Canto XXXIV

More treading water here, for seven pages. Again, there's a recurrent use of ellipsis to separate out the various strands, and again, we're mainly dealing with the early days of the USA, though moving through Napoleonic times and beyond. The economic motif returns:

Banks breaking all over the country,
Some in a sneaking, some in an impertinent manner ...
prostrate every principle of economy.

And someone (Adams?) is talking about arboriculture. Should that be 'arborikulchur'?

Again, it's a salad of voices and opinions. To use a new metaphor, the result of twisting a radio dial across a limited period of history. Mostly it looks like extracts from diaries, letters and contemporary reportage, but towards the end a more incantatory seection:

These are the sins of Georgia
These are the lies
These are the infamies
These are the broken contracts ...

which, again, is something Ez (like TS Eliot) does very well (I'm sure it's harder than it looks to get the rhythm rhyght).

And right at the end a chinese character, which of course I can't put here.

One of these days, I'm going to have to tackle Ez's economic thinking, if that's not too strong a word. His opposition to usury seems, from what I've seen so far, naive. But in the current economic climate (if that's the word) there's a possibility that his views will gain some respect. The banks are pretty universally cast as the villains, and obv they're the home of usury. I think it's a poor comparison. The problem with the banks these days is that they've lost huge amounts of money (where it's gone is harder to tell), not that they've ripped off the poor farmers and artists. They've practised usury really badly by lending on shifting sands, or something, so it's their failure to do usury properly that's caused the problem. I still think Ez looks like a man in the grip of an obsession.

You may notice I've added a new gadget, or toy, to the sidebar on the left. Evri, it's called, and it seems to work, if that's the word, by identifying words or phrases in a post and identifying links from them. The results are erratic, but sometimes intriguing. For example, this post, when I preview it, is showing a link for T S Eliot. That's good, but if I click on it, it links T S Eliot to Penelope Wilton, the underrated British actress. In fact, it's an entirely fitting gadget for an Ezra Pound page.