RECORSI

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=RECORSI PT. 1) by [|Robert Anton Wilson.]= =(Hyperlinked by Steve Fly=

Giordano Bruno [1548-1600], a Neopolitan trouble-maker, has strongly influenced both modern science and modern occultism -- an oddly mixed heritage. Bruno's "pantheism" also had major philosophic impact on Spinoza; in the 20th Century he has continued to exert a fascination upon such odd bedfellows as Annie Besant, of the Theosophical Society; Dr Wilhelm Reich, radical psychotherapist; Dr Timothy Leary, another radical psychotherapist; and on Joyce and Pound. Paul Levinson regards Bruno's de-centered universe as the perfect model of cyberspace.

eh, the perfect model of cyberspace?

Bruno's books got burned by the holy roman catholic and apostolic church. They also burned Bruno himself 17 February 1600. When surrounded by barbarians, it may prove hazardous to have new ideas.

[|Dr. Reich's] books also got burned -- by U.S.Government [hereinafter, the Lying Bastards] in 1957. Then they smashed his lab equipment with axes, threw his ass in jail, and passed a law against replicating his experiments. Re-read previous comment about barbarians

........eh, the perfect model of cyberspace?

Bruno's universe, infinite in both space and time, has no "real" or absolute center, since wherever you cut a slice out of infinity, infinity remains. Thus every place an observer stands becomes a relative center for that observer.

This [|infinite universe] may or may not match the currently fashionable cosmological model of a generation, but it clearly matches the essential nature of "mystic experience" -- the mindblowing realization that one 'is' the center of EVERYTHING and the equally mindblowing discovery that that doesn't really matter because every conscious [|entity] 'is' also at the center.

Cyberspace, an indefinite but evergrowing network, also has no absolute center. Every console becomes "the" center for it's user. Plug in a terminal. Internet doesn't care who or what you think you "are."

...language as Class Warfare...
Giambasta Vico [1668-1744]: Another tricky Neopolitan writer, so egregious and/or polymathic that one finds him called a "philosopher," a "sociologist," and even a precursor of "cultural anthropology" or "Jungian psychology." A heavy influence on Hegel and Marx; on Joyce and Pound; and on [|Transpersonal Linguistics]. Joyce [and the present book] borrow most heavily, not from Vico's "cycle" theory of history, but from his concept of language as Class Warfare.

Vico, unlike Bruno, escaped the Inquisition, but frequently got himself accused of "heresy" by academic rivals; at his funeral, a violent confrontation broke out between his admirers and a group of detractors, still charging "heresy" and declaring him unfit for burial in "holy ground" [the cemetery of the Unversity of Naples, where he had taught] Some of the disputants required hospitilization afterwards; Neopolitans take philosophy seriously.

Marx bragged of "turning Hegel upside down," thinking he had thereby created Social Science. Unfortunately, [|metaphysics] turned upside down does not become science but merely upside-down metaphysics. Hence the failure of Marxism.

TRANLATION = TREASON
Why Joyce invented a new language: "English is an honest language; there willl be nothing left of Vico." --Salvemini, on attempts to translate Our Man.

Vico, aware of the Inquisition looking over his shoulder, never says exactly what he means. If he had, they would have burned the poor bastard. All books written in the United States since the passage of the [|USAPATRIOT act] may deserve the same suspicions. [Including this one.] I hold that English, despite its basic honesty, can contain the same insinuations and innuendos as Italian, if poetized and information-enriched.

"Make him an offer he can't refuse." --Don Corleone

Friederich Nietzsche [1844-1900] offbeat German philologist-philosopher, enemy of "morality;" often [inaccurately] blamed for World War I, Naziism, World War II, Existentialism, the Leopold-Loeb murder, and other nefarious tendencies and events. Influence on Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Thomas Mann, W.B. Yeats, Stefan George, Bernard Shaw, Jean-Paul Sartre, Eugene O'Neill, William Faulkner and, of course, Joyce and Pound. We will consider him chiefly as a critic of language and forerunner of [|Wittgenstein], Logical Positivism, Pound/Joyce and General Semantics.

Vico, as I understand or misunderstand him, believed that religion began from fear of the thunder. Vico says only "gentile religion" began that way, thereby leaving the Bible outside the scope of his enquiry; we who live under the USAPATRIOT Act can appreciate his discretion.

Ernest Fenollosa [1853-1908], scholar of and historian of art, Eastern and Western; considered a "national hero" in Japan, and buried as such with all due honors by the Japanese government, Fenollosa remains mostly unknown in his own country [U.S.A.] Revered in Japan for renewing interest in Japanese poetry and painting at a time when the young Japanese mostly had forgotten their own tradition and wanted to imitate Western models, Fenollosa also wrote an essay on "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry"* which vastly influenced Ezra Pound and, through Pound, modern poetry generally; said essay also anticipates some formulations of General Semantics and NeuroLinguistic Programming [NLP], **and foreshadows**
 * modern critiques of "linear" and "alphabetical" thinking.***

five years of Homeric struggles to get this essay published, Pound printed it as an appendix to a book of his own literary/linguistic essays, Instigations [1918]. In 1952, Instigations having gone out of print, Pound, Marshall McLuhan and associates reprinted it as part of their Square Dollar Series.
 * Given to Ezra Pound, 1913, by Fenollosa's widow. After

A squiggly fractal-- the line of Monterrey's hills-- floats above the fog

...the alphabet vs. the equation....
Count Alfred Korzybski* [1879-1950] inventor of General Semantics; a Polish-born engineer, who grew up in a house where everybody spoke four languages [Polish, Russian, French, German], Korzybsi wrote his major works in English after becoming a U.S. citizen. His basic theorems: [1] every "language" or code has a structure which heavily influences the perceptions and "ideas" of those who use it; [2] the structure of Indo-European subject-predicate sentences does not mesh with the structure of the world known to science; [3] mathematics does mesh neatly with science [4] we need to make our languages more like mathematics if we want our social life to become as pragmatically succesful as our sciences . In the present context, Korzybski's mathematized language structures, like the Fenollosa/Pound emphasis on Chinese ideogram, helps us perceive/conceive Internet in alternative ways, not possible for those restricted to Indo-European semantic structures.

"Weep, weep!" cries a bird Lost somewhere in fog and mist. Sunrise with no sun.

Korzybski pronounced a heretic by Pope Martin Gardner, remember.

"You speak to me of nationality, language, religion. These are nets I shall try to fly over." --A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce [1882-1941], the primary inventor, along with Pound, of "modernism" in literature. In Dubliners [1914], Joyce invented the "modern" [New Yorker-style] short story, or slice-of-life; in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1915], he changed the style and language continually, from infant prattle to educated elegance, as the hero grew from babyhood to college graduation; in Ulysses * [1922], he replaced the allegedly "objective" and seemingly omniscient narrator of traditional fiction with a hundred narrators [or "narrative voices"] all of them mildly-to- severely distorting events to suit their own predilictions; in Finnegans Wake [1939] he invented a new hologrammic style, based on Bruno and Vico, which encodes the whole into every part. In this class we l lean most heavily upon the neurological relativism of Ulysses and the hologrammic prose of Finnegans Wake.

Lying Bastards said they wanted to protect us from "indecency."
 * Banned from U.S. and repeatedly burned 1922-1933.The

free speech without free radio speech is as zero --Ezra Pound, Canto 74

Ezra Pound [1885-1971]* a foremost creator of and the primary polemicist and propagandist for "modernism" in literature and art; proponent of "ideogrammic" as distinguished from "alphabetical" [linear] perception and/or conception of world; major influence on McLuhan.

I borrow mostly from Pound's use of ideogrammic method in his epic Cantos [1917-1970 approx.] and in Machine Art [1930]

by the U.S. government; committed to St Elizabeth's Hospital for the Criminally Insane for 13 years, 1945-1958.
 * Charged with "treason"[poor usage of the First Amendment]

A WORD TO THE WISE GUY: Quick like a bunny, check out: []

Gay flamingo sings: "The sun rises and the world Is ablaze with Dawn"

...the alphabet vs. the equation....?

...language as Class Warfare...?

R. Buckminster Fuller [1895-1983], often hailed as "the moden Leonardo," "the brainiest American since Benjamin Franklin," etc.; inventor of the Geodesic Dome, the World Game, the Dymaxion Car, the Dymaxion Map [the first 2-dimensional projection to show all continents without distortion], the Global Energy Network, Synergetic Geometry, etc. etc. etc. inventor of the phrase "Spaceship Earth" etc. Here we mostly use Fuller's synergetic/planetary sociology, as influenced by and an influence upon Pound.

God is not a noun. God is a verb. --Buckminster Fuller, No More Second-Hand God

A WORD TO THE WISE GUY: check out []

Marshall McLuhan [1911-1980]. Who he? You'll find out.

Claude Shannon [1916-2001 ] never had any trouble with the Proper Authorities, but he nonethless launched two mathematical revolutions which made Internet inevitable and also crept into the vocabulary of both the biological and social sciences: [1] In his 1940 M.S. dissertation for M.I.T. he demonstrated how use of Boolean algebra could make electrical networks into logic machines, thereby creating the theory of digital circuits-- the foundation stone of modern computers; and in his 1948 book, The Mathematical Theory of Communication [University of Illinois Press], he created Information Theory, which underlies Internet and simultaneously acted as a paradigm for literally dozens of other sciences.

I actually find it hard to think of any area of modern life-- science, education, business, art, entertainment-- where bits and bytes of Shannon's Information Theory have not penetrated. In fact, whenenver you tell somebody how many "bits" [binary units] a disk contains, you have quoted him ... And whenever you've heard or used the word "feedback" in any but its original meaning*, you have heard another extension of Shannon's work.


 * Sound distortion created by interacting electronic systems.

"f-e-e-d-b-a-c-k..."
H = - Epilogepi

--Claude Shannon, [|The Mathematical Theory of Communication]

"Shit, motherfucker! I want my fucking money, motherfucker." Jungle Fever. Spike Lee.

I'm still hungry. --Citizen Kane

You'll get fat! --The Magnificent Ambersons

= = =RECORSI (PT 2)=

Bill Yeats

BEFORE THE WAR
in the world of Esperanza, Primrose and Augusta; of fat fussy old women and of fat fussy old men. "Sure they want war," said Bill Yeats, "They want all the young gals fer themselves." That lovely unconscious world, slop over slop, and blue ribbons Ezra Pound, Canto 41

[|W B Yeats: 1865-1939] [|James Joyce: 1882-1941] [|Ezra Pound: 1885-1972]

Pound went to London in [|1909] with the specific intent of meeting Yeats, whom he considered the greatest living poet. If you want to become a great poet, he believed, find a great poet to learn from.

The Yeats-Pound synergy mutated both of them, stylistically. If you agree with Nietzsche that "the only way to improve your mind is to improve your style," then they both grew mentally as well as technically. Modern poetry oscillates between the poles of Pound and Yeats. Of the tribe of Ezra (and acknowledging it): William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, [|Charles Olsen], Sir Basil Bunting, Louis Zukofsky, e e cummings) Yeats's influence appears in W H Auden, [|Alan Tate], and most of T S Eliot [except "[|The Waste Land]" which Eliot allowed Pound to "edit" -- the end product looks suspiciously like a gloomy/neurotic/Christian prologue to Pound's exhuberant/ high-hearted/pagan [|Cantos]]

In 1912, preparing an anthology of [|Imagist poetry], Pound asked Yeats if he could suggest any new poets not allied to the Imagist circle, but writing close enough to the Imagist style to deserve inclusion. Yeats mentioned a man who'd left Dublin under a cloud and had survived since then as a language teacher in Trieste: James Joyce.

Pound wrote to JJ; JJ sent him the "Chamber Music" poems and Pound picked two of them for the anthology. [He picked exactly the same two I wd have picked, the one about the sea-bird going forth in the cold wind and the one about the Army marching and the sea-[|hags] running on the beach waving their long green hair.]

EP wrote again to ask for more poems. Joyce said he currently worked in prose and sent along a few of the "Dubliners" stories.

These stories resembled NOTHING previous in world literature. They had no plots, no beginnings or middles or ends, JJ had INVENTED the "[|slice of life]" which later became the "[|New Yorker]-type story" and since then has become formalized and mass produced by mediocrities. The style [described by Joyce as "scrupulous meanness"] fit the blocked, paralyzed,* bumbling denizens of an Occupied City the way good clothes fit a body.

physically and symbolically paralyzed.
 * The first story concerns a priest who is both

Yeats belonged to several rebel groups (which might have gotten him hanged if the Brits ever caught him.) Joyce called himself an anarchist but remained politically aloof ([|Stirnerite].) Yet Joyce, with the mask of "scrupulous meanness," showed in small everyday details the Death Trip hanging over an occupied country, and made ordinary nastiness as awful as Sartre ever made the major horrors of the Nazi occupation of France.

EP's reaction: "I can turn from good French prose to a page of Joyce without feeling my head is being stuffed with cotton." (Other English prose of the time did not please him.)

Pound devoted major energies to getting "[|Dubliners]" published. When JJ began the "Portrait of the Artist." with a new style, which starts out as baby-talk and grows up in quantum jumps as the Artist himself grows, from infancy to 20 years old, Pound again saw a major breakthrough in prose and worked like hell to get it serialized and then published in full. Then he found two rich women who started sending Joyce monthly gifts to support him while he launched the even-more revolutionary "[|Ulysses]. " Through all this Pound never complained about his own poverty. He seems to have seen himself as a tough guy who took hard times easily and JJ as a sensibility so sensitive it might burn out without sufficient nourishment.

During World War I, Pound and Joyce corresponded a lot and agreed about the slaughter. Pound said it was a pity the nations involved couldn't ALL be defeated. JJ wrote a [|Swiftian] poem denouncing warfare -- the only overtly or openly political work in his ouvre. Yeats expressed himself by writing poems in which humanity appears as "weasels fighting in a hole" and the Anti-Christ slouches toward Bethlehem to be born

EP and JJ also entertained each other by mail with limericks about their friends and the literary scene in general. Some still seem funny.

AFTER THE WAR: BETWEEN WARS?
In the one-page autobiography he wrote for New Directions in the early 1950s, Pound describes a major re-orientation in typically terse fashion -- "[|1919]: began investigating causes of war, to oppose same."

In the 1920s JJ began [|Finnegans Wake] and Pound re-started the Cantos. Neither one could understand the other any longer. They "drifted apart."

Although both [|Finnegans Wake] and the [|Cantos] attempt to "explain" history (read: explain why World War I happened), they use different mutations of style to convey two radically new and radically different. visions.

Pound locates the Original Sin or major fuck-up in the economic structures of societies AND in the ethical (or unethical) ideas that perpetuate economic structures. (Marx plus Dante, a mixture EP called [|Voluntarist] economics, and found anticpated in [|Kung fu tse] and Mong tse...)

JJ finds the glitch in the conscious and unconscious struggles over power, sex and status within one middle-class early 20th Century Irish Protestant household consisting of a middle-aged Mom and Dad, two quarreling sons, a disturbed but sexy teen-ager daughter, and 2 servants. The greatest is within the smallest: one household models humanity's predicament.

In 1931, at their last meeting, Pound grew loud and agitated. JJ later said Pound had gone mad, He was the first one to ever utter that opinion, but he wd not be the last.

The Joyce-Pound saga (friendship and respect turning to angry incomprehension) appears, conciously or not, in the [|Cantos], as the Jefferson-Adams friendship-feud-reconciliation. EP and JJ never had that reconciliation, but--

On one of the radio broadcasts which the U S Department of Justice called treasonous, Pound orated on JJ's death and reiterated again that JJ ranked as the major novelist of the 20th Century.


 * --[|ROBERT ANTON WILSON.]**
 * RECORSI: 2005.**

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