6/14/2015

BBC Radio 3: The Trial Of Ezra Pound

BBC Radio 3, Sunday, 20 Jul 2008, 21:30.
"To mark 2008's 50th anniversary of his release, historian Sean Street investigates how Ezra Pound, one of the 20th century's most important poets, was accused of treason by the US Government and held for years in a mental hospital after he made a series of anti-American and anti-Semitic broadcasts in Italy.
The programme investigates the significance of the case today, asking whether he committed treason or inconveniently used his right to free speech. With contributions from Pound's daughter Mary de Rachewiltz, his biographer David Moody and the playwright Bernard Kops, who wrote a play about Pound, in order to find out how we should view the complex and controversial poet."













W.B Yeats: Politics, Psychology and Spiritualism


He created a complex system of spirituality, using the image of interlocking gyres (similar to spiral cones) to map out the development and reincarnation of the soul....
...He published his intricate theories of personality and history in A Vision in 1925 (which he substantially revised in 1937), and some of the symbolic patterns (gyres, moon phases) with which he organised these theories provide important background to many of the poems and plays he wrote during the second half of his career.--http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/wb-150/magic-myth-and-secrecy-wb-yeats-and-the-occult-31207213.html


We are entering," he said, "the political era, dominated by considerations of political necessity which belong to your people. That will be bad enough, but there will be worse to come. For after that there will be an age dominated by psychologists, which will be based on the complete understanding by everyone of all his own motives at every stage of his life. After that, there will be the worst age of all: the age of our people, the spiritualists. That will be a time when the separation of the living from the dead, and the dead from the living, will be completely broken down, and the world of the living will be in full communication with that of the dead.
          Yeats expressed these ideas in a half-prophetic, half-humorous vein, and I may have distorted them in recording them. But certainly he spoke of the three ages to come, of the political, the psychological, and the spiritual: and he affirmed that the last would be "the worst". It is difficult to understand how to take such a prophecy. What is clear though, is that he saw spiritualism as a revolutionary social force as important in its power to influence the world, as politics, psychology, or science. (World Within World, 180–81)-- http://yeatsvision.blogspot.nl/

Zhanmusi Qiaoyisi BIG in CHINA

By what miracles of linguistic mastery and literary imagination could Chinese characters be made to capture Joyce’s mind-bending manipulations of the alphabet? By what subtleties of cross-cultural understanding could the specificities of Ireland and its mythologies be translated for a Chinese audience? -- http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/13/james-joyce-china-bloomsday-chinese-reputation




...the alphabet vs. the equation....?