DEEP SCRATCH

Category: Ezra Pound

  • Hoggers of the harvest

    Hoggers of the harvest
    by Steven James Pratt

    “and they have broken my house” Ez, Canto LXXVI

    House of supreme court and
    whitechapel packed since 1776?

    1970’s U.S. Gov. policy trending
    deregulation to bait business
    less oversight
    less disclosure of                       information
    about banks and other                financial
           institutions

    thus, policymakers blind to
                     gangster role played by
    financial inst. investment banks
                                            hedge funds and some gov.
    funded enterprises
             a.k.a the SHADOW
                     banking system

    October 82’ U.S. President Ronald
                                      ‘star wars’ Reagan signed into law
     the Garn–St. Germain Depository
                                   Institutions Act

    sleazy adjustable-rate
                    (mort)gage loans death pacts
    the slithering process of banking
    deregu’ proceeeds
    92’ Euro-members sign
                                            mass-tricked treaty

    97′ Alan Greenspan fought to keep the
                        derivatives market unregulated
    Nov. 99’ U.S. President ‘Wild’ Bill Clinton
    signed into law the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act
                                         more loop holes for dereg’

    01’Off-balance sheet entities
    invoked by Enron as part of the
                                           rabid scandal

    03’ Warren Buffett on derivatives:
                                     “financial weapons of mass
    Augustus Gloop is stuffing his
                face

    And if a few bankers and financiers
    were jailed we would all be
                                     better off now?

    04’ U.S. Securities and
    Exchange Commission relaxed
    the net capital rule and the shit
                                    flowed into the mortgage nappy

    06’ housing froth and bubble burst
                                   in dung-bloom burst cycle peak
    values of securities hand-cuffed to
                                                     US real estate
                                                            drop
                                                        like pennies

    Fannie Mae and co. stroll on…
                                           predatory lending and/or
    mortgage fraud,
                                                 okey-dokey

    Gov and central banks
                        react with fiscal stimulus, an iron fist
    further funny-money policy buffering
               and institutional bailouts or
                                                       jail outs.

    07’ August 7
                       BNP Paribas Netherlands
    liquidates in financial bone marrow cancer

    08’ U.S Total over-the-counter
    (OTC) derivative
    notional value rose to $683 trillion
                                              hell, a bit O.T.T mate?

    2008’ U.S financial crime wave
                                           Bang! 08-13 global financial crisis
                     Boom! European sovereign debt crisis
                                                  crisis crisis  for the love of Isis
    what of barley, rice, cotton, tax free?

    can we have balance and neutrality
    in all courts, in ANY courts?
    is their a truly honest judge
                              anywhere on this planet earth?

    and dullards CasaPound hijack a turtle
                                         and a good poets worst
    ever mistakes

    08’ The U.S. Senate’s
    Levin–Coburn Report sez
    crisis was the result of:
                                 “high risk, complex
    financial products
                           undisclosed conflicts of interest
                                   the failure of regulators
    the credit rating agencies
                                and the market itself to rein
    in the excesses of
    Wall Street”

    Greedy sneaky double crossing
                                     fraud and conspiracy to commit robbery
         were not considered seriously
    in 08’?

                                                        Hanging from a cemetery door:
                              TO BIG TO FAIL
                                                       TO BIG TO JAIL.
                                                           (1913-2013)

    Several major financial institutions
                               collapsed in Sept’08
                                             global recession, we taste
                                 the great credit
                                        crunch
    snap!

                                     number of U.S unemployed
    rose from approx. 7 million in 08
    pre-crisis…
    to 15 million by 09’

                                 and if a few bankers and financiers and ministers
    were jailed we would all have been
                                                  better off by now?

    yet the richest
                                   criminals run wild and free
    buy footballs teams, industry and
                                       daytime TV
    all to raise the price of
                                                            stocks

    09’ Another G20 summit
                                          the great new long lesser global recession
    kicks in
                  ministers only appear at night

    In Ireland unemployment rose from 4%
    06 to 14% 10′
    the national
    budget went from surplus in 07’
    to a deficit of 32% GDP in 10’
                                            the highest in the history of Eurozone
                                                     control of the outlets?

                                      According to the CIA World Factbook
    from 2010 to 2011 the unemployment rates
    in Spain, Greece, Ireland, Portugal,
    and the UK increased
                                       and Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone

    11’ financial crisis inquiry
                              committee found that…
    over the past 30-plus years
    we permitted growth of
    shadow banking system – opaque
    and laden with short term
                                          debt – that rivaled the size
                of the trad. banking system.

             “criminals have no intellectual interests?” Ez, LXXVI

    who knew the multitrillion-dollar
                                      repo lending market?
    off-balance-sheet entities? and
                               abuses of over-the-counter
                    derivatives were hidden from view
                                                            who Who WHO?

    The crisis was avoidable
                                      disinformation ops on behalf of
    international finance capitalism
                                               usuriocracy

    like giving bunk directions to an
                                      elderly blind tourist

    mass protest movements
                 errupt
    responding to crime wave
    with peaceful alternatives, some
                                   riots and open revolts bloom

    12’ By the end of 11’
                Germany was estimated to have
    made more than €9 billion
    out of the crisis
                               investors flocked like vultures to safer
    but near zero interest rate German
                                         federal gov. bonds, binds, bundles, bunds, punds

    12’ July, the
    Netherlands Austria
    Finland benefit from
                                                    zero or negative interest rates
    may the reader pause for reflection

                                              the debt crisis crime wave forced
    5 out of 17 Eurozone countries
                    to seek help from other nations
    by Dec. 12’
                                            and no such thing as public opinion

    16 Dec. 2010
    the Euro Council agreed
    a two line cocaine fuelled amendment to the
                                                      EU Lisbon Treaty to allow a
    permanent bail-out
                                  mechanism to be established
                                      by political chicanery

    the Euro Stability Mechanism (ESM)
    is a permanent rescue funding
                                      programme to suck seed
    the temporary Euro’ Financial
             Stability Facility
                  and the Euro’ Financial Stabilisation Mechanism
    July 12’

    but postponed… until
    after the Federal Constitutional Court
    of Germany had confirmed
                                              legality of the
    measures 12 Sept’ 2012
                                   dragons snort rolling in pools of gold coin

    London excluded from
    future financial regulations
    including proposed EU financial
    transaction tax
                                and crime minster Cameron juggles
    his nukes
               who tried to buy peace with money?

    26 countries had agreed to the plan
    leaving U.K as only
                             country not willing
    to join.

    in case of economic shocks
    policy makers try to improve
                                  competitiveness
    by depreciating the currency
                           as currently in Iceland
    which beat-off the biggest financial
    crisis in economic history

                                               13’ China, India, and Iran
    with sluggish growth
    some drone attacks and
                     terrorism have NOT entered
                                                            recession

    however eurozone countries
    cannot devalue their
    currency
                                            as Silvio Gessel and C. H. Douglas
    and Ez might suggest

    this may nip usury in the bud
             and present a new solution to
                                                          boom bust cycles
                                  derivatives and crimes against nature
                                                              crimes against humanity

    “A system which becomes in practice merely another hidden and irresponsible tyranny is no better than any other gang of instigators to theft and oppression—Ez, the proof of the pudding. 1937.

    –Steven James Pratt (Fly Agaric 23) 25-28 May 2013.

    Steven James Pratt

  • Quotes from Ezra Pound Guide To Kulchur

    I am currently reading Ez’s guide again and find it very stimulating with great ball of genius striking in the direction of the 2008-2013 global recession, music, painting, sculture and poetry. –Steve fly

    Full text at Scribd.

    Quotes from…

    EZRA

    POUND

    GUIDE
    TO
    KULCHUR

    “To put it another way: it does not matter a two-penny damn whether you load up your memory with the chronological sequence of what has happened, or the names of protagonists, or authors of books, or generals and leading political spouters, so long as you understand the process now going on, or the processes biological, social, economic now going on, enveloping you as an individual, in a social order, and quite unlikely to be very “new” in themselves however fresh or stale to the participant.”

    “I suggest that finer and future critics of art will be able to tell from the quality of a painting the degree of tolerance or intolerance of usury extant in the age and milieu that produced it… That perhaps is the first clue the reader has had that these are notes for a totalitarian treatise and that I am in fact considering the New Learning or the New Paideuma… not simply abridging extant encyclopedias or condensing two dozen more detailed volumes… May I suggest (not to prove anything, but perhaps to open the reader’s thought) that I have a certain real knowledge which wd. enable me to tell a Goya from a Velasquez, a Velasquez from an Ambrogio Praedis, a Praedis from an Ingres or a Moreau…”

    “Ideogram is essential to the exposition of certain kinds of thought. Greek philosophy was mostly a mere splitting, an impoverishment of understanding, though it ultimately led to the development of particular sciences. Socrates a distinguished gas-bag in comparison with Confucius and Mencius… At any rate, I need ideogram. I mean I need it for my own job…”

    “Usura rusteth the chisel It rusteth the craft and the craftsman It gnaweth the thread in the loom None learneth to weave gold in her pattern; Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is unbroidered Emerald findeth no Memling… Usura slayeth the child in the womb”

    “Dante uses che sanno in his passage on Aristotle in limbo. He uses intendendo for the angels moving the third heaven… Our Teutonic friend, what’s his name (Vossler is it?), talks about schwankenden Terminologie des Cavalcanti’s. I believe because he hasn’t examined it. Till proof to the contrary overwhelms me, I shall hold that our mediaevals took much more care of their terms than the greeks of the decadence.”

    “This book is not written for the over-fed. It is written for men who have not been able to afford a university education or for young men, whether or not threatened with universities, who want to know more at the age of fifty than I know today, and whom I might conceivably aid to that object.”

    http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Guide_to_Kulchur

  • Ezra Pound and the tale of the tribe in 2013.

    Ezra Pound and the tale of the tribe in 2013.

    Today, Easter Sunday 31st March 2013, I am here at home in Amsterdam, switching between facebook, blogger, youtube and Wikipedia, and my copy of Pound’s Cantos. And I cannot resist pulling out some examples of Pounds relevance, coloured by the texts analysis by Pound/Joyce scholar Dr Robert Anton Wilson.

    First off there is the poetry, the straight up imagist prose that is juxtaposing natures forms with man’s sensory experiences, bashing the mind with species and etymology through metaphor. Just on the surface, when revisiting Canto’s CXVII & CXVIII without pretending to be able to decode the strange new scripts intermingling on the page, there is an aesthetic appeal, an instant wonder and sense of the unique, nothing else in literature exits anything like this, to this day. And so I imagine the wonders and messages hidden away, what I don’t know is always in my face, highlighting what I can read and make inferences about, like little villages of recognizable action and meaning surrounded by a huge forest of mystery and unknown symbol systems.

    Due my acknowledgement of what I don’t know about the Cantos, it proves difficult to state a case about the text, and about what Pound means by any particular fragment or ideogram. However, there is a long line of scholarship and decoding of the texts, along with extensive biographical commentary on Ezra Pound to help the lone rambler stumbling into the forest. Like Joyce’s equally dense work Finnegans Wake, Pounds Cantos…works its hidden magic most effectively with an accompaniment of skeleton keys, supportive texts and internet search engines, or if you are fortunate a good teacher.

    Robert Anton Wilson regarded Ezra Pound very highly, although like many other Pound scholars made clear that he did not ascribe to Ezra’s opinions during the 30’s and 40’s which took on a fascist and racist tendency. RAW does not throw the baby out with the bathwater and almost begs us to reconsider Pound and all his contributions and his extensive wonderful works that aim to better humanity, our individual critical minds and refine a globalist taste for common horse-sense in general. RAW’s love and deep understanding of the Cantos is expressed in a series of Cantos commentaries published at rawfans.org, and which inspired this writing today. I recommend them highly, and especially with the Cantos in hand, reading in between the lines and discovering the labyrinth of rich languages running together with the English bits.

    Commentary on The Cantos of Ezra Pound, c. 2001-2002
    Canto I, II & XX, III, IV, VIII,  IX,  X,
    XI,  XII,  XIII,  XIV,  XV,  XVII,  XVIII, XIX,
    XXI,  XXXI, XXXII,  XCVIII

    http://rawilsonfans.com/writings/

    “There are six rites for festival
           and 7 instructions
    that all converge as the root tun       pen
    the root veneration (from Mohamed no popery)
    To discriminate things
            shih  solid
    mu  a pattern
    fa  laws
    kung  public
    szu  private
    great and small
           (That Odysseus’ old ma missed his conversation)
    To see the light pour,
         that is, toward sinceritas”—Ez, Canto XCIX

  • TTOTT 2013: Go git’ yr’ pens and pads

    TTOTT 2013 by Steven ‘fly’ Pratt.

    Some of my readers, and a small portion of friends may be familiar with Robert Anton Wilson and his tale of the tribe, but, alas i imagine that most are not. If you stumbled upon this writing, and are out of facebook well done, I dearly wish you might give me a chance to turn you on.

    I have shared the continued relevance and impact that the individuals and ideas from ‘the tale of the tribe’ have had, and are having on global humanity through a network of blogs and posts. I am also resending the same simple message here: read Robert Anton Wilson’s books and try out his ideas, again! This post consists of a short review of his ideas from TTOTT and current 2013 events and breakthroughs that have a direct correspondence to the characters.

    Swooping from the global banking and credit circus to ‘open source’ software ‘The tale of the tribe’ forms a unique doorway into a coherent system, running from the renaissance to the present day, that helps frame some big questions pertaining to our times, a bawdy bunch and global cross-section of individuals and their works selected by Dr Wilson for an equal balance of high-brow and low brow, art and science and mysticism, all innovators and ahead of their time.

    “Art as TRANSACTION / Information as TRANSACTION—RAW”

    Most of them, worryingly to me, are still understudied overlooked and almost forgotten in the majority of mainstream Academic institutions, yet, together in synchrony and as the TRIBE, they bootstrap their influences and coherence into a group of 13–relatively unknown–super geniuses. A kind of renaissance super hero-gang. I think that Dr Wilson picked these characters very very very carefully, and of course, they still hold infinite potential for anybody crazy enough to begin studying em’ and carefully scaffolding between ideas, and, furthermore, I am certain they will be important for the future scenarios and technological breakthroughs during 2013 and ahead, in the spirit of the poet as early warning missile defence system.

    “Pound & Joyce supplement each other
    like Jefferson & Adams
    each created a NEW non-aristotelian
    language
    for the tale of the tribe”–RAW

    In one sense, the tale of the tribe includes some of the most complicated and scholarly works known to man: Finnegans Wake, Information Theory, General Semantics, Pound’s Cantos, Cybernetics, Ulysses, Media Studies and Quantum Mechanics. On the other hand, I think that Dr Wilson recognized this ‘too complicated’ factor, and might have been hinting, in part, that in the age of internet search engines and masses of shared data, translation software etc. the once esoteric works and ideas available to the select few, can now be read, decoded, studied and poured over, even when high…by anyone and everyone who can connect to the net. You don’t need no stinking Yale or Cambridge library, or even their professors, in many cases, you require a connection and whole lot of time, will and energy to invest in things that at first may not seem worth your while pursuing. I hope to persuade you otherwise.

    “Distinguish also between faith-based programs [NO FEEDBACK]
    and research-based programs [MAXIMUM POSSIBLE FEEDBACK].–RAW

    For me today, the tale of the tribe boils down to the concept of humanity. The problems confronting everyman man, women and living system on planet earth today. Dr Wilson stressed a comprehensive strategy, a GLOBAL view, and he was known for having at least seven models for explaining anything. This wish to communicate and show compassion to all-around-humanity remains a goal of ‘TTOTT’ and at the same time liberate humanity, consciousness and our  daily doings from the boot and chains and guns of the oppressors:

    Those who champion closed systems, surveillance, secrecy, violence, war and clandestine attacks on the emotional and physical strings of a mostly innocent humanity-as-a-whole. Those that fan the flames, do damage to names, switch the rules, the sneaky pundits and spin doctors, the war advertisers and the TV Mirage salespeople, those that wish the majority of us live in fear and in debt, be it to Gods or States-entities, they’re surely watching you even now. I hear you, and I think ‘TTOTT’ provides an historical current that runs counter to the above trending towards centralized control and secrecy, to shallow pools of bullshit passing as news and bad, wrongheaded single mindedness and bullying throughout the mediasphere. The decentralized universe of the mystics, poets, shaman & shawomen, neuro-scientists, design scientists and information theorists pushes against centralized control, both psychological and political (via. The digital hacktivist revolution) these are new forces that we have all heard about, if not felt in our daily life.

    “can we see this emerging in psychedelics & internet?
    or in Leary & McLuhan at least?”–RAW

    Fly On The Tale Of The Tribe: A Rollercoaster Ride With Robert Anton Wilson

    by Steven James Pratt

    Link: http://a.co/gOGNKyV

    (more…)

  • 1922 year 1 of MODERNISM (Book review)

    A new age dawned on October 30 1921, said Ezra Pound, who claimed that the Christian Era ended on the day that James Joyce finished the final paragraph of Ulysses. Three months later Joyce’s book was published on the palindromic date of 2/2/22 – his 40th birthday —http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/historybookreviews/9712690/Constellation-of-Genius-by-Kevin-Jackson-review.html

  • Preface to ‘The Mayan Letters by CHarles Olson.

    For me, and my world right now (9th December 2012) Charles Olson and his book ‘The Mayan Letters’ makes perfect sense.

    Here’s the preface:

    Preface to Mayan Letters

    by Charles Olson

    Sometime toward the end of 1950, it was in December I think, but the letter isn’t dated, I heard that Charles Olson was off to Yucatan. A sudden “fluke”—the availability of some retirement money owed him from past work as a mail carrier—gave him enough for the trip, “not much but a couple of hundred, sufficient, to GO, be, THERE. . . .” By February I had got another letter, “have just this minute opened this machine in this house lerma. . . .” From that time on I heard from him regularly, and so was witness to one of the most incisive experiences ever recorded. Obviously it is very simple to call it that, that is, what then happened, and what Olson made of his surroundings and himself. Otherwise, it is necessary to remember that Olson had already been moving in this direction, back to a point of origin which would be capable of extending “history” in a new and more usable sense. In his book on Melville, Call Me Ishmael , he had made the statement, “we are the last first people . . .”; and in his poetry, most clearly in “The Kingfishers,” there was constant emphasis on the need to break with the too simple westernisms of a ‘greek culture.’
    Yucatan made the occasion present in a way that it had not been before. The alternative to a generalizing humanism was locked, quite literally, in the people immediately around him, and the conception, that there had been and could be a civilization anterior to that which he had come from, was no longer conjecture, it was fact. He wrote me, then, “I have no doubt, say, that the American will
    Charles Olson, Mayan Letters (Bañalbufar, Mallorca: Divers Press, 1953).
    ― 103 ―
    more and more repossess himself of the Indian past. . . . If you and I see the old deal as dead (including Confucius, say), at the same time that we admit the new is of the making of our own lives & references, yet, there is bound to be a tremendous pick-up from history other than that which has been usable as reference, the moment either that history is restored (Sumer, or, more done, Chichen or Uaxactun) or rising people (these Indians, as camposinos ripe for Communist play—as ripe as were the Chinese, date 1921, June 30). . . .” The problem was, to give form, again, to what the Maya had been—to restore the “history” which they were. For in the Maya was the looked-for content: a reality which is “wholly formal without loss of intimate spaces, with the ball still snarled, yet, with a light (and not stars) and a heat (not androgyne) which declares, the persistence of both organism and will (human). . . .”
    In editing the present selection, I have tried to maintain a continuity in spite of the limits of space and the loss of some letters which it has meant. I have indicated excisions with dots ( . . .), whenever such were necessary.
    February 12, 1953

  • Ezra Pound’s daughter fights to wrest the renegade poet’s legacy from fascists

     “He made mistakes and we have to take the good part of him, just as he did with others.–Mary De Rachewiltz

    “De Rachewiltz has since fought a lifelong battle to separate Pound the poet from Pound the fascist and antisemite, which is why the emergence of CasaPound – now boasting 5,000 members – is so painful.

    She rebuffs the suggestion that CasaPound’s lionisation of him is no more than he deserves. “Pound just quoted what Mussolini said,” she said. “This organisation is hiding behind Pound’s name for intellectual cover,” she added. “He made mistakes and we have to take the good part of him, just as he did with others. He fell into certain antisemitic clichés that were rampant in Europe and the US at the time.”–http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/14/ezra-pound-daughter-fascism

  • Ez TSOG YALE and SPIES.

    “The scholar who works for a government intelligence agency ceases to be an independent spirit, a true scholar,” stated a Boston Globe editorial in the mid-1980s.

    My Ezra Pound ‘Google Alert’ just alerted me to an article from the Yaledailynews by Ava Kofman that outlines the history of the CIA’s relationships with Academia, and therefore criss-crosses with ‘The Tale of the Tribe’ material and helps to refresh our minds to Dr. Wilson’s brilliant essay ‘TSOG: The Thing that ate the Constitution, 2001′ and information concerning Ezra Pound, James Jesus Angleton and the impact the Spycraft had on Modernism, poetry and the arts. Wilson writes:

    But James J. Angleton was a pathological case of some sort himself; he often hid his middle name because it revealed his half-Hispanic genes. An exceptionally intelligent and sensitive student of modern literature while at Yale, Angleton adored Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, I.A. Richards, e e cummings and other SuperStars of Modernism; he met most of them personally. They collectively influenced Angleton’s fascination with multiple perspectives, labyrinthine ambiguity and the eternal uncertainty of all inferences and “interpretations.” These modernist tendencies, which also appeared in science and philosophy at the same time, blossomed into obsessions and, perhaps, raging madness when Angleton systematically applied them to the spy-game. After all, modernism really begins with Wilde’s “The Reality of Masks” and Yeats’s hermetic mystique the world we know emerging from interactions of Mask, Anti-Mask, Self, and Anti-Self: which may or may not fit all of us or all the world but certainly fits the world of spooks and snoops that Angleton created.–http://www.rawilson.com/tsog.html

    Ava Kofman writes in ANNONYMOUS ACADEMICS:

    “James Jesus Angleton ’41, breeder of rare orchids and disputably a paranoiac, founded and edited the short-lived but reputable literary magazine, Furioso, during his time as an undergraduate at Yale. Beginning a series of enthusiastic correspondences with Ezra Pound after the two met in Italy during the summer of 1938, Angleton published Pound’s poems along with the work of Cummings, MacLeish and Williams in his magazine the next year. But more ink has been spilled describing Angleton’s life than those of his beloved poets. Returning to Washington after World War II, Angleton would go on to help found the Central Intelligence Agency.”http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

    “Varsity crew coach Skip Waltz recruited for the OSS what he saw as the best of Yale’s white Anglophile protestant males from its population of mostly white Anglo-Saxon protestant males. Following the conclusion of war in 1947, OSS alumnus Walter L. Pforzheimer ’35 contributed to drafting the act that would establish the CIA.

    And still today, some recent alumni from both campuses include CIA directors Porter J. Goss ’60, R. James Woolsey Jr. LAW ’68, and George H.W. Bush ’48. Now a visiting lecturer at the Jackson Institute, John Negroponte ’60 served as the first Director of National Intelligence under President George W. Bush ’68. William F. Buckley ’50, founder of the National Review, wrote one of the many aforementioned fictionalized accounts of Angleton’s life, and served a stint in the CIA as well.” http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

     “Why learn how to write a policy memo on preventing nuclear proliferation if you can’t even convincingly make a case that the human race — much less the United States of America — is a good thing that’s worth protecting,” laments the anonymous source. “Does the U.S. government exist to merely protect us and clothe us and feed us or to foster public and private virtue? These are questions that the Yalies of yesteryear could tackle quite easily and eloquently. Today, almost no one can.” http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

    The skills that most Yale majors teach students well — namely, close reading, critical thinking and strong writing — are the same valuable assets that make its graduates good analysts. Or for that matter, good at any job.

    “An analyst job is like writing a paper except its called an intelligence report,” said a senior government official, who requested to remain anonymous citing government policy. “But instead of using a book or a person as your evidence, you’re using classified intelligence.” He points to this as to why Yale turns out so many journalists and policy makers as well. The only difference in what those jobs consist of, the senior official argued, is in the subject matter and sourcing of what they’re writing on. http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

     

    “In 2001, following the attacks of September 11, around 750 students expressed an interest in the CIA when they passed through the agency’s career fair booth. For some years thereafter, interest in the agency was at a new high.  http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

    “With the rise of cyber-espionage, it would seem that the CIA’s interest in Computer Science and Math majors who can write and break code might balloon.
    Regardless of their background — whether it be in C++, the classics or both — applicants need to be realists and understand, the senior official warned, that for many it’s a “desk job.”
    “Your cover is going to be a dark close-up of the shadow of Nathan Hale’s face,” a senior government official teased, “but the reality is that people [in the CIA] work in cubicles that look like a Proctor and Gamble office — and it’s mostly a bunch of Mormons.” The senior official paused dramatically, letting the reality of his vision of the CIA sink in.http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

     Borrowing a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s Gerontion, Angleton often described the inner workings of the agency as a “wilderness of mirrors.” Angleton’s means of ordering the world moved along so many deceptions that it ceased to be real.  http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

    One that could recast, for better or worse, the arbitrary boundaries drawn between literature and the classroom, reality and a dream, poetry and analysis. Our fascination with the CIA, with its mythical figures and failures, as a national legend — as a genre of fiction — may be of just as much interest for learning about the intuitions of the modern mind — as it is for learning about the institution itself. http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

    The spy world then, turns accident into meaning and so frees us to imagine and presume in broad leaps and strokes.
    “For in [the spy] profession there is no such thing as coincidence,” writes Le Carre in the film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
    And consider an illustration of these two approaches to thinking: Most of the American public would prefer to watch say, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a fictionalized account of the spy world, than read the continually growing number of now declassified documents made readily available, or, for that matter, the adapted book. http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/academics-anonymous/

  • Joyce Pound Shaw and Ulysses in Porno-mags

    SNIPPET FROM: An end to bad heir days: The posthumous power of the literary estate

    By Gordon Bowker

    The question of rights in Joyce’s work was a fraught one even during his lifetime. Fearing prosecution, no one would publish Ulysses complete and unabridged until Sylvia Beach, the American bookseller in Paris, bravely did so in 1922. But Joyce’s notoriety attracted pirates , and at one time he was unprotected by good contracts or good law. In November 1925, he found that without his permission Ulysses was being published serially in the magazine Two Worlds by Samuel Roth, the New York pornographer. His protests went unheeded. Roth simply sent a cheque for $1000 which Joyce refused to cash.

    Among his literary friends and supporters, only Ezra Pound and Bernard Shaw were unsympathetic. Pound said that Joyce had only himself to blame for not registering his copyright in America. He advised him “to write letters to the press denouncing Roth”, or alternatively, “organise a gang of gunmen to scare [him] out of his pants”. But Roth, he warned, was a ruthless capitalist driven by avarice, not easily stopped.

    Joyce was incensed, and with the aid of friends composed a letter of protest which was circulated among writers, attacking unjust American copyright law. Pound refused to sign, as did Shaw, who suspected a Joycean stunt.

    READ ON HERE

    http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/an-end-to-bad-heir-days-the-posthumous-power-of-the-literary-estate-6285277.html

  • McLuhan letter to Ezra Pound Dec.21st 1948

    ON THE EZRA POUND/ MARSHALL MCLUHAN CORRESPONDENCEby EDWIN J. BARTON

    http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss1/1_1art11.htm

    “The only problem with this mode of thinking and presentation, as McLuhan was to discover, lay in the resistance with which it was met, and continues to be met, by Western intellectuals. For, as McLuhan put it in a letter written in 1948, this way of writing and thinking is inaccessible to those whose mentality is “incorruptibly dialectical.”

    The American mind is not even close to being amenable to the ideogram principle as yet. The reason is simply this. America is 100% 18th century. The 18th century chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy-the basic fact that as A is to B so C is to D. AB : CD. It can see AB relations. But all relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to a deep occultation of all human thought for the U.S.A. (21 December 1948)

    It was precisely this structure and action of the metaphorical analogy, of course, that enabled McLuhan and his son Eric, many years later, to arrive at tetradic model of laws with which to study media “scientifically.”–EDWIN J. BARTON.