25 Days in a Cage

If I had to pick one critic (that overgeneralized word for "smart" people who write books) I admire more than any other, it would have to Frederic Jameson, not becuase I actually believe his Marxist claptrap but because I really have to admire someone who can be a Marxist and simultaneously filthy stinking rich. I heard somewhere, can't remember where, that all American Marxists are really capitalists, because, ultimately, all Americans are capitalists, closet or otherwise. Ah, yet another gross overgeneralization...

If I had to pick one critic (here meaning someone who actually criticizes written works, social systems, and so forth) whose influence I grapple with most, it would be Ezra Pound. I've always admired people who, despite being fundamentally flawed, manage to produce pure genius. Also, being something of a polymath myself (according to Mickles), I see something of the old, middle, and young Ezra in myself. The major difference is I try to shut up about the things that could quite easily land me in hot water.

I resent being something of a mantic. In this half the world (i.e. Asia, the new Orient), I spend most of my time conversing with non-Western types explaining "our culture" to them in terms they claim to understand. The same, of course, is true back in the Fatherland. Japanese, Chinese, whatever culture is a big fucking mystery to the paleface (apparently), so we produce a class of mantics whose jobs it is to commune with the natives and interpret their signs for the powers that be. "Why are Japanese men so concerned with saving face in public?" Hmm, good question, because obviously Americans have no need of spin doctors or PR firms.

And we punish these mantics when they're wrong. I should revise that statement: we punish these mantics when we perceive that they are wrong.

All of you already know that you learn infinitely more about people when you live among them. The first and truly valuable thing you learn is despite superficial peculiarities, they're not different.

Ezra Pound went apeshit trying to make sense of the world as a whole. When the Americans found him in Italy they locked him up in an outdoor cage for the better part of a month. When he was finally released from the mental institution where he spent a good deal of his remaining years, he returned to that Italian city which I still claim to this day stinks of cigarettes and garbage, obviously something a sane man would not do.