tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6531553.post2591115231687189792..comments2023-06-27T01:34:35.359-07:00Comments on Ted Burke LIKE IT OR NOT: Conflating the punchlinesTED BURKEhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6531553.post-15325524187415683102009-10-14T11:35:41.865-07:002009-10-14T11:35:41.865-07:00Pound and Eliot are interesting contrasts, one a w...Pound and Eliot are interesting contrasts, one a windbag, a blowhard,a buttinski, a motor-mouthing gab-bag who happened to have some brilliant notions of how poetry can be made aesthetically and personally viable again, the other being a depressed, crabby, self conciously rigid individual who's view of the cracked surface of culture gave us some haunting images that perfectly convey the despair and longing decades after they were written. Both were closet autocrats, of course, and very conservative--neither was a fan of corporations nor capitalism, and it wouldn't be so hard to imagine the current strains of the right wing characterizing these fellows as left wingers. A strange set of long-view bed fellows; two anti-semetic, totalitarian inclined poets who wind up writing stuff that dovetail comfortably with a Marxist analysis on the effect of capital on human relationships. Everyone brings their own dynamite to this party, blowing up the same thing for the same reason, but with each with a Jesus of a different name.<br /><br />You're right about Thompson, he was not an intellectual , nor a particularly sharp analysis of what he was covering, but his strengths were in noticing things people did and characterizing them in a critical, sarcastic light that revealed an ongoing quest for power, naked and virulent under all his subject's noble rhetoric. ITED BURKEhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6531553.post-41153180907203683232009-10-14T10:48:18.731-07:002009-10-14T10:48:18.731-07:00Fair enough. I would add that I find it fascinatin...Fair enough. I would add that I find it fascinating that Pound and especially Eliot used the dynamite of fractured perspective (and, in Eliot's case, the cacophony of Jazz Age pop culture) to blow up modernity in the service of returning to the High Church theocratic-cultural dominance of the pre-modern era. A sweet paradox, no? Also -- I might not choose to parse the difference between the mob and the guys at the bar, other than to add that some of my favorite NJ exponents like Hunter S. Thompson really had no great erudition or wide perspective to offer beyond their immediate impressions and "street smarts" -- just what you might expect from a rather bright member of the common rabble. As HST used to say, Selah.Barry Alfonsohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14624298347392911828noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6531553.post-60884407978401276732009-10-14T10:39:34.196-07:002009-10-14T10:39:34.196-07:00Eliot and Pound weren't friends of democracy, ...Eliot and Pound weren't friends of democracy, of course, but they did their own style of the mash up --classical and pop styles and a preferring a diffusion of coherence rather than writing a series of unifying metaphors--in ways that would better express their idea of the fracturing of reality and the destruction of purpose in culture. The New Journalists weren't really the mob--mobs cannot , by nature, be democratic nor fair nor be able to devise a fair and just politics. I'd say they were more the guys at the end of the bar who stopped opining about the way things ought to be and got off the bar seat to enter an argument that started without them; they were going to straighten folks out. As it goes, they did provide an interesting altnerative narrative line to what gets called the Movement of History, a choice , up close view of the insanity, the ugliness and the egomania that was chewing at the margins of the Great Society and it's aftershock. Realty is both an indvidual and a collective endeavor, yes; whatever it may in fact be in God's mind, we , as a species, cannot concieve of reality without a narrative line, a script. We are all stars in our own movie and everyone else is from central casting; reality is close to being a multiplex theatre with very thin walls between the auditoriums. Dialogue and sound effects bleed into each other's plot lines.TED BURKEhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16610296721891201100noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6531553.post-48797598146985070152009-10-14T07:03:31.475-07:002009-10-14T07:03:31.475-07:00Pound and Eliot seemed to favor dissolving individ...Pound and Eliot seemed to favor dissolving individual perspective into a collective pre-Enlightenment ubermind of Tradition. P&E were profoundly anti-democratic, haters of the mob. The New Journalists WERE the mob, or at least the loudest among them. For all their faults, they bucked consensus in the best American style. Reality IS an individual, rather than a collective thing -- or would you disagree, Ted?Barry Alfonsohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14624298347392911828noreply@blogger.com