Reading now: Guide to Kulchur, by Ezra Pound. I've never heard much about this book, and Pound's rep. will forever be sullied by his anti-semitism (which mellowed as he aged) and pro-fascist stance during WWII, but many of his ideas, and his approach in general, are astonishing. First published in 1938 ( ! ), this Guide, in its opening pages, presages Foucault's view of authorship and approach to history as geneology as well as Deleuze's bastard line in a casual and off-hand manner. Of course, Mr. Pound occasionally makes me squirm, but, like Foucault (again), the measure of his scholarship and his attendance to its relation to the world of actions (not just ideas), are heartening (and inspiring). Unlike Foucault, however, Pound seems very interested in polemics.
We do not know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthitized
on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time
There is no ownership in most of my statements and I can not interrupt every sentence or paragraph to attribute authorships to each pair of words, especially as there is seldom an a priori claim even to the phrase or the half phrase.
Pound also dealt with the East in what seems to me a relatively sensible and committed manner. The absence of such an effort is glaring in Foucault's thought, to my mind.
posted by Brad Larcen 2/08/2002[edit]
