Thursday, January 13, 2005

Disturbed this morning to have Googled "Pound" and "vorticism" and to have hit on the first page a "racialist" website promulgating his ideas. Almost unforgiveably naive of me, but I was shocked to realize that Pound's venom is still fresh enough to be a weapon in the hands of contemporary haters. I will treat him even more carefully now than I have wanted to since listening to some of the radio speeches Ben Friedlander was kind enough to send me. But those convey their "pastness" far more than they do the living voice, what with the general scratchiness and incoherence of the recording (as distinct from Pound's own political and mental incoherence). It's far more unsettling for me to encounter Pound as a hero of racists that breathe my own air. "The evil that men do lives after them; / The good is oft interred with their bones."



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