I’m writing a series of posts about Ezra Pound’s massive book-length poem The Cantos as I work my way through the poems. If you scroll down to the bottom of this post, there will be a menu where you can go back to the beginning of this series. Well, then: having worked our way through the official, final versions of Cantos I-III, it seems it’s time to go have a look at the “Ur-Cantos.”

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto III

This entry is part 5 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

For those who don’t know, I’m writing a series of posts about Ezra Pound’s massive book-length poem The Cantos as I work my way through the poems. My readings, designed to help me write a novel featuring Pound as an occult adventurer (more on that here), will stray from the merely academic to the unusual and highly fanciful, so take all this with a grain of salt! If you scroll down to the bottom of this post, there will be a menu where you can go back to the beginning of this series. Today, I’m continuing with the Cantos, and specifically addressing …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto II

This entry is part 4 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

For those who don’t know, I’m writing a series of posts about Ezra Pound’s massive book-length poem The Cantos as I work my way through the poems. My readings, designed to help me write a novel featuring Pound as an occult adventurer (more on that here), will stray from the merely academic to the unusual and highly fanciful, so take all this with a grain of salt! If you scroll down to the bottom of this post, there will be a menu where you can go back to the beginning of this series. Today, I’m continuing with the Cantos, and specifically addressing Canto …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto I

This entry is part 2 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

For those who don’t know, I’m writing a series of posts about Ezra Pound’s massive book-length poem The Cantos as I work my way through the poems. My readings, designed to help me write a novel featuring Pound as an occult adventurer (more on that here), will stray from the merely academic to the unusual and highly fanciful, so take all this with a grain of salt! If you scroll down to the bottom of this post, there will be a menu where you can go back to the beginning of this series. Where to begin? I could go back and read Personae …

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David Amram on John Coltrane and Albert Einstein

Not long ago, I mentioned John Coltrane’s youthful interest in SF and pulp zines. But he was apparently also quite interested in science itself, something I’d suspected but don’t remember seeing confirmed as clearly as in this anecdote from David Amram, a French horn-playing jazz man who knew Trane in New York in the 1950s, and ran into him just outside a club, where Amram had just finished playing a set with Charlie Mingus. Coltrane was eating  a slice of pie, and: [Trane] said, “How are you?” I [Amram] said, “Everything’s fine.” And then he said to me, “What do …

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Listen to “Improperly Prepared Blowfish”

Well, one of the first stories I sold professionally has finally been podcast over at Machine of Death. Download/listen to it here, and my thoughts and reflections about the story here. Brett Donnelly did a great narration, and I’m pleased with it! For those who missed the news, I also have a story forthcoming in the next volume of the series, though I’ve no idea when that’s coming out…

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Happy New Year

I’m told that not long ago, Koreans tended to reserve the phrase “Saehae bok manhi baedusaeyo!”1 for Seollal, the Lunar New Year (or what we in the West call Chinese New Year). However, people tend to say it a lot more now for January 1st, so that’s what I’m wishing you all out there. For Miss Jiwaku and myself, it was a quiet New Year’s, and a busy week before it. Well, quiet compared to some, I suppose, but we had a lot of running around to do, things to get done, and so on. That cooking at home thing …

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John Coltrane and the Pulp Connection

Arguably one of the most significant musicians in American history (and unarguably one of the most significant saxophonists and jazz musicians ever), John Coltrane grew up in High Point, North Carolina. It might be a weird thing to bring up —  where he grew up, that is — except that, when we think about major artists, we so often imagine them having sprung into being fully-formed, if not in technique or approach, then at least in their essential selfhood. This is also often how we tell their stories: for example, in Coltrane: Story of a Sound (a book I’ve just …

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