Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> But there's nothing new under the sun,
Just _almost_ true. In absolute form, it would be Platonism. But running after novelty in thought puts one in Book III of _Gulliver_.
and originality is a bourgeois delusion.
Not exactly. The lust for originality seems to characterize most the better educated sectors of the working class. I recommend taking a look at the list of periodcials in the front of the annual MLA bibliography.
Then there is the kind of originality that makes the difference between the prose of North's translation of Plutarch and the verse of _Antony and Cleopatra_ or the prose of John Adams and the verse of the Adams Cantos. This habit of close plagiarism was perhaps one of the real advances (! original? ) in Pound's poetry -- and the one which has been least followed by subsequent generations of poets.
It's easy to see that capitalism's endless revolution of everyday life is mostly destructive; it is less easy to see that its revolutionizing of all "levels" of life is often as destructive as its purely "economic" impact.
Though Pound (and most populists and large numbers of "anti-capitalist" intellectuals and artists drew reactionary conclusions from their reaction to these aspects of capitalism, Pound''s lines in Canto XLV have their point:
no picture is made to endure nor to live with
but is made to sell and sell quickly . . .
Pound apparently read much of Volume I of _Capital_; it's a pity he didn't read Volume II instead.
Carrol
> Doug