bande-annonce/emendation (Patreon)

This course of recovery is so labyrinthine that I can't totally promise anything, but unless I have a major unexpected setback, there ought to be a show next week.  And dear god, do I have some shit to talk about.

I've also come through this whole thing with a sharply focused sense of my own fallibility, and it feels now like I should be more specific about a couple of things from the show:

• Regarding the horrible murder of Antonio Martin in Berkeley, MO a few months after that fucking cop killed Michael Brown in Ferguson: I know what I came away with after seeing the livestream of the protest, and it's what I said, that a gun I hadn't seen before suddenly appeared near the body.  (It's also terribly possible that Martin was still alive or could've survived; the police certainly didn't call any fucking ambulances or EMTs to the scene.)  But it would've been smarter to say it that way, "what I came away with," rather than projecting too much certainty when speaking of something I could only see once, and only in real time.

• I worry I've assumed too much context and been insufficiently vocal in condemnation of Ezra Pound's fascism and prejudice when I've mentioned him on the show.  I got so deep into trying to understand the Modernist period, those bizarre 30ish years when human perception arguably changed more than in the previous 500 (and so many major figures ended up crazy or monstrous), that I probably presumed too much tacit foreknowledge in the audience.  

To be very clear: Pound was a bigot.  He was a very strange, convoluted sort of bigot, and he may have been a clinically insane one – a diagnosis of "madness" from the ’40s doesn't tell us very much, especially with the politics involved – but that doesn't mitigate anything.  And too many books and writers, some capable of brilliance when discussing Pound's poetry, make preposterously flimsy excuses for the poisonous person he became.

I hope this dispels any vagueness, & I hope (and think) I'll back soon –

MSJ