Enough with the D-Day porn, please. The Good War gave birth to the military-industrial corporate complex as we now know it, and the Russians did more bleeding to end fascism than we can even imagine. Bah, humbug. I remember when I first read Catch-22 at the tender age of eleven or so I wondered at Heller's cynicism. Weren't Yossarian and company, you know, bombing Nazis? Nowadays, of course, it's clear that we have Milo Minderbinder for a vice-president. Another seminal text of WWII cynicism was Slaughterhouse Five. Which means we're now at, what, Slaughterhouse Nine? Slaughterhouse n? Feh.

You know what, there's some goddman beautiful stuff in the first couple dozen Cantos. I tend of course to focus on the pastoral moments. Huzzah for "Tian the low speaking," from XIII:

And Tesu-lou said, "I would put the defences in order,"
and Khieu said, "If I were lord of a province
I would put it in better order than this is."
And Tchi said, "I would prefer a small mountain temple,
"With order in the observances,
          with a suitable performance of the ritual,"
And Tian said, with his hand on the strings of his lute
The low sounds continuing
          after his hand left the strings,
And the sound went up like smoke, under the leaves,
And he looked after the sound:
          "The old swimming hole,
"And the boys flopping off the planks,
"Or sitting in the underbrush playing mandolins."

My favorite Canto thus far is XX, the noigandres Canto. Which means something like "to ward off pain or boredom." I also love the phrase "Ligur' aoide," by which Pound means "sharp singing," as of the Sirens. The passage through which Pound plays with the answer to Levy's question, "Now what the DEFFIL can that mean!" is incredibly beautiful:

Wind over the olive trees, ranunculae ordered,
By the clear edge of the rocks
The water runs, and the wind scented with pine
And with hay-fields under sun-swath.
Agostino, Jacopo and Boccata.
You would be happy for the smell of that place
And never tired of being there, either alone
Or accompanied.
Sound: as of the nightingale too far off to be heard.
Sandro, and Boccata, and Jacopo Sellaio;
The ranunculae, and almond,
Boughs set in espalier,
Ducciou, Agostino; e l'olors—
The smell of that place—d'enoi ganres.
Air moving under the boughs,
The cedars there in the sun,
Hay new cut on hill slope,
And the water there in the cut
Between the two lower meadows; sound,
The sound, as I have said, a nightingale
Too far off to be heard.
And the light falls, remir,
from her breast to thighs.

Pastoral as boundary between nature and civilization, myth and enlightenment. The former manifests a page later, a renewable resource with teeth:

                         Jungle:
Glaze green and red feathers, jungle,
Basis of renewal, renewals;
Rising over the soul, green virid, of the jungle,
Lozenge of the pavement, clear shapes,
Broken, disrupted, body eternal,
Wilderness of renewals, confusion
Basis of renewals, subsistence,
Glazed green of the jungle;
Zoe, Marozia, Zothar,
                         loud over the banners,
Glazed grape, and the crimson,
HO BIOS

A vision of the Lotus Eaters ("Lotophagoi") follows. Adorno and Horkheimer:

Self-preserving reason cannot permit such an idyll—reminiscent of the bliss induced by narcotics, by which subordinate classes have been made capable of enudring the unendurable in ossified social orders—among its own people. And indeed, it is only an illusion of bliss, a dull aimless vegetating, as impoverished as the life of animals. At best, it would be an absence of the awareness of unhappiness. But happiness contains truth within itself. It is in essence a result. It unfolds from suffering removed. The enduring Odysseus is therefore right not to endure life among the Lotus-eaters. Against them he asserts his own cause, the realization of utopia through historical work, whereas simply abiding within an image of bliss deprives them of their strength. But in being exerted by rationality, by Odysseus, this right is inevitably drawn into the realm of wrong. His immediate action is one which reasserts domination (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 49).

Pound's Cantos are impaled on the horns of this dialectic: the poem which creates the image of bliss is asked itself to do historical work. Does this wrong the poem (and does the poem wrong history)? Or is it the kind of work Pound asks his poetry to do that dooms it to its fragmentary success (Pound's success being his failure to establish a monolithic fascist utopia, even within the bounds of the text)? The painted paradise at the end of it. These lapidary moments shining from the solidified muck of the poem (a haunting image from XV: the shield with Medusa's face is used to petrify the soil enough for the poet and his guide to walk on), these survivals gleam in the black sea of print, that peculiarly archaic New Directions typeface. It may simply be a hypertrophic case of the stone set off by foil, "bright metal on a sullen ground." Of course I haven't yet reached Pound at his most prescriptive; the grumblings about usury are just getting underway.