The Pisan Cantos, the poetic sequence that Pound wrote while incarcerated at an open-air military detention center near Pisa in 1945, has long been recognized as a landmark of modern poetry. Since its publication, though, the sequence has provoked two very different readings, apparently opposed and yet united in their willingness to read Pound's work as ideologically consistent. The Pisan Cantos were awarded the first Library of Congress Bollingen Award by a panel of internationally famous poets in 1949, and have since been surrounded by furor. An admitted fascist under indictment for treason because of wartime radio broadcasts made in support of the Axis cause, Pound was being honored for poems that lamented the passing of fascist and Nazi collaborators, and the general public rose up en masse. In constructing a defense of Pound, the Bollingen judges and an international array of prominent writers fell back on formalist criteria of poetic value and helped to forge a mandarin, politically conservative "New Criticism" that would dominate the next two decades of literary discourse and ultimately become the primary target of poststructuralist theory.
Other readers defended the Pisan Cantos by fashioning a more palatable reading of what the poems said; they pointed to currents in the text they associated with the lines "'Master thyself, then others shall thee beare' / Pull down thy vanity," and suggested that the Pisan Cantos dramatized a moving, albeit reluctant, recantation of fascism. In this view, the poems were defensible not only because of their technical brilliance, but also because they established a new confessional mode associated with a revolutionary technical openness and a hypersensitive awareness of the natural world. One contemporary reviewer, Robert Fitzgerald, wrote that Pound had sounded "a personal desolation" and had achieved "a kind of repentance that is enormously moving." 1 In the wake of this and similar responses, The Pisan Cantos cast a long shadow over the poetry of the next twenty years, whether it was the confessional verse of Robert Lowell or the less intimate meditations of Charles Olson. Anchoring Pound's influence was a perception that The Pisan Cantos were confessions wrung out of a repentant fascist by a dark night of the soul and the healing force of nature: spontaneous utterance and an apparent return to natural simplicity had given Pound's words a special authenticity, an immediacy that was hailed as the ne plus ultra of poetic modernism.
Critics have since questioned the sincerity of Pound's "repentance" as they have recognized obvious strains of undiminished fascist loyalty in the poem. And recently they have begun to question more than that. For the issue of Pound's contrition has been seen by poststructuralists as related to the way modernist poetry's "immediacy" authorizes factitious mystifications of language and nature. The strong version of this position argues for a necessary connection between the modernist manner of The Pisan Cantos, its naturalization of experience, and the fascist politics of its author.
With so much at stake, questions about how The Pisan Cantos were written take on a special interest. Do, for example, the facts of the work's composition match the account of spontaneous utterance that Pound had advanced and that even his critics have assumed? A decade after their publication Ezra Pound wrote to a friend that all the "Pisans" were done at Pisa, that "not more than three lines" changed afterwards. 2 That is not, however, the story his manuscripts tell. Writing the Pisan Cantos was a protracted, complex, and fractured process. The actual composition took place in three distinct stages, each corresponding with changes in Pound's circumstances, his self-assessment, and his political outlook. First, while still residing in Sant'Ambrogio and months before his imprisonment, Pound began a series of lyrical fragments that were overtly symbolist in style and avowedly fascist in viewpoint. Then, after circumstances had wrenched him out of his wartime retreat and into the prison camp in Pisa, his manner and subject changed. The literary model for his writing became a realistic poetic diary in the manner of Villon, and (though he incorporated from memory swatches of material from the earlier drafts) the center of his attention became the lives of the rough crew of soldiers around him. Having thus fashioned an uneasy mixture of very different perspectives, Pound believed that he had finished the poem, then suddenly changed his mind. Jolted by reports that close friends had died, and increasingly faced with the possibility that he himself might be executed, he began writing once more. In a surge of defensiveness, he imposed a polemical framework on the poem, which gave it a force and coloring that often contradicted what he had recently written. 3 Pound's manuscripts thus suggest a history that unfolded not in one aesthetic and ideological context, but in several. Consequently, interpreting The Pisan Cantos involves choosing among conflicting authorial signals and presents a dilemma that may be insoluble. To recognize as much, however, can clarify some of our currently vexed interrogations of modernism.
Ezra Pound's attraction to Italian Fascism was from the beginning both representative and bizarre. One of many prominent intellectuals whose cultural politics shifted after World War I from anarchist sympathies to a yearning for order, Pound moved in 1924 from Paris to the English resort town Rapallo, attracted at least in part by Mussolini's vision of a transformed Italy. Pound's enthusiasm for Mussolini was shared in the mid-1920s by voices as disparate as George Bernard Shaw and The New Republic, but as time passed and the Italian regime suffered the crises of the Matteoti murder , the Italian invasion of Ethiopia , the alliance between Germany and Italy, and the resulting promulgation, against the Italian grain, of racial laws directed against Jews , Mussolini's foreign sympathizers dwindled. Yet Pound's support continued. Where others saw repression, Pound (encouraged by fascist propaganda) continued to believe in the construction of a society free of the class hostilities that plagued both capitalism and communism, and in Mussolini's ability to allocate the economic goods of the modern world for the common good. Above all, Pound understood Mussolini as the creator of a Sorelian myth of the future strong enough to recreate Italian society. Mussolini's promises dovetailed with Pound's own political and economic idealism, and his attempt to refashion Italian society through the irrational energies of political myth answered to the ambitions of all Futurist art to revolutionize human consciousness. For Pound, Mussolini was an "artifex" ("take him as anything but an artist and you will get muddled with contradictions"), and in the deepest recesses of his imagination he associated Mussolini's revolutionary rhetoric with Jefferson, who had envisioned for America the renewals of periodic revolution, and with the transcendentalists, who had urged the American self periodically to revolutionize the world through the individual imagination. 4
The politics of Pound's Cantos, an epic of cultural values begun well before the advent of fascism, could not help but register the political evolution of its creator. When young, Pound had espoused "a downright rejection of the bourgeois conception of family," but "from his early forties to his early seventies he gradually went over to advocating [a patriarchalism that] passes for Confucianism." 5 So before 1920 Pound had made the adventurer Odysseus the first protagonist of his many-voiced poem; but by the 1930s he was transferring his praise from what he then called "the maritime adventure morals of Odysseus" to Rome ("the responsible ruler") and "the need for coordination of individuals expressed in Kung's [Confucius's] teaching." 6
As World War II approached, Pound's situation grew increasingly brittle and precarious, and his long poem lost even its revised direction. By the end of the 1930s, he wished to bring his modern Commedia to a paradisal conclusion, but the time was not auspicious. Sensing the outbreak of the war, he inserted one more installment on politics (Cantos 52-71) to constellate what he thought of as an ideogram of strong government at a moment when Europe was falling apart. In 1939 he briefly visited Washington D.C. in an attempt to influence the senators he had been corresponding with for years to avoid a war between America and the Axis, then returned to Italy before the hostilities started. In January 1941 he began making radio broadcasts from Rome which were sponsored by the Italian propaganda ministry and shrieked his frustrations over the airwaves. Finally in December 1941 he made the fateful decision to continue the broadcasts after America entered the war.
Pound was indicted for treason on 26 July 1943, the day after the king of Italy, following the lead of the Fascist Grand Council, removed Mussolini as head of the Italian government. In early September, when Marshall Badoglio announced Italy's surrender to the Allies and the Germans responded by moving south to retake Rome, Hitler rescued Mussolini and set him up as the leader of the so-called Repubblica Sociale Italiana (RSI) or Salò Republic. At the time, Pound was staying in a Rome that had been reduced to chaos. No one knew who would control the city, nor what the consequences would be. Fearing for his life, he made a desperate journey to the Tyrol, where his daughter lived, and gradually returned via Lake Garda and meetings with representatives of the RSI to an even more precarious life back in Rapallo. But his life and the writing that grew out of it came increasingly to lament a world in ruins and to seek consolation in a landscape suffused with ghostly presences.
By late 1944 Pound was almost without money and increasingly dependent on work he did for the RSI's Ministry of Popular Culture. This work was regarded by the U.S. as part of its evidence for Pound's treason, and it must also count as evidence of his fascist literary leanings. But the evidence is strange. As Tim Redman has pointed out, in February 1944, when Pound wrote to Nino Sammartano (inspector of the radio for the RSI) to propose a list of translations that Mussolini's government should support, the list included e. e. cummings's Eimi, Joyce's Ulysses, and Stalin's The Bases of Leninism ("a magnificent slashing criticism of the Roosevelt-Churchillian scum"). 7 The next month he added something equally odd but much closer to his current interests, the translation of Confucius into Italian, with two aims: "first: instruction in philosophy; second: commerce with the Chinese as a manner of understanding what the Nipponese are and on what they base their culture." 8 And although the Japanese, as Emilio Gentile has noted, had even before the war become a model for how the Italian Fascists could utilize ancient traditions in a revolutionary way, Pound's proposal to translate Confucius in order to advance the Axis war effort was a very peculiar business. 9 Redman comments that Pound was "following his own program at least as much as a program for Italian propaganda," and implies that he was exploiting his paymasters in a commendable way. 10 But it was more likely that Pound genuinely believed that Confucianism, which he had paired with the American tradition in Cantos 52-71, genuinely shared the cultural ethos of revolutionary fascism.
Meanwhile the war was drawing near its conclusion. In the spring of 1944 the Allies captured Rome, and then, as the primary front shifted to France, allowed the Italian campaign to stall just north of Tuscany. (They took Pisa, for example, but did not bother with Liguria.) Yet the destruction had been immense. Towns like Rapallo were bombed insistently, and slowly but surely many of the art treasures of Northern Italy were damaged. On Sunday, 4 June 1944, Pound read in the Corriere della Serra that bombs had severely damaged the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini, his touchstone of Renaissance civilization and the power of the human imagination to renew itself. 11 Pound's personal life was touched by an almost equally ominous disruption--in May he and his wife Dorothy were forced to vacate their apartment by the seashore and move to a house on the cliffs of Sant'Ambrogio with Olga Rudge, with whom Pound had been carrying on a relationship for almost twenty years; the Sant'Ambrogio house witnessed but could barely contain the running friction between the two women he loved.
From then on, if we are to judge by the poetry he wrote, Pound's state of mind, strained by his domestic relations, swung between defiant denial and a passivity bordering on the feeling of an afterlife. The defiance appears in the Italian Cantos 72 and 73, whispered about for years and finally published for the first time in the U.S. in 1987. 12 They were written in response to two events. On 16 December 1944, Mussolini made what was to be his last public speech, a stirring appeal for patriotic efforts to stop the Allied forces, which ended with a call for a riscossa, a counterattack. Four days earlier, on 12 December, the Futurist poet and ardent Fascist F. T. Marinetti had died, and the combination of the two events spurred Pound into writing. He attempted his new cantos in Italian and they express their fascist loyalties in the baldest way imaginable. 13 Canto 73 represents the exultation of Guido Cavalcanti, who has returned from the sphere of Venus to witness the heroism of a young girl who sacrificed her life for her country by leading Canadian soldiers who had raped her into a minefield. The canto enacts the Fascist ritual of celebrating martyrs of the "faith," as does Canto 72, originally entitled "Presenza!," echoing the Fascist call to order and recalling the word "Presente," inscribed one thousand times around the Sacrarium of the Fascist Martyrs at the center of the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution in Rome. 14 Canto 72 depicts the appearance of Marinetti's spirit, who asks to appropriate Pound's body so that Marinetti can continue to t in the war. Marinetti, though, is displaced by Pound's friend Manlio Torquato Dazzi, and then by the ferocious re of Ezzelino da Romano, the early thirteenth-century Ghibillene whom Dante sees boiling among the tyrants of Inferno XII. It is in Ezzelino's suitably enraged voice that Pound calls for the damnation of treacherous Italian peacemakers and for the revenge of the monuments at Rimini.
Having drafted the two poems in a notebook, along with still more materials in Italian, Pound published a fragment of Canto 72 and all of 73 in a newspaper addressed to sailors in the navy of the Salò Republic. Even before they were printed he had gone on with Italian sequels, drafts that contain visionary moments on which Pound would draw that summer in writing the Pisan Cantos. 15 The Italian work, which was evidently abandoned after several months and includes manuscripts and multiple typescripts, begins with a visionary meeting on the hillside near Sant'Ambrogio with "la scalza," a barefoot girl, and her companions. 16 The visionary troupe includes Cunizza da Romano, the sister of the tyrant Ezzelino who had been courted by the troubadour poet Sordello. 17 Cunizza (Pound believed) spent her old age in the house of Guido Cavalcanti when Dante was a young boy, so transmitting the lyrical power of Provence to Italy. 18 Pound's setting is the gulf of Liguria, a scene of steep cliffs, climbing olive groves, and natural beauties. In one typescript, Pound speaks of hearing "the ancient voices" ("le vetuste voc[i]") louder than ever before ("più che mai prima"), "clear and more frequent" ("chiare e più sovente"). As the world falls apart around him, he reassures himself that these ancient voices represent a paradisal bedrock in human experience which cannot be destroyed. And in the hillside typescript, he portrays this ancient wisdom emanating from the re of Cunizza, who appears at the crossing of three paths (the triedro) near an olive grove. There, her hair shining with copper and gold, she defends her ferocious brother. Yet what she says is less important than the effect she makes, for in these texts Pound does his best to reproduce the atmospherics he admired in Dante's Paradiso. Cunizza is followed by another apparition, Isotta degli Atti, the lover of Sigismondo Malatesta who had reportedly inspired him to build the Tempio Malatestiano, and she is compared with a chrysalis the color of light. Isotta and Cunizza blend with the moonlit landscape and, with other res like themselves, fashion a compound presence both intercessor and spirit of place--a sometimes queen, sometimes waif whom Pound frequently addresses as "la luna" (the moon). An apparent embodiment of charity or compassion, this visionary presence is unthinkable apart from art and poetry, and she appeals to us aesthetically rather than morally. This is hardly surprising in Pound, who ordinarily thinks of morality as an outgrowth of intense perception. But it does represent an extremely delicate, even precarious experience on which to base the kind of judgments Pound soon found himself wanting to make.
The verses of these Italian Cantos 74 and 75 were still in Pound's head when in May, four months later and with the Allies in control of Italy, he was captured and nearly killed by marauding partisans, then released. He turned himself in to the American army and after three weeks of bureaucratic shuffle was incarcerated. Treated as a possible target of rescue by remaining Fascists, Pound, aged nearly sixty, was held for three weeks (from 24 May to 15 June) in a wire cage exposed to the elements in the U.S. Army Disciplinary Training Center (DTC) outside Pisa. Shattered by the exposure to intense summer weather and by solitary confinement, he suffered a breakdown. He was released from the cage and moved to the Center's medical compound, where he occupied an officer's tent and acquired a packing crate table, together with some pencils and writing pads; now he set about composing the poem that would make his postwar reputation.
Pound's manuscript comprises the first text of The Pisan Cantos proper (Cantos 74-84), and at this point two things about it are worth noting. First, it is a distinct version of the text, containing much that was later omitted. Second, it is conditioned in crucial ways by the earlier typescripts of the Italian Cantos 74 and 75 and their related manuscripts, from which he borrowed freely. The Canto 74 that he finally published, for example, returns several times to a visionary encounter with Cunizza at the crossing of the three paths ("al Triedro"), and with her companion who whispers "I am the moon" ("Io son' la Luna"). And the first page of Canto 76 as published retains a passage every element of which had been sketched out in Italian earlier in the year:
But on the high cliff Alcmene,
Dryas, Hamadryas ac Heliades
flowered branch and sleeve moving
Dirce et Ixotta e che fu chiamata Primavera
in the timeless air
that they suddenly stand in my room here
between me and the olive tree
or nel clivo ed al triedro?
and answered: the sun in his great periplum
leads in his fleet here
sotto le nostre scoglie
under our craggy cliffs
alevel their mast-tops
Beyond these linguistic holdovers, however, it is apparent that Pound's manuscript carries on the otherworldly mood of his Italian verses, and like them aestheticizes his experience. The re of "the barefoot girl," though sometimes shading into the Virgin Mary, derives from his thinking about the troubadours and Cavalcanti. As in his famous translation of "Donna mi prega," he celebrates a love that does not take "delight" in its object but "in the being aware." He understands, he tells us elsewhere, the true "matter of Dante's paradiso" to be not moral philosophy, but rather "the glass under water, the form that seems a form seen in a mirror," and similar "realities perceptible to [heightened] sense." And, he says, he admires Cavalcanti in some ways more than Dante, because, being a "natural" rather than a "moral" philosopher, a thinker more like Erigena than Virgil, Cavalcanti treats this "matter" more intensely. 19
It is in the spirit of these remarks that the manuscript text of The Pisan Cantos begins. Most strikingly, the draft starts with the verses that now appear at lines ten and eleven--"The suave eyes, quiet, not scornful, / rain also is of the process." Here Pound telescopes a vision of the stilnovisti beloved with a mystical reading of Confucius very like the one that concludes his contemporary translation of the Unwobbling Pivot: "The unmixed functions (in time and space) without bourne. This unmixed is the tensile light, the Immaculata. There is no end to its action." 20 "The suave eyes," then, initiate a poem whose theme is meant to involve the redeeming energies of light and reason, and whose essential shape unfolds in intuitions of Aphrodite that prepare us for the appearance of "pale eyes as if without fire" in Canto 80, for the subtle eyes without anger in Canto 81 (in carnival mask as were Cunizza's eyes in the Italian cantos), and ultimately for Canto 83, in which other eyes, Pound exults, "pass and look from mine."
Which is to say that in its thematic contours the longhand text of The Pisan Cantos is not radically different from certain currents of the published text, at least as it has been interpreted since the 1950s. 21 And yet, in light of the fascist fury of the Italian Cantos 72 and 73 and of the visions of the Italian Cantos 74 and 75, this first English version of the work has a very different feel. Pound, we can now see, did not discover the eyes that The Pisan Cantos celebrate in the Pisan landscape, nor did they enter his consciousness either because of his bitter incarceration or due to the kindness of his fellow inmates. He had them already in mind, and he used them to filter his experience, which helps to explain a nagging dissonance in the poem. The goddesses of The Pisan Cantos are disconcertingly slight in relation to the depth of experience we find in Pound's more genuine moments. They are also oddly disengaged from it: they tend to appear in histrionic, even sentimental passages that speak of ecstacy, whereas the poem's great moments invoke human sympathy; and yet Pound calls on their force and counsel to justify a jeremiad against his accusers and the modern world.
This dissonance corresponds to another off-note, the way the sequence emphasizes endearing glimpses of nature. Pound's disciplined concentration on the natural object had made his reputation, of course, and The Pisan Cantos, in manuscript as in publication, boast a number of celebrated examples. Pound himself even calls attention to their importance when, near the end of Canto 78, he remarks, "as for the solidity of the white oxen in all this / perhaps only Dr. Williams (Bill Carlos) / will understand its importance, / its benediction. He wd / have put in the cart." But Pound's use of the word "benediction" should make us pause. The white oxen here, along with the many small creatures that subsequently appear in the sequence (the katydid, Madame Vespa the wasp, and the green midge half the size of an ant), are agents of that same force that flowed through Cunizza--a force that had more to do with beauty and power than with human fellowship. So in The Pisan Cantos, the resurgent power of nature that in Canto 83 insures that the "mint springs up again / in spite of Jones's rodents" is directly related to what in Pound's winter manuscripts transcended the rubble of the war and whispered "voices / clear and more frequent." The small creatures, on which so much of the poem's message depends, belong to a force as preliminary to Pound's Pisan experience as la luna (the moon). Instead of instancing unbidden interruptions of the untainted here and now, they manifest power that Pound equates with ancient discourse and characterizes in terms of a Confucian "process" that he unselfconsciously turns to political purposes.
No less than in Emerson or Thoreau, in other words, nature in The Pisan Cantos confronts an isolated man that he may teach what appears to be a timeless lesson. And especially as in Thoreau, whom Pound had praised in the early 1940s, the timeless lesson bears an undercurrent of very timely politics. In the writing of Thoreau and Emerson, nature appears as a polemical counter in a campaign of cultural resistance to the exchange relationships of modern industrial life. And in the "Baker Farm" section of Thoreau's Walden, Thoreau throws in relief both the natural world and "the only true America" by means of an ugly portrait of an Irish family identified with life in the marketplace. At Pisa, Pound replicates the same discourse, substituting Jews for Thoreau's Irish. What nature tells him has the force of a political jeremiad, only it now resonates not only with the politics of American nativism but with the politics of fascism, which sees marketplace capitalism as the primary hindrance to the emergence of a revolutionary new society. And no less than in Walden's nostalgia for an America that has passed, Pound's elegy turns frequently sour.
Yet along with the carryovers from the 1945 Italian Cantos, the maunuscript text of The Pisan Cantos also marks the emergence of a second poetic idiom, a major change in poetic practice that runs counter to the Italian drafts' symbolism. When Pound started writing in the medical compound, he proceeded as if he were keeping a poetic diary, combining narrative with observation and starting from a very specific moment. The earliest event he identifies was the hanging of a fellow prisoner, Louis Till, on 2 July 1945. Near the beginning of Canto 74 Pound records that "Till was hung yesterday," and in another manuscript passage a few pages later he inserts the date "July 6th."
The material's diary-like texture is reinforced by the first use Pound made of it. When he was at last permitted to write to his wife Dorothy, he sent her fragments of his work in place of substantive communication. The first of these enclosures consisted of what would later become the suite's most famous lines ("Pull down thy vanity"). In his accompanying note, dated 23 September, Pound said that he was sure the lines would be "more human than a dull letter," and added that they were "mild" enough for his mother to see. 22 Such was the first context of Canto 81, but it would not be the last.
Pound initially assumed he would preface the sequence with the already drafted Italian Cantos 74 and 75, for the manuscript refers to what is now Canto 75 as "Canto LXXVII" and what is now Canto 76 as "Canto LXXVIII." By 2 October, though--a sign of his change in practice--he tentatively decided to forget about the Italian manuscripts, and he wrote Dorothy "I have done a Decad 74/83, which dont seem any worse than the first 70." He also seems to have been quite definite that Canto 83 would be the last, because on 4 October he instructs her to sound out T. S. Eliot about publishing "cantos 72 or 74 to 83."
By the onset of his composition at Pisa, then, and lasting until a point when The Pisan Cantos as we know them had reached an advanced state, Pound's preoccupation with goddesses and katydids was overshadowed by concern with the fate of the people he knew and the affections of the family he was writing for. The diary-like openness of the text also indicates that he was less certain of where he would start and where he would end than his visionary structure would suggest. Which helps put, I believe, the Pisan landscape in context different from either the sentimental or the ideological reading mentioned above. A note from Dorothy to Pound before she had read any of the Pisans is of use. On 25 September, Dorothy, unsure that Pound would ever receive her message, wrote, "Should this reach you.--You may imagine that I am thinking of you all the time: but I do not worry all that time. I only hope captivity is not proving bad for your health, & that you are able to work at some writing or other. The moment perhaps for those 'Memoirs' [struck by Dorothy in note] 'Memories'?"
The word "Memories" here has Dorothy's quotes around it, and points to the fact that the two of them had already discussed the possibility of a work about Pound's life. That explains why, on 13 October, having seen parts of Cantos 74, 76, 80 and 81, she writes with the delight of a prophet confirmed (and then with a nagging reservation about the use of private experience): "Of course," she exclaims, "all these last, apparantly, scraps, of cantos, are your self, the memories that make up yr. person."
Considering how charged issues of memory had become for Pound, Dorothy's questions would have been haunting. In the account of his American lawyer, Julien Cornell:
after a week or so of the mental and physical torment of confinement in the cage, Pound's mind gave way. He says that he can now recall only the sensation that the top of his head was empty; also that his eyebrows were constantly taut in a raised position, due to the heat and glare. . . . he was stricken with violent terror and hysteria, and also affected with amnesia. 23
The amnesia, it seems, was most terrifying of all. As he told Jerome Kavka, the young therapist assigned to his case in his early days at St. Elizabeths, he felt he had "burst a mainspring at Pisa." And although, as Kavka noted, it seems that Pound "deplored the psychoanalytic method" partially because "it would bring up too many painful memories," when his mind went at Pisa, Pound was desperate to remember so that he could maintain his self-esteem. 24 (As late as February 1946 he would movingly complain to James Laughlin from St. Elizabeths that as he was no longer required to "THINK anymore [I] shall be happy when I begin (i.e. IF) to remember.") 25
Whatever his conflicted feelings about them, at Pisa Pound did write his "Memories," and in them he resurrected persons young and old, famous and obscure. And it is the exercise of this remembering, working with and against a sensitized response to the landscape, that gives these cantos a place on our shelves. Although there are ugly blinkers on Pound's sympathy, they ultimately seem forgivable because of the generous way he remembers the dead.
Nor did his exercise lack an appropriate literary frame. As Achilles Fang observed in the late 1950s, Pound's rememberings derive precedent and structure from a work he had for many years praised and imitated. In 1921, Pound had used Francois Villon's "Grand Testament" for an opera. Now, fearing he might succeed Till on the gallows, he imagines himself with Villon "under les six potences." Hence a great deal of The Pisan Cantos can be construed as an elaboration of the "Testament"'s stanza 29: "Where are those laughing comrades / that I was with in former days, / who sang so well, talked so well / and so excelled in word and deed? / Some are dead and stiff--/ nothing now remains of them: / may they find peace in Paradise, / and may God save the rest." 26
Pound, though, did not simply reproduce Villon's recitation of legacies. Concen-trating on those cries in the last extremity that punctuate Villon's tough humor, the Pisan Cantos throughout associate memory with broken pride, forgiveness, unconscious intensity, and tears. 27 And though it may be argued that Pound's tears started out in self-pity, very early in the composition they become fused with the kind of compassion that (like the sunset in Purgatorio VIII that Canto 74 quotes) "softens" ("ch'intenerisce") the heart. Like a mantra that sidesteps psychic resistance and discovers sympathetic powers beyond the ego, Pound's mnemonic exercise, he tells us, restored his power to feel. In his words it bathed the "dust and glare evil" of his confinement with a fountain of self-forgetful reminiscence. And he recorded the experience with gratitude. So in Canto 74, shortly after the echo of Dante's sunset, "the tides [that] follow Lucina" remind him "that [he] had been a hard man in some ways / a day as a thousand years." And in Canto 80, Villon's plea, "repos donnez a cils," unleashes Pound's answering French: "Les larmes que j'ai crées m'inondent / Tard, très tard je t'ai connue, La Tristesse / I have been hard as youth sixty years."
This confession, validated by Pound's frequent testimonials to the dead, acquires increasing poignancy in the text preserved in the manuscript, and, parallel with the orchestrations of nature and Aphrodite, culminates in Pound's intended conclusion. Canto 83 starts with Eregina and light but finds its completion in hudor--water in the form of mist, rain, and tears. It is perhaps most poignant in Pound's memory of H. D., the dryad "whose eyes are like the clouds over Taishan / When some of the rain has fallen / and half remains yet to fall." But the Canto is almost as moving in its filial close, where Pound gives voice to his elderly mother and his late Aunt Frank. Their recollections reach back "40 years, 60 years?" to another era. 28
Thus, against the grain of the autograph manuscript's visionary and mystified symbolic structure, but reinforced by the fragmentary movement of the Cantos' modernist narrative idiom, Pound had superimposed on the Dantescan epic model he had followed from the mid-1920s the lyric, episodic model of Villon. The Testament's generic pull toward open lyric progression proved ideal for recording the flow of Pound's day-to-day memories, perceptions, and activities. And Villon's ideological coordinates reinforced some of the poem's prefascist sources--an identification, for example, with the outlaw instead of the governor, the renegade instead of the policeman, the bohemian instead of the courtier.
However, the composition of the Pisan Cantos did not fully conform even to the altered premises just described, premises that fueled the poem until 4 October 1945 when Pound still intended to make Canto 83 the last poem in his new sequence. On 5 October, once again the Cantos were wrenched into another course. On that day Dorothy was allowed to visit for the first time and she now reported to Pound the news that the poet J. P. Angold had died. As Pound wrote on 8 October, he was heartbroken; Angold had been the "best granite" of his poetic generation. On the same day Pound began an unforeseen Canto 84 with a cry of grief. He continued in the same vein after 17 October with farewells to the collaborators Laval and Quisling, an angry lament for a new set of "martyrs." Also after the 17th, he began heavily revising earlier parts of the poem. 29 Pound was unsure about the appropriateness of Canto 84, though, and both his manuscript and typescript contain several pages dated 11 November that he finally removed. 30 Only his departure from the DTC seems to have ended his postscripts. He was without warning removed for transfer to Washington at half past eight in the evening on 16 November 1945, and on 4 December Dorothy received the rest of his typescript. 31
Parts of Canto 84 were fully of a piece with what he had already written. Its finale, for instance, was genuinely moving, though off-balance. In lines he later excised, he laments (as one critic has said he does in The Pisan Cantos as a whole) "the errors his personal life," 32 and he uncomfortably recalls the two women his domestic arrangements had grieved ("I know I ask a great deal"). 33 Yet this conclusion was not what his heartsick anger wanted to say. The most dramatic evidence of Pound's mood during these weeks and the keynote of the third distinct stage of The Pisan Cantos text forms a fitting counterpart to the Canto 84 he had just composed. The famous opening elegy to Mussolini, which seems to give The Pisan Cantos so much of their characteristic tone, was an afterthought. I give the passage as it appears on Pound's first typescript:
The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant's bent
shoulders
Manes / Manes was tanned and stuffedthus
B[enito], and la C[lara], a Milanoby the heels at Milano
that magots shd/ ead the dead bullock
DIGENES, but the twice crucified
where in history will you find it
yet say this to the Possum, a bang, not a whimper
with a bang not with a whimper
To build the city of Dioce whose terraces are the
colour of stars
These lines, far from being the originating kernel of the suite, in fact surfaced slowly. Pound made notes for the verses about Manes and the city of Dioce as early as July; sometime later he wrote out a version without Dioce but including the dream, Benito and La Clara; and still later, he recopied the lines on a leaf between pages ninety-one and ninety-two of the Canto 74 manuscript and typed them, still without Dioce, onto a separate sheet. 34 We know that he did not insert them into the text even in early October from the evidence of the typewriters. Even after he had retyped the first two-thirds of Canto 74 sometime after 17 October, the Mussolini lines had not yet been inserted. In one late typescript, Pound in fact had written an "incipit" next to the "Canto ?74" above the first lines of his text, lines that still began "The suave eyes, quiet, not scornful." It was likely among his last decisions at Pisa to affix the page with the lines on Mussolini, beginning "The enormous tragedy of the dream," adding in longhand "To build the city of Dioce. . . ." Then and only then did he boldly pencil in page "1" and with the same pencil renumber pages one through nine.
But however belated, or rather precisely because belated, Pound's new opening pointed to the emergence of a distinctive version of the text. By which I mean not that he rewrote his poem, but rather that he changed enough cues to make what remained vibrate in a different way. Together with all the changes he had already made--the remembrances of personal friends he had excised from Canto 74; the political Canto 84 he had added in October and November; his decision to cut the personal ending of that canto--the new opening lines transformed his elegy to a destroyed world into an explicitly political statement.
In Pound's completed typescript, it becomes difficult not to read even ambiguous passages along political lines. Thus the Confucian references on the first pages of Canto 74, which Pound had flavored with Cavalcanti, now seem primarily political, as were the Confucian Cantos 52-61. Think of "what whiteness will you add to this whiteness, / what candor?" Pound had originally found the question in Mencius, where it is asked by a disciple after Confucius's death, and he quoted it in an unpublished 1941 fragment at Yale. 35 But in its new surroundings, the question is hard to dissociate from the death of Mussolini, which took place on 28 April 1945. Or consider, one line before it, "What you depart from is not the way," which was suggested by a discussion of process in The Unwobbling Pivot. 36 We can read the words as a self-accusation, meaning roughly: "adversity has shown me problems in my way of living; and so my old life could not have been the way." And in fact Pound had first written on his manuscript "what is left is not the way." With the new opening of Canto 74, though, the line all but shouts: "I know the way, and I am not going to leave it."
Also, think about Pound's tone. The Mussolini lines send The Pisan Cantos in this third version on its way bristling with self-protective hostility. Reading quickly, we are likely to remember not Pound's openness or his generosity, but a "proud and intransigent . . . stoicism" that allows him "to control and order" chaos and despair. 37 In this mood nature sounds less like an unpredictable series of quotidian miracles than a force allied with Pound and eager to rebuke their common enemies. Nor can he afford to sympathize with America in this version of the poem. And so in a truncated Canto 81 his emphasis now shifts from vision to admonition, and Pound's possessed voice cries out, in Peter D'Epiro's words, against "the empty pride of his victorious captors (and the nation they serve, along with its self-righteous artists)" 38:
"Master thyself, then others shall thee beare'
Pull down thy vanity
Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail,
A swollen magpie in a fitful sun,
Half black half white
Nor knowst' ou wing from tail
Pull down thy vanity
How mean thy hates
Fostered in falsity,
Pull down thy vanity,
Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity,
Pull down thy vanity,
I say pull down.
I wish to conclude, however, with a caution not to emphasize the ressentiment of this outcry too much. Because of the succeeding frames that Pound incorporated into the manuscript and typescript texts of The Pisan Cantos, it seems to me that George Kearns is as justified arguing that Canto 81 is a "confession of [Pound's own] failure and vanity" as Peter D'Epiro is when he holds it confesses nothing. 39 Pound provided encoded instructions for both, with the result that neither reading by itself suffices. To appropriate Jerome McGann, in The Pisan Cantos as in The Cantos as a whole Pound left the telos of his writing indeterminate as he composed, and he thus opened it to contradictory interpretations. In McGann's words, as the poem's images succeed one another, each detached from narrative support, Pound's "discourse accumulates a structure that grows increasingly overdetermined." The result is that "every part becomes open to invasion from every other part." 40 What a given image signifies, then, may change dramatically from year to year or, as in this case, from month to month. Thus the opening and conclusion of The Pisan Cantos, which seem unmistakably to announce the fascist sympathies of the suite as a whole, are in fact late additions to a work whose earlier impulses had been decidedly mixed. It is true that the belated opening and conclusion resonate with the mourning of fascist martyrs in Cantos 72 and 73, but it is equally true that they are out of tune with the poetic diary that Pound had written in the interim. Rather than announcing the central "message" of the poem, they speak to the personal frustration and rage that marked the last stage of the poem's composition.
Nor are the shifting ideological currents just described aberrant in Pound's work. Far from being an accident of Pound's unusual circumstances at Pisa, the opposition of aesthetic ideals in The Cantos between symbolist closure and diary-like openness, or Pound's ideological opposition between mandarin values (Confucius and Mussolini) and bohemian-anarchist ones (Villon), recurs in the poem from the beginning. The same oppositions characterize Pound's creative and editorial practices from the 1910s to the 1960s. To cite a dramatic example, the text of Canto 6 as revised for A Draft of XXX Cantos , which contributed an important predecessor (Cunizza) to the goddesses of The Pisan Cantos, was when originally published in 1919 a feminist document, related to Pound's work on The New Freewoman. 41
One way of framing the ideological inconsistencies of especially The Pisan Cantos would be to say that just as years earlier Pound had begun writing one (quasi-anarchist) version of the modernist long poem and had inadvertently shifted into another (fascist) one, here the process was momentarily reversed. To put it more broadly, the ideological affiliations between fascism and modernist poetics cannot and should not be understood in terms that presuppose a straightforward reciprocity, easy synchronization, or veiled collusion. To be sure, modernism and fascism shared common backgrounds of knowledge, beliefs, and discursive practices, and at various points between 1920 and 1945 each was often aggressive in trying to appropriate, legitimate, and transform the other. The outcome was complex. Their affiliations were strong enough to encourage Pound in his attempt to write a modernist epic of the fascist experiment; but they were also problematic enough to interfere with his efforts even when he was working at the height of his powers and most wanted to do so.
Moreover, the actual relations between Pound's earlier American variety of revolutionary modernism and his later fascism in 1945 seem anything but clear cut. Thus, the poem's insistence on natural observation, which seemed to contemporary readers in 1945 to be among its "American" stengths--connected to the poem's attitude of "repentance" and renewal--turns out to have strong "fascist" affiliations. On the other hand, the Villon-related segments, which have received relatively little attention by critics, can be connected to earlier, prefascist modernist practice; according to Emilio Gentile, in Italy between 1918 and 1920 those practices took the form of Futurism's dream of an "anarchist utopia of a New State, governed by Futurist artists" and boasting a "maximum of individual liberty and cultural cosmopolitanism." 42 No matter their reliance on certain features of Futurism, neither Hitler nor Mussolini could finally tolerate a renegade bohemia such as the one Marinetti dreamed about in the 1910s or Villon helped Pound voice in the 1940s. To argue otherwise is to see a consistency in the relations between modernism and fascism that history will not sustain.
Ronald Bush is Professor of Literature at the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of books on Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, the coeditor of Prehistories of the Future: the Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism, and at work on a book about The Pisan Cantos of Ezra Pound.
1. Robert Fitgerald, "'What Thou Lovest Well Remains,'" review of The Pisan Cantos, by Ezra Pound, The New Republic, August 1948; reprinted in Eric Homberger, ed., Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1972), 359-363.
2. Ezra Pound to Agnes Bedford, 8 April 1957; quoted in Ben D. Kimpel and T. C. Duncan Eaves, "More on Pound's Prison Experience," American Literature 53 (November 1981): 474. Pound added, "and I can only recall one [emendation]."
3. In addition, Pound made or allowed his editors to make a number of local changes, especially to Canto 81, that included removing an extensive series of Chinese characters along with their Confucian overtones. There are more than sixteen lines substantially altered in Canto 81 in Pound's Washington revisions of a new typescript prepared by New Directions; the revised typescript also dropped a five line proem to Canto 84. As for the Chinese characters, there is no written evidence that Pound authorized their omission. On the contrary, in letters whose photocopies are in the Beinecke Library, Yale University, he badgered James Laughlin to put them all in and to do them well. Finally, however, New Directions's delays in publication seem to have worn Pound down. At least in a letter to Laughlin of 21 [February? 1947?], YCAL Mss 243, Beinecke Library, Yale University, he has been reduced to asking that one key ideogram be allowed to remain on page six of the Yale Poetry Review proofs of Canto 83 in lieu of the "more" he remembers being there originally.
Still, in the instructions Pound scrawled on the first page of the typescript copy that was sent to Faber and Faber, he urged the English firm to include the characters even though New Directions had not; see Pound to Faber and Faber, n.d., Butler Library, Columbia University. A letter from James Laughlin to T. S. Eliot, 23 December 1945, Lilly Library, University of Indiana, indicates that Laughlin was already worried about the expense of printing them; he asks Eliot to share the burden.
4. Ezra Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935; New York: Liveright, 1970), 34. For Mussolini's reception among Americans, liberal and otherwise, see John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View From America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).
5. Eva Hesse, "The End of The Cantos," in Ezra Pound, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 32.
6. Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (1938; New York: New Directions, 1952), 38.
7. Ezra Pound to Nino Sammartino, 26 February 1944; quoted in Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 249.
8. Ezra Pound to Fernando Mezzasoma, 15 March 1944; quoted in Redman, Pound and Italian Fascism, 250.
9. For Japan and Fascist Italy, see Emilio Gentile, "The Conquest of Modernity from Modernist Nationalism to Fascism," 1 (September 1994): 68.
10. Redman, Pound and Italian Fascism, 251.
11. On the news of the Tempio's destruction, see Lawrence Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 212-3, 329-31.
12. See Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound: I CANTOS, trans. Mary de Rachewiltz (Milan: Mondadori, 1985), 825-35; and Ezra Pound, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1970), 423-36. Unless otherwise noted, all citations from the Cantos are from the New Directions text. Pound's own later translation of Canto 72 (probably made in the 1950s) was published by James Laughlin in The Paris Review 35 (fall 1993): 307-17.
13. On Mussolini's speech, see Rainey, Monument of Culture, 331-2. For riscossa in Pound's text, see Pound, I CANTOS, 1566. For commentary on Cantos 72 and 73 (some of it preliminary), see Massimo Bacigalupo, "The Poet at War: Ezra Pound's Supressed Italian Cantos," The South Atlantic Quarterly 83 (winter 1984): 69-79; Massimo Bacigalupo, "Ezra Pound's Cantos 72 and 73: An Annotated Translation," Paideuma 20 (spring-fall 1991): 9-29; Barbara C. Eastman, "The Gap in the Cantos: 72 and 73," Paideuma 8 (winter 1979): 415-27; and Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 637-40. See also Eva Hesse, Ezra Pound: Die Ausgefallenen Cantos LXXII Und LXXIII (Zurich: Arche, 1991); and Robert Casillo, "Fascists of the Final Hour: Pound's Italian Cantos," in Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture, ed. Richard J. Golsan (Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England, 1992), 98-127.
14. On the cult of fascist martyrs as one of the elements of a secular or political religion in fascist Italy, see Emilio Gentile, "Fascism as Political Religion," Journal of Contemporary History 25 (May-June 1990): 229-51, and Walter L. Adamson, "Fascism and Culture: Avant-Gardes and Secular Religions in the Italian Case," Journal of Contemporary History 24 (July 1989): 411-35.
15. Lines nine to thirty-five of Canto 72 were published with editorial help by Uberti as "Presenza di F. T. Marinetti" in the Marina Repubblicana, 15 January 1945. Canto 73 appeared in the same journal as "Cavalcanti--Corrispondenza Repubblicana," 1 February 1945. (The young girl's story came from a newspaper article in the Corriere della Serra, 1 October 1944; see Rainey, Monument of Culture, 243-7.) For Mary de Rachewiltz's commentary, see I CANTOS, 1569.
16. This rather large collection of manuscript and typescript material can be found in the Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge collections at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. The author is currently editing this material as part of a larger project on the composition of The Pisan Cantos.
17. Translations and commentary on Pound's typescripts of the Italian Cantos 74 and 75 have been published by Massimo Bacigalupo as the last part of his "Ezra Pound's Cantos 72 and 73." Reproductions of the Italian typescripts will appear in Ronald Bush, "'Quiet, not scornful?': The Composition of The Pisan Cantos," in A Poem Including History: The Cantos of Ezra Pound, ed. Lawrence Rainey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming).
18. Dante had placed much-married Cunizza in the sphere of Venus in Canto IX of his Paradiso, and, twenty years before Pisa, Pound, then meditating on the mystical precisions of Guido Cavalcanti's "Donna mi prega," began to imagine the reasons why. Some time between 1927 and 1930, he inserted Cunizza into a revised version of Canto 6, connecting her magnanimous liberation of family slaves with the quality of the love she shared with her troubadour suitor. He expanded the story in the contemporary Canto 29. Then, a few years later, in Canto 36, he insinuated Cunizza's remarks in the Paradiso about God's thrones into a constellation that included "Donna mi prega," Erigena, Sordello and a paean to the sacred light of coitus. All this would be explained in his Guide to Kulchur, where he characterized Cunizza as the woman whose "charm and imperial bearing [and] grace" had been responsible for the last glow of Provencal song and for the transmission of the culture of mystical philosophy and Romanesque architecture to the young Guido and the younger Dante. See Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 107ff., and for commentary, Peter Makin, Provence and Pound (Berkeley: University of California Press), 199ff.
19. Citations are from Pound's "Cavalcanti" essay, circa 1927-8. See Ezra Pound, The Literary Essays (1954; New York: New Directions, 1968), 154, 158.
20. Ezra Pound, trans., The Great Divide, the Unwobbling Pivot, the Analects, by Confucius (New York: New Directions, 1969), 187.
21. See Forrest Read, "The Pattern of the Pisan Cantos," Sewanee Review 65 (summer 1957): 400-19.
22. Quotations from these and the other letters to and from Dorothy Pound are from the letters, Series PM.3, Dorothy Pound, Lilly Library, University of Indiana, and are cited courtesy of Omar Pound, Dorothy Pound's executor.
23. Cornell's statement occurs in a letter to the psychiatrist Wendell Muncie; see Julien Cornell, The Trial of Ezra Pound: A Documented Account of the Treason Case by the Defendant's Lawyer (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 30-31.
24. Jerome Kavka, "Ezra Pound's Personal History: A Transcript, 1946," Paideuma 20 (spring-fall 1991): 150, 171. Kavka's intuitions about Pound's unease with directed recollection are confirmed by Charles Olson, who talked to Pound in between the sessions with Kavka. Olson particularly recalls Pound's panic when Kavka forced him to write a life history. See Catherine Seelye, ed., Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths (New York: Viking, 1975), 54.
25. Pound to James Laughlin, [26 or 27] February 1946, YCAL Mss 243, photocopy in the Beinecke Library, Yale University.
26. On Pound and Villon, see Achilles Fang, "Materials for the Study of Pound's Cantos" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1958), 5-10. Translation of Villon from Anthony Bonner, trans., The Complete Works of Francois Villon (New York: Bantam, 1960), 33; hereafter abbreviated CWV.
27. See, in Canto 74, "the name of my family," from Villon (CWV, 36); "Absouldre . . . ," from Villon's "Epitaphe" (CWV, 162); "puvrette et ancienne" and "painted paradise," from "Ballade pur prier" (CWV, 68). In Canto 80, see "repos donnez . . . cils," from "Rondeau" (CWV, 122).
28. For the connection between Aunt Frank and this passage, see Carpenter, Life of Ezra Pound, 4.
29. We know about this last revision even though the original typescript pages have not survived because of the evidence of Pound's typewriters. Ever since he had started typing his manuscript, Pound had been using the army base machine, equipped with pica type. But, as a letter to Dorothy on 17 October tells us, on that day Olga Rudge and Pound's daughter Mary visited the DTC and brough his own machine, which used elite type. Knowing that, it becomes apparent from the typescript he delivered to his lawyer, Julien Cornell, in Washington D.C., that after 17 October Pound quickly rewrote a great deal of what he had thought of as a finished text. The first sixteen pages of the twenty-four page typescript of Canto 74, for example, had been redone on elite type.
30. The missing typescript pages of Canto 84 were published by Matthew Jennet in Sulfur 1 (spring 1981): 4-10.
31. The files at the Lilly Library record their arrival, which Dorothy acknowledges in a letter dated 13 December. See also Carpenter, Life of Ezra Pound, 694.
32. Quoted in Peter Nicholls, Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1984), 170.
33. The typescript's final lines are:
and it might have been avoided if
Joe Davies had gone to Berlin instead of to Moscow
"in our time
Give us peace."
If the hoar frost grip thy tent
Thou wilt give thanks when the night is spente
Italy, my Italy, my God, my Italy
Ti abbraccio la terra santa
Pound's last important revision was to type the penultimate couplet onto the typescript of an earlier page.
34. The first set of notes he remembered from what he had incribed in 1940 onto the title page of Dorothy's copy of the freshly issued Cantos LII-LXXI; see Massimo Bagicalupo, The Formèd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 101. In a conversation on 28 August 1991, Omar Pound told me that there was a second stage of this prehistory as well. A version of these lines are scribbled on the inside endpaper of the little Chinese dictionary (now at Hamilton College) that Pound took with him to Pisa. There is a photocopy of the second version of these lines at Yale, but the original was apparently owned by Ben D. Kimpel and T. C. Duncan Eaves, and is now the property of James Laughlin; see Kimpel and Eaves, "More on Pound's Prison Experience," American Literature 53 (November 1981): 474.
35. See Ezra Pound, The Great Digest, 194.
36. See Pound, The Great Digest, 101-3.
37. Nicholls, Ezra Pound, 166.
38. Peter D'Epiro, "Whose Vanity Must be Pulled Down," Paideuma 13 (fall 1984): 252. D'Epiro's article capped a decade long controversy over whether or not The Pisan Cantos should be read, as in most of the commentaries since Forrest Read's, as a statement of self-accusation and contrition. Summarizing both sides of the debate, D'Epiro made a persuasive case that it should not, and he has since been joined by Peter Nicholls, Ezra Pound, 161ff., and Jerome McGann, Towards a Literature of Knowledge (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989), 112ff.
39. George Kearns, Guide to Ezra Pound's Selected Cantos (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1980), 167.
40. McGann, Towards a Literature of Knowledge, 119.
41. See my "Excavating the Ideological Faultlines of Modernism: Editing Ezra Pound's Cantos," in Representing Modernist Texts: Editing as Interpretation, ed. George Bornstein (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 67-98.
42. Gentile, "The Conquest of Modernity," 70.


"Be still," the Voice said.
"Be still? Are you kidding?" I thought.
I've got to get my
my views opined
doctrines aligned
vices maligned
sins disinclined
My style designed
life plan outlined
hobbies defined
a wife to find
that You've assigned somewhere, presumably
and bear in mind
I've got the daily grind
sucks out the zest, the lemon rind
of life that comes and perks the mind
and all of these combined
just serve to take my bind
and wind it up
so this is why like most mankind
I'm disinclined
to lie inclined
and listen to
Your still, small Voice.


recycling spent batteries process leaching lithium processes battery material lithium-ion active LIBs LFP cathode recovery Zhang acid Recycling Lithium using current used materials Figure Batteries Power cobalt Chen LIB Recovery Battery Sources Yang solution Patent Table hydrometallurgical proposed Wang metals organic Li-ion Waste agent treatment ion reducing However, reaction waste ./j.jpowsour... Co, Liu high LiFePO capacity extraction recovered valuable Ni, cathodic thermal Chem. LCO Manag. direct reported Method iron manufacturing review separation Cathode Mater. Materials PVDF developed energy environmental method {border-style ./j.wasman... N.S. carbon low phosphate selective Hydrometallurgy Process U.S. black compounds px;} solid #ffffff;} Spent Zheng electrochemical metal new Energy Kim Lithium-Ion chemical provided Eng. Sun binder dissolution mAh/g methods purification types various water (accessed Available Supplementary anode major obtained online: precipitation presence process, step ./j.hydromet... Ion NMC Proceedings approach collector electric followed important including ions mass patented performed pyrometallurgical (according Material Mn, Recupyl Selective Zhou evolution following mixed oxide recover significant Cobalt Li, LiCoO Song Summary Sustain. Technol. approximately batteries. composition demonstrated electrode graphite here, material, material. materials, mixture potential prior relithiation safety studied summarized Huang Lastly, Lee Shin World addition batteries, decomposition described did different good industry inorganic large leach literature management oxide, precipitated pretreatment properties rate recycling. residue respectively. similar (s) ./j.resconrec... Conserv. Direct LIBs, LIBs. Recycl. Resour. Zhao Zhu ]). ]); addition, batteries: efficiency electrodes facilities feed market mechanical owing particularly preparation production rates solvent steps sulfate synthesis technologies type ./acssuschemeng.b ACS According Cao Environ. FePO Gaines Green HCl Hazard. Hydrometallurgical LiOH Lin Moreover, Secondary Springer Tables Tedjar Then, USA Used Zeng according based cells collection conditions consumption currently economy efficiencies global increase lower min oxalic oxidizing performance pilot processes, px; reduction regeneration shown suggested temperature transition {font-family °C. ./j.jhazmat... Adv. Bian Conversely, Cyanex Electrochemical Electrode Ganter Gao III Information International LCO, LFP, Leaching NMC, Ni-, Report Sci. Shi Sloop Therefore, air alkaline alternative amounts analysis atmosphere avoid cathodes cell chain circular compared considering contamination controlled crushing development discharge efficient example, font-size illustrated kinetics leaching, lithium-nickel-manganese-cobalt metallic oxalate oxidation packs plants products reactions research resulting second secondary separated soluble sorting studies suitable sulfuric sustainable treatment. use vehicles /Co /Mn Appl. Cells Co(II), Co-, Conference Considering Cu, European Han Int. Laucournet LiM Lithium, Lithium-ion Meshram Metal NMP Ref. References Sohn Synthesis achieved acids acids, agents agents, aluminum applied approaches aspect automatic carbonate collectors comparison components, cycle data des discussed double; easily elements emissions extract final flotation flow form great green impact indicated industrial inert initial leaching. manganese mineral nickel nitric precursors presented processing product provide publications published recent recycled remain remove represent salt scale selectively sensitive separation, simple slightly standard study summary surface time (g) ./s--- Acid Active August China Chinese Chung Co(II) E.J. Electric Environmental Extraction First, Furthermore, G.P. Guo Iron June K.Y. LiNi Life Meng Metals Mixed NY, NaOH Nature Nguyen Prabaharan Pyrometallurgy Retriev S.M. September Similarly, Soc. T.R. Technology Umicore Xie Zaghib allow allows ammonium anode, application aqueous binder, border-color border-width caused challenges chemistry chloride coating common concentration cost critical cycling design detached development. directly dissolved does effective electrolyte end-of-life entire estimated extracted frequently fresh gas general hazardous however, hydride include internal large-scale limited lithium-cobalt lithium-iron loop main manually manufacturers materials---t_Table materials. mechanism membrane model number oxidized paper phosphoric positive processes. range ratio reach reached reaching reagent reduce reduced require resources respectively, sales section selectivity significantly small solid; solubilized specifically, thermally thus, toxic treated value values wastes {font-style {font-weight °C) "R’s" (Canada) ./.. ./j.jclepro... Al, Amine Amouzegar B.-W. B.D. Chemistry Cho Circular Clean. Congress EVs Fan Finally, Foudraz Freitas French Gaustad Golmohammadzadeh Gratz Guan HNO Hailey Hydrothermal ICBR J.-C. Kepler Liang Lisbon, M.A. Manganese Materials. Mn(II) Mn-based Nan Nevertheless, New Ni(II), Nickel November PVDF, Pandey Peng Phosphate Portugal Prod. Propulsion Pyro-hydrometallurgy RSC Res. S.E. S.J. Separation Sorting Takacova Thermal X-ray Zou [], acid, additional advantage affect al.’s allowed anodic bold calcined cathode. chart chemistries. cleaning commercialization commercially complete completely complex components concluded conductive confirmed contained copper costly costs coupled courier; decrease dedicated degradation detailed difficult economic effect electrode. em; end environment evaporation film flowsheet follows fraction fractions fully generally generated governments higher hybrid hydrometallurgy hydroxide implementation implemented improved impurities incidents includes increased individual involves ionic issues kJ/mol) kinetic liquid liquor mass: medium, meet mild minimize molar novel obtain operations oxygen oxyhydroxide patent permission phase physical precursor presents primary probably process. promising promote pt;} pyrolysis quality rapid raw reagents rechargeable recycle reductive regenerate related release removed requires results risks scrap separate serve sintering sodium specific steel structural successfully technique techniques temperature, tons) transportation treat two-step typical usually versus vs. wide


//Demonstrate all of the following in separate JavaScript file (each response should be in separate file):


Chapter 5 Location and Scale
5.1 The Intuition
If we took a histogram and tried to describe it to someone else without showing it to them, the most most important pieces of information are usually the location and scale.1
We might describe the variable this way: “The values are about __________, give or take ________ or so.” We can think of the first blank as the location and the second blank as the scale.
- The location describes where the histogram is positioned along the left-right axis.
- The scale describes the width (or “spread” or “dispersion”) of the histogram.
Inspect the histogram of a hypothethical variable to the right. Notice the location and the scale. If we had to describe these data, we might say that our variable is “about zero give or take one or so.”
While this variable has a particular location (about zero), we can imagine shifting it left or right. The figure below shows some possible shifts. We could shift it way to the left, so that it’s “about -6” or a little bit to the right so that it’s “about two.”
We can also imagine increasing the scale (more spread) or decreasing the scale (less spread). The figure below shows some possible changes in scale. In each case, the “give or take” number is changing.
5.2 The Usual Measures
5.2.1 The Average
The most common measure of the location of a variable is the average.2 Suppose we have a variable (a list of numbers) \(X = \{x_1, x_2, ..., x_n\}\).
\[\begin{equation} \text{average} = \dfrac{\text{the sum of the list}}{\text{the number of entries in the list}} = \dfrac{\sum_{i = 1}^n x_i}{n} \nonumber \end{equation}\]
The average is easy to compute and easy to work with mathematically.3
Unfortunately, the average doesn’t have an easy interpretation. The best interpretation, in my mind, is as the balance-point for the data. If we imagine the left-right axis as a teeter-totter and stack the data along the beam according to their values, then the average is the position of the fulcrum that would balance the data-filled beam.
5.2.2 The Standard Deviation
The most common measure of scale is the standard deviation (SD). The intuition is subtle, so let’s look a a simple example. Rember, our goal is a "give-or-take number.
Suppose we have a list of numbers \(X = \{1, 2, 3, 4, 5\}\). The average of this list is 3, so we can compute the deviation from average for each value.
\[\begin{equation} \text{deviation from average} = d = \text{value} - \text{average} \nonumber \end{equation}\]
In this case, \(d = \{-2, -1, 0, 1, 2\}\).
We want to use these deviations to find a give-or-take number.
Here’s an initial idea. Just take the absolute values \(|d| = \{2, 1, 0, 1, 2\}\). These tell us how far each entry falls away from the average. Then we could average the absolute devations to find how far a typical entries falls away from the average of the list. In this case, we get 1.2. This is reasonable approach and we’ll refer to it as the average absolute devation or a.a.d. (It turns out that the a.a.d. isn’t a common quantity, so I don’t elevate it with an all-caps acronym.)
The a.a.d. has one big problem–it uses an absolute value. This introduces some computational and mathematical difficulties.4
So let’s do something similar. Rather than take the absolute value, let’s square the deviations, take the average, and then undo the square at the end, so that \(\text{SD} = \sqrt{\text{avg}(d^2)}\).
Sometimes taking the (3) square root of (2) the average of (1) the squares is called the RMS. In this case, the RMS of the deviations from the average is the SD, so that
\[\begin{equation} \text{SD} = \sqrt{\text{avg}(d^2)} = \sqrt{\dfrac{(x_i - \text{avg}(X))^2}{n}} = \text{RMS of deviations from average}. \nonumber \end{equation}\]
The SD moves smoothly as you move around the entries in the list.
To calculate the SD, first make this little table, with the list of values, the deviations from the average, and the squares of the deviations.
| \(X\) | \(d\) | \(d^2\) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | -2 | 4 |
| 2 | -1 | 1 |
| 3 | 0 | 0 |
| 4 | 1 | 1 |
| 5 | 2 | 4 |
Then compute the average of the squares of the deviations, which in this case is 2. Then take the square root of that average, which in this case is about 1.4. Notice that 1.4 is about 1.2 (the a.a.d.). The SD is bounded (weakly) below by the a.a.s., but they’ll usually be close, so we can think of the SD as how far a typical point falls away from the average.
5.3 Robust Alternatives
The average and the SD are mathematically nice. But they are not robust. Seemingly innocuous changes in the variable can lead to large changes in the average and SD.5
We can definite robustness more concretely: How many observations do I need to corrupt to make the summary arbitrarily large?
Suppose the toy variable \(X = \{0.1, -0.6, 1.1, 1.3, 0.2\}\). If I replace the first entry (0.1) with 1, 5, 10, 50, and so on, what happens to the average and SD? The table below shows that we can easily manipulate the average and SD by changing only one data point. In this sense, the average and SD are fragile.
| Summary | Average | SD |
|---|---|---|
| Actual Data Set | 0.42 | 0.70 |
| First entry of \(X\) replaced with 1 | 0.60 | 0.71 |
| …with 5 | 1.40 | 1.92 |
| …with 10 | 2.40 | 3.86 |
| …with 50 | 10.40 | 19.81 |
| …with 100 | 20.40 | 39.81 |
| …with 500 | 100.40 | 199.80 |
| …with 1,000 | 200.40 | 399.80 |
If corrupted data present a problem, then what do we mean by “corrupt”? There are (at least) three ways to imagine corrupting a measurement.
- First, perhaps we have a data entry error. While entering data in a spreadsheet, you entered the number 50,000 into the “hours spent watching the news per day” variable instead of the “income” variable.
- Second, perhaps our measurement procedure is noisy. Suppose we are coding Twitter posts by their support or opposition to President Trump. Our algorithm might interpret a sarcastic take as support when it actually presented intense opposition.
- Third, the substantive model might not apply to a particular observation. Take Clark and Golder’s project as an eplxame. They suggest that SMD systems should only have two parties. Indeed, this is a strong theoretical equilibirum. However, it might take several elections to reach this equilibrium. Parties might take several years to coordinate and consolodate. If we include a new democracy in the data set, then we might consider these data “corrupted” since the conceptual model doesn’t apply (yet).
The average and SD respond to even a small amount of corrupt data.
As an alternative to the average, we might use the median, which is more robust. The median is the/a number which splits the values in half, so that equal numbers of entries lie above and below the median.
We have two common robust alternatives to the SD. The interquartile range (IQR) is the difference between the 25th and 75th quantiles. The median absolute deviation (MAD) is the median of the absolute values of the deviations from the median (almost the a.a.d., but using the medians in place of averages). It turns out that multiplying the MAD by 1.4826 makes it similar to the SD in many dataset, so it’s common to rescale it.
To illustrate the robustness of each of our measures of location and scale, let’s imagine a variable with 10 observations \(X = \{-1.1, 1.5, -1, -0.1, -1.1, 0, -0.4, 0, 0.8, 0.4\}\). Let’s see how the measures change as we corrupt more and more of the observations.
| Summary | % Corrupted | Average | SD | Median | IQR | MAD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual Data Set | 0% | -0.10 | 0.81 | -0.05 | 1.15 | 0.96 |
| First entry of \(X\) replaced with 100 | 10% | 10.01 | 30.01 | 0.00 | 1.03 | 0.89 |
| First two entries… | 20% | 19.86 | 40.07 | 0.00 | 1.03 | 0.89 |
| First three entries… | 30% | 29.96 | 45.85 | 0.20 | 75.28 | 0.89 |
| First four entries… | 40% | 39.97 | 49.02 | 0.60 | 100.00 | 2.00 |
| First five entries… | 50% | 50.08 | 49.92 | 50.40 | 99.90 | 73.54 |
| First six entries… | 60% | 60.08 | 48.89 | 100.00 | 99.50 | 0.00 |
This table illustrates that while the average and SD respond to any corruption, the median, IQR, and MAD remain reasonable summaries of the uncorrupted variable with 40%, 20%, and 30% of the data corrupted, respectively. T
The percent of the data that one can corrupt before they can make the measure arbitrarily large is called the breakdown point. Here are the breakdown points for our measures:
| Measure | Breakdown Point |
|---|---|
| Average | 0% |
| SD | 0% |
| Median | 50% |
| IQR | 25% |
| MAD | 50% |
As you can see, the median and the MAD are highly robust–they achieve the theoretical maximum breakdown point.
5.4 Computation in R
We can easily calculate all these measures of location and scale in R.6
# create variable x = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5}
x <- 1:5
# compute measures of location and scale
mean(x) # average
## [1] 3
## [1] 1.581139
## [1] 3
## [1] 2
## [1] 1.4826
## [1] 1
The functions above work nicely for computing on whole variables. But in most cases, we are interested in comparing the summaries across groups.
Take the nominate data set for example.
# load packages
library(tidyverse)
# load nominate data
df <- read_rds("data/nominate.rds") %>%
glimpse()
## Rows: 7,080
## Columns: 7
## $ congress <int> 100, 100, 100, 100, 100, 100, 100, 100, 100, 100, 100, 100, …
## $ chamber <chr> "House", "House", "House", "House", "House", "House", "House…
## $ state <chr> "AL", "AL", "AL", "AL", "AL", "AL", "AL", "AK", "AZ", "AZ", …
## $ district <int> 2, 4, 3, 5, 6, 1, 7, 1, 2, 3, 5, 4, 1, 3, 1, 4, 2, 36, 10, 2…
## $ party <fct> Republican, Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, Republic…
## $ name <chr> "DICKINSON, William Louis", "BEVILL, Tom", "NICHOLS, William…
## $ ideology <dbl> 0.398, -0.213, -0.042, -0.175, -0.060, 0.373, -0.085, 0.279,…
For these data, we might want to know the average ideology for Republicans and Democrats. We could do it the hard way.
# create a data frame with only republicans
rep_df <- df %>%
filter(party == "Republican")
# compute average
mean(rep_df$ideology, na.rm = TRUE)
## [1] 0.4213385
But this is tedious, especially if we wanted to do it by party and Congress.
To compute these summaries for lots of subsets of the data, we have the group_by()/summarize()
workflow.
group_by()
defines several groups in the data frame. The first argument is the data frame to group (but we’ll %>%
it in). The remaining arguments are the grouping variables. You can think if the groups as a footnote at the bottom of the data set that just mentions the variables that define the groups of interest. Whenever we act (in the wrangling sense) on the data set and the action makes sense in the context of groups, the action will happen by group.
After grouping, we use summarize()
to create summaries for each group. The first argument is the data frame to summarize (but we’ll %>%
it in). The remaining arguments are the summarizes to compute. The names of the remaining arguments become variables in the resulting data frame.
smry_df <- df %>%
# group by party and congress
group_by(party, congress) %>%
# compute all of our measures of location and scale
summarize(average = mean(ideology, na.rm = TRUE),
sd = sd(ideology, na.rm = TRUE),
median = median(ideology, na.rm = TRUE),
iqr = IQR(ideology, na.rm = TRUE),
mad = mad(ideology, na.rm = TRUE),
mad1 = mad(ideology, constant = 1, na.rm = TRUE)) %>%
# quick look at our work
glimpse()
## `summarise()` regrouping output by 'party' (override with `.groups` argument)
## Rows: 32
## Columns: 8
## Groups: party [2]
## $ party <fct> Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, …
## $ congress <int> 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, …
## $ average <dbl> -0.3092901, -0.3130075, -0.3142407, -0.3333065, -0.3615000, …
## $ sd <dbl> 0.1653092, 0.1664293, 0.1658089, 0.1609726, 0.1524251, 0.137…
## $ median <dbl> -0.3200, -0.3200, -0.3200, -0.3360, -0.3815, -0.3835, -0.384…
## $ iqr <dbl> 0.22750, 0.22600, 0.23025, 0.24000, 0.20550, 0.17850, 0.1730…
## $ mad <dbl> 0.1675338, 0.1719816, 0.1690164, 0.1793946, 0.1490013, 0.132…
## $ mad1 <dbl> 0.1130, 0.1160, 0.1140, 0.1210, 0.1005, 0.0895, 0.0870, 0.08…
We can plot this measures to get a sense of how they change over time. Notice that mad
(rescaled by multiplying by 1.4826) closely corresponds to the SD, but mad1
(not rescaled) is much smaller.
# wrangle the data for plotting
gg_df <- smry_df %>%
pivot_longer(average:mad1, names_to = "measure") %>%
mutate(measure_of = ifelse(measure %in% c("average", "median"), "location", "scale")) %>%
glimpse()
## Rows: 192
## Columns: 5
## Groups: party [2]
## $ party <fct> Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, Democrat…
## $ congress <int> 100, 100, 100, 100, 100, 100, 101, 101, 101, 101, 101, 101…
## $ measure <chr> "average", "sd", "median", "iqr", "mad", "mad1", "average"…
## $ value <dbl> -0.3092901, 0.1653092, -0.3200000, 0.2275000, 0.1675338, 0…
## $ measure_of <chr> "location", "scale", "location", "scale", "scale", "scale"…
I use these terms intentionally. Later, when we discuss random variables, the terms “location” and “scale” will return (with similar meanings). Indeed, we paramaterize many distributions according to their location and scale. For example, the normal distribution has a location parameter \(\mu\) and a scale parameter \(\sigma\).↩
Some people refer to the “average” as the “mean”. I prefer to avoid this because the “mean” might also refer to the expectation of a random variable. I use “average” and “expected value” to differentiate these two meanings.↩
The median, alternatively, is not easy to compute and quite difficult to work with mathematically.↩
Here’s the gist: If you take an entry and slide it up and down (i.e., make it larger or smaller), then the a.a.d. moves up and down as well. This is fine, except the a.a.s. doesn’t respond smoothly. The figure to the right shows what happens as we move the first entry on the list above around–notice the kink! The derivative of the a.a.d. isn’t define here (i.e., there are lots of tangents). This makes things hard mathematically.↩
The mathmatical ease and the substantive fragility are related.↩
For reasons I don’t want to deal with now, R uses the formula \(SD = \sqrt{\dfrac{(x_i - \text{avg}(X))^2}{n - 1}}\) rather than \(\sqrt{\dfrac{(x_i - \text{avg}(X))^2}{n}}\). This means that R’s SD will be slightly larger than the SD with my formula. This difference will be tiny in data sets with a typical number of observations.↩


LOGAN'S RUN A Film Review Copyright Dragan Antulov 2000
In Spring of 1982 the biggest television event in former Yugoslavia was the series of five science fiction films being premiered on Belgrade state television. Among them four were MGM classics made in late 1960s and 1970s - 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, LOGAN'S RUN, WESTWORLD, DEMON SEED (fifth was relatively obscure Croatian 1976 period horror IZBAVITELJ). Those four films left strong and lasting impression on the author of this review, reaffirming his love of science fiction and helping him to shape his taste in the movies, and also learning him to distinguish good from bad examples of the genre. The impact was even stronger, thanks to the fact that many of those films were re-aired shortly afterwards, as part of daytime educational program (and uncut, which should give you rather insightful look into the censorship standards of former Yugoslavia). On the other hand, although all those four films happened to be great, there was only one that found special place in my heart. It was LOGAN'S RUN, 1976 science fiction spectacle by Michael Anderson.
The plot of the film is based on the 1967 novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. It begins in the year 2274, in a world depopulated by industrial pollution where the survivors live in the huge city under the dome.  However, due to the population limit, all citizens must end their life at the age of thirty, being subjected to spectacular quasi- religious ritual of Carousel that offers vague hope of "renewal". Those who try to escape Carousel and live past their thirtieth birthday are known as Runners, and their capture and immediate execution is a job for the police force known as Sandmen. Logan 5 (played by Michael York) is a Sandman who is given a special task by Computer - he must locate mythical place that shelters Runners, known as Sanctuary, and destroy it. Logan, in order to achieve that task, must pretend to be a Runner and thus infiltrate the underground network of people who help Runners in their escape. Logan gets in touch with beautiful Jessica 6 (played by Jenny Agutter), one of the members of that group, and slowly builds her trust. She leads him to Sanctuary and Logan along the way falls in love with her, begins questioning his own life as a Sandman and decides to become Runner for real. But, Computer has sent another Sandman, his former best friend and colleague Francis 7 (played by Richard Jordan) who would hunt two of them even if it means going outside allegedly impenetrable city limits.
LOGAN'S RUN is often referred as the best example of a science fiction movie that didn't age very well. This is most evident in the area of special effects. In 1976 MGM spent huge sums of money for the special effects that were state-of-the-art for its time and actually won an "Oscar". But, only a year later, STAR WARS would set much higher standards and make LOGAN'S RUN look cheap and laughable. We become aware of film's age in the beginning, when the audience, which is introduced to the futuristic city by spectacular panoramas, actually sees rather pathetic miniature models. Such impression is somewhat improved later in the film, especially in the scenes featuring Washington D.C. of the distant future.
But the problems for LOGAN'S RUN aren't limited to the obsolete visual effects. Characters are sometimes given lines that seem unrealistic, directed more towards the audience than to each other. Music by usually reliable Jerry Goldsmith is of variable quality -after the effective opening theme that combines classical orchestration and electronic instruments, he goes to more standard territory. And Anderson as director uses that music on the wrong scenes. The acting is, to put it mildly, bellow standards you might expect in science fiction classics. Michael York is not the best casting choice for the protagonist, looking somewhat too intellectual for tough, macho hero of futuristic action drama. His partner Jenny Agutter has rather thankless role of classic damsel in distress, and she is better remembered for her good looks and skimpy clothes (and lack of in couple of moments, brief but well- remembered by male science fiction fans in their early teens). However, even her thankless role is well played, at least compared with terrible acting by Farrah Fawcett in episodic role that became legend of its own. Late Richard Jordan, on the other hand, is excellent as Logan's friend-turned-nemesis, bringing raw, masculine humanity to his character, including some homoerotic overtones. His total opposite is equally superb Peter Ustinov who gives dignified portrayal of half-senile, almost childlike Old Man.
But all that flaws, that turned LOGAN'S RUN into "that film that didn't age well", "that 1970s schlock" and MST fodder, are not so important for the overall impression of the film. At least when we consider how different this film is from science fiction cinema of today. Now we expect science fiction films to feature CGI graphics, cool soundtracks and spectacular action, which makes plot and characters less important. But in 1976, before Lucas and Spielberg began their infantilisation of American cinema industry, Hollywood science fiction was built on different principles. Interesting ideas, plots and characters were more important than cool special effects. LOGAN'S RUN was made on those principles, as a film that allowed viewers to use their heads, as well as their senses, making them think long after the end credits.
LOGAN'S RUN, like any good, thought-provoking vision of the future, is actually built on some trends in the present. The authors of original novel, written in 1967 (mediocre according to most on-line critics, and, the author of this review, after reading the sequel, tends to believe them), were inspired by social turmoil of late 1960s and counter-culture of younger generations, violently opposed towards establishment of the older generations. They saw this revolt as a consequence of unprecedented economic prosperity and technological advances, making younger generations, now unaffected by hardships of the past, less motivated to take responsibility for their lives as their parents had done. In the future, role of parents (and welfare state) is taken by omnipotent technology and the tables are turned - the younger generations now belong to establishment; hedonism and instant self- gratification is supreme social value and those who preach family, work and responsibility are considered dangerous subversives. A decade later, young rebels of 1960s grew older, world economy was hit by fuel crisis, but hedonism was still reigning supreme and the vision of the future in LOGAN'S RUN was still very believable. And the idea of mandatory age limits was not so alien to the generations that grew on slogans like "Don't trust anyone over thirty".
This vision of future is, of course, hardly utopian. Script by David Zelag Goodman, same as the novel, sees the brave new world of LOGAN'S RUN as dehumanised, totalitarian and sterile. Material wealth of this new world is by definition limited, and so are the boundaries of space, as well of creativity. Despite filmmakers' efforts to make the world as exotic as 1970s America, we could still see monochromatic fashion, so typical for typical totalitarian, oppressive dystopias of classical science fiction. And the humanity in this world, same as in classical story THE MACHINE STOPS by E.M. Forster, is so accustomed to supertechnology that it becomes doomed when this supertechnology begins failing (as it happens in this film). What is more disturbing is the fact that we might see seeds of this dystopia in our lives - recently Y2K phenomenon was supposed to cause effects similar to the ones seen in the last scenes of the film.
Perhaps some viewers wouldn't like the alternative to this dystopia, which offer conservative worldview. Hedonism and instant self-gratification ultimately lead to moral and physical decay, as well as life without obligations, which in the end becomes empty and pointless. Instead, people should return to the ideals of glorious past (symbolised in Washington D.C.) and re-embrace family, work and responsibility. Those who follow such path, like the hero of this film, would be rewarded with valuable experience of past generations and thus get ability to beat corrupt, decadent system. Taking this into account, the ending of the film, often referred, as unbelievable embodiment of bad SF stereotypes, actually becomes quite effective. The film ends on positive note - although the powerful finale still leaves one important question unanswered. Would society as a whole be as successful as Logan and manage to survive its transformation from bunch of decadent pleasure- seekers into responsible human beings?
Whether LOGAN'S RUN happens to be conservative reaction on the excesses of 1960s and 1970s or not, might be debatable. But it still remains very interesting and entertaining piece of classic science fiction cinema.
RATING: 8/10 (+++)
Review written on February 9th 2000
Dragan Antulov a.k.a. Drax Fido: 2:381/100 E-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>E-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>E-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Filmske recenzije na hrvatskom/Movie Reviews in Croatian http://film.purger.com
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews


Sweet Free Stuff
///////////////////////////////////////////
Free Linospresso Espresso Capsule Sample
Posted: 30 Dec 2015 11:31 AM PST
http://feedproxy.google.com/&edburner&utm_medium=email
Free Lino’spresso Espresso Capsule Sample
The post Free Lino’spresso Espresso Capsule Sample appeared first on
SweetFreeStuff.com.
///////////////////////////////////////////
Free Subscription to Seventeen Magazine
Posted: 30 Dec 2015 09:00 AM PST
http://feedproxy.google.com/&edburner&utm_medium=email
The post Free Subscription to Seventeen Magazine appeared first on
SweetFreeStuff.com.
CommentsRight! Lol by CristieAwe, she’s just waiting for that something
special to fully … by CristieI’ve gotten this subscription free 2 times
already and it’s … by CristieBoy my child could use this! Can’t
understand why she just … by minkieMy granddaughter is going to love it.
Maybe learn something … by Steve zenoriniPlus 2 more…
///////////////////////////////////////////
Free Subscription to Road & Track
Posted: 30 Dec 2015 07:54 AM PST
http://feedproxy.google.com/&edburner&utm_medium=email
Free Subscription to Road Track
The post Free Subscription to Road Track appeared first on
SweetFreeStuff.com.
///////////////////////////////////////////
Free Be(you)tiful Bumper Sticker
Posted: 30 Dec 2015 07:38 AM PST
http://feedproxy.google.com/&edburner&utm_medium=email
Free Be(you)tiful Bumper Sticker
The post Free Be(you)tiful Bumper Sticker appeared first on
SweetFreeStuff.com.
///////////////////////////////////////////
Free Blue York Shark Sticker
Posted: 30 Dec 2015 07:36 AM PST
http://feedproxy.google.com/&edburner&utm_medium=email
Scroll down and enter you e-mail, then fill out the form. Free Blue York
Shark Sticker
The post Free Blue York Shark Sticker appeared first on SweetFreeStuff.com.
///////////////////////////////////////////
TurboTax - Free Edition 2016
Posted: 30 Dec 2015 07:35 AM PST
http://feedproxy.google.com/&edburner&utm_medium=email
Free federal tax prep your biggest refund, guaranteed. TurboTax Free
Edition 2016 Free Tax Preparation
The post TurboTax Free Edition 2016 appeared first on SweetFreeStuff.com.
///////////////////////////////////////////
Free 2016 KCM Wall Calendar
Posted: 30 Dec 2015 07:32 AM PST
http://feedproxy.google.com/&edburner&utm_medium=email
Free 2016 KCM Wall Calendar
The post Free 2016 KCM Wall Calendar appeared first on SweetFreeStuff.com.
///////////////////////////////////////////
Free Carly for America Bumper Sticker
Posted: 30 Dec 2015 06:48 AM PST
http://feedproxy.google.com/&edburner&utm_medium=email
Free Carly for America Bumper Sticker
The post Free Carly for America Bumper Sticker appeared first on
SweetFreeStuff.com.
///////////////////////////////////////////
Free Hearts of Fire Book
Posted: 30 Dec 2015 01:47 AM PST
http://feedproxy.google.com/&edburner&utm_medium=email
Free Hearts of Fire Book
The post Free Hearts of Fire Book appeared first on SweetFreeStuff.com.
///////////////////////////////////////////
Free Sample of Emergen-C
Posted: 29 Dec 2015 09:00 PM PST
http://feedproxy.google.com/&edburner&utm_medium=email
Sign up to receive free samples of Emergen-C Vitamin Drink Mix.
The post Free Sample of Emergen-C appeared first on SweetFreeStuff.com.
Commentsthanks by SYMONA. THORNECan’t get a free sample. by Sonya
HopkinsPlease & thank you by Rosemary Meza


Steganography is the practice of concealing a file, message within another file like image in order to protect the important information. This concept is like hiding a tree in the forest. Therefore, hackers will be hard to find the imporant information of you in a plain text file. You can it use for: Protect your username and password in image Send your secret message through image to family and friends The program is all client side execution and open sourced. Feel free to leave me feedback and contact me at github.
Provide all the Input to go to next step
OR Input Text At Below:
Retrieve text from image
Decoded Text as below:


%= circled_title(2, "Set Deployment Manifest") %>
Deployment manifest specifies what services to deploy, their properties and resources configuration. The manifest contains a placeholder director_uuid that needs replacing.
Update the director_uuid value in the manifest.yml with the value from:
Set the deployment manifest:
Learn more: