WHY WAS EZRA WESTON LOOMIS POUND SUCH A LOST CAUSE?

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Ezra Pound HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1885

October 30, Friday: Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, to Homer Loomis Pound (“Euripides Weight”) and Isabel Weston Pound (“Hermione”). At the age of eighteen months, the family moved with its infant to Pennsylvania and “Ra” or “Ray” would grow from the age of four in the town of Wyncote, there, where his father would become the assistant assayer to the US Mint.

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

Ezra Pound “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1889

The Pound family moved to 166 Fernbrook Avenue, Wyncote, Philadelphia, where they would be members of the Calvary Presbyterian Church.

After a summer of picking hops for Shaker farmers in the Pacific Northwest, the Paiute prophet Wavoka journeyed in a dream to the Christian heaven, and found that Jesus was not a stuffy old white man, but an Indian who liked to dance and sing. On his return to his home at Walker Lake, Nevada, Wavoka would sponsor the Native American religion known as “Ghost Dancing.”

NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Ezra Pound HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1898

With his great-aunt Frances “Frank” Wessels Weston, whom he called “Heeb,” 13-year-old Ezra Pound went on a 3-month tour encompassing London, Brussels, Cologne, Paris, the Alps, Venice, Granada, Tangiers, etc.

The Spanish-American War became the final major war to be fought using black powder (and the initial major war to be started by the power of the popular press).

Brennecke introduced rifled shotgun slugs in Germany (while very powerful, they would not become popular in the United States until 1936, or in the British Commonwealth until after World War II).

In Tientsin, the YMCA embarked on an agenda to “increase the capacity of the [Chinese] race” (to this end they would be introducing basketball in 1896 and baseball in 1907). In order to limit the gore and carnage during lineage feuds, the Chinese government banned sword-making in Shantung Province. This outraged clan elders and increased the popularity of stage plays depicting mortals who through intensive training and intense concentration achieve almost magical fighting skills. Training for the human roles in these morality plays would take place in boxing grounds called ch’uan chang and such training would be open to all, with rank based on the fighting skill that was exhibited during contests (instructors in such schools were termed “Senior Brothers,” while the students were known as “Junior Brothers”).

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Ezra Pound HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1901

In the year in which Harry S Truman graduated from Independence High School with 40 other students, his father, John Anderson Truman, was losing his savings in the grain-futures market. He visited aunts in Illinois and St. Louis, and began to attend Spalding’s Business College (he would become our sole president without a college degree).

In this year the Germans were inventing something typically German, the flamethrower, while the British were inventing something typically British, the concentration camp.

From this year into 1903, Ezra Pound would be studying Anglo-Saxon and Romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania, where he would meet Hilda Doolittle and a medical student, William Carlos Williams.

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Ezra Pound HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1903

In an article published in Strand Magazine, H.G. Wells described the sort of armor-plated behemoths that would be carrying machine guns about the battlefield of the future. Although at this point Wells’ vision of “land ironclads” was viewed as “pure phantasy,” within a dozen years this magazine article would cause Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, to establish a “Landships Committee” charged with designing such an battlefield armored tractor (for reasons of security, for the time being, this new military device would be referred to as a “tank,” but then this temporary coded designator would come to be ensconced in our warfare lingo).

From this year into 1905, Ezra Pound would be studying at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Ezra Pound HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1905

Ezra Pound was awarded the degree of Ph.B. at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.

G.P. Putnam’s Sons of New York published Nitobe Inazo’s BUSHIDO: THE SOUL OF JAPAN. Nitobe was a Quaker schoolmaster and his English-language ghostwriter was Anna Hartshorne, a Canadian; this monograph presents bushido (“Military-Knight-Ways”) as a far-Eastern version of European chivalry. Nitobe downplayed mathematical skill, offering that “chivalry is uneconomical: it boasts of penury.”1 In Nitobe’s consideration, what all that training in judo, fencing, and archery did was build character.2

1. Or at least, penury was the ideal for the impoverished. In fact, with the notable exception of the Mitsui family, the traditional mercantile class had resisted modernization and the leaders of the ten largest zaibatsu (“financial cliques”) that had come to control Japanese land, labor, and industry and had therefore become inordinately wealthy had begun as families of the samurai caste. 2. It will come as a considerable surprise to those of us who have heard stories about the Bataan Death March, and stories about the Rape of Nanking, to learn that “Tenderness, Pity, and Love were traits which adorned the most sanguinary exploits of a samurai.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1906

Ezra Pound was awarded the degree of M.A. at the University of Pennsylvania.

Harry S Truman moved from his boardinghouse in Kansas City to the 600-acre family farm near Grandview, Missouri to help his parents, and his brother Vivian, manage and operate it.

Under the “Indians not taxed” exclusion of the civil rights act, members of the native American “domestic dependent nations” (tribes) had needed to get along somehow without any civil rights. In this year the United States of America enabled these people to pay taxes and provide their young men for military service exactly as if they were white, by extending “dual citizenship” to its “wards.” (This granted a few civil rights, but, don’t think that this gave them the right to visit a polling station on election day: to vote you must not only be a citizen of the USA but also a citizen of the state in which you reside — and such natives were definitively still not citizens of the states in which they resided.)

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

Ezra Pound “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1907

Ezra Pound was an instructor in Romance Languages at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, a small Presbyterian school. His term there would come to an abrupt end in the following year when he would be caught in the sin of entertaining an actress in his rooms. (In Indiana, as I can testify from personal experience having grown up along the Wabash River, if they happen to disapprove of anything you do or anything you say or anything they suppose you are thinking, they are going to defend to the death their right to abuse you — this being understood as Hoosierismo. :-)

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

Ezra Pound “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1907

July: Ezra Pound read a little Confucius (in translation, of course).

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

Ezra Pound “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1908

Resigning his instructorship at Wabash College, Ezra Pound headed for Europe (you can venture interesting things in Europe that it would be wrong to attempt in Hoosierismo Indiana; he would there found the Imagist movement, which encouraged experimentation with verse forms, and Vorticism, which opposed representational art in favor of abstract forms).

Why should war be limited? German chemist Fritz Haber patented a way to make high explosives out of nitrogen obtained directly from the atmosphere. Since there was atmosphere all over Europe, this would render it feasible to have more protracted European wars by eliminating Germany’s need to import its war nitrates from Chile and Peru. –And yet some people will say that there is no such thing as progress!

Why should it be only the privileged youth who die in war? In this year Robert Baden-Powell established the Boy Scouts of England to prepare the working-class youth as well for future military service. This organization would offer the public school spirit minus the public school elitism, and teach military skills without so great an emphasis on the nicenesses of close-order drill. Stated goals of the Scouting organization included instilling patriotism and good moral character into pre-pubescents (90% of British Boy Scouts of the 1910s were younger than 14). Baden-Powell asserted “We shall establish a standard and bond throughout the cadets of the coming Imperial Army” (what, pray tell, could be wrong with that?)

Eventually people would be saying that Ezra Pound must be insane, but you will note that nobody has ever offered that Fritz Haber was insane, and nobody has ever offered that Robert Baden-Powell was insane! Perhaps insanity is the sort of thing that is easier to detect in some cases than in others?

July: In Venice Ezra Pound published his initial collection of poems, A LUME SPENTO (WITH TAPERS QUENCHED).

The St. Helena government took over the Lace Making Association, establishing a government Lace School.

September: At about this point Ezra Pound settled in London. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1909

April: Ezra Pound published PERSONAE in London.

October: Ezra Pound published EXULTATIONS in London. He met W.B. Yeats and Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford). He joined the Second Poets’ Club, which included T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, et al. (In his “Prefatory Note” to “THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF T. E. HULME,” in Ripostes, he would refer to Les Imagistes as “the descendants” of this group.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1910

On a return trip from England Ezra Pound visited New York City. In this year Manhattan’s population was peaking at 2,300,000 and Penn Station was opening. The Metropolitan Opera was staging the premier of Puccini’s “Girl of the Golden West.”

Lionel Giles published the most significant translation of Sun Tzu’s ART OF WAR to have appeared since 1782 (a 1905 translation by E.F. Calthrop had been consulted mostly by Sinologists, and the Bruno Navarra translation of this year would suffer the same fate; there would be little Western military interest in this Eastern version of the art of war until the end of World War II would provide our military deep-thinkers with a “breather” in which they might begin to deep-think again).

June: Ezra Pound published SPIRIT OF ROMANCE in London. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1911

July: Ezra Pound published CANZONI in London. In addition, at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, he copied out Arnaut Daniel’s manuscript with musical notation in the presence of a librarian, Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti (later to become better known as Pope Pius XI). He would show this to Emil Levy in Freiburg.

August: When, in Giessen, Ezra Pound showed his new CANZONI to his friend Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford), he received an unexpected piece of advice. Ford needed to direct Pound back to his “own proper effort, namely, toward using the living tongue.” He met A.R. Orage, editor of the weekly New Age, and was offered a regular column. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1912

In Paris, Ezra Pound discovered Andreas Divus of Justinopolis’s Latin translation of the ODYSSEY.

Railway heiress Juliette Gordon Low, after long discussion with Robert Baden-Powell and his young wife, established a Girl Guides troop in Savannah, Georgia. (In the following year Low would relocate her new organization to Washington DC and name it Girl Scouts of America.)

Luther Gulick, a former YMCA administrator who considered it to be just totally wrongheaded to require girls to go camping and perform military drills, created a rival organization, Camp Fire, Inc., devoted to the homemaking skills.

June: During this month and the following one Ezra Pound would be on walking tour through southern France.

August: Harriet Monroe of Chicago asked Ezra Pound to contribute to the new magazine Poetry.

Due to an outbreak of scarlet fever the schools of St. Helena would close, for nearly three months.

October: Ezra Pound’s RIPOSTES, in London. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1913

March: Ezra Pound’s “A Few Don’ts.” He met Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.

September: Ezra Pound met Mary Fenollosa.

The St. Helena government paid one old pence per rat tail for 4,800 tails (Cecil Isaac of Plantation single- handedly collected 414 of these tails).

October: At some point during the remainder of this year, Mary Fenollosa sent Ernest Fenollosa’s manuscripts on Chinese poetry and Japanese Noh plays to Ezra Pound.

November: From this point into January, Ezra Pound would be staying with W.B. Yeats at the rented Stone Cottage in Sussex. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1914

April 20, Monday: Ezra Pound and the artist Dorothy Shakespear got married, at St Mary Abbots (their union would produce a son).

September 22, Tuesday: The German ship Emden shelled facilities of the Burmah Oil Company at Madras, destroying 50,000 tons of oil.

A German submarine sank three British cruisers off Holland with the loss of 1,400 lives.

British planes bombed zeppelin hangars at Cologne and Düsseldorf.

Ezra Pound met T.S. Eliot for the initial time, either in Pound’s Kensington apartment or at Eliot’s flat in Holland Place Chambers.

September 30, Wednesday: British and French troops from Douala attacked the Germans at Tiko, driving them off. WORLD WAR I

Publishers Breitkopf and Härtel announced that the International Music Society had been discontinued on account of war.

Ezra Pound wrote to Harriet Monroe, the publisher of Poetry magazine, alerting her about “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “[T.S. Eliot] has sent in the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American.”

Turkish authorities distributed arms to the Muslim residents of the town of Keghi in Erzerum Province on the excuse that the Armenians there were unreliable. ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

October: With Italy about to enter World War I, the Socialist Party opposed interventionism and some revolutionary syndicalists broke away into a splinter group they called Fasci d'azione rivoluzionaria internazionalista. Benito Mussolini joined the Milan fascio, plumping for Italy to abandon the Triple Alliance, and its relations with Imperial Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in order to enter the world war on the side of Britain and France (this is what, in the following year, would indeed happen).

Ezra Pound sent T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to Poetry (this would appear in the issue for June 1915). He began to incorporate Ernest Fenollosa’s translations of Chinese poetry and Japanese Noh plays into poems of his own (such as “The River Merchant’s Wife”).

A refortified St. Helena was reinforced with 87 further British soldiers and Governor Major Sir Harry Edward Spiller Cordeaux imposed martial law (which would be continuous, in this “outpost of empire,” until 1918). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Winter: Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats spent the winter at Coleman’s Hatch. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1915

The Nobel Peace Prize was not awarded — this year likewise there wasn’t anyone to hand it to.

Professor Bliss Perry’s THOMAS CARLYLE. (NOT WORTH YOUR WHILE)

A revised version of the manifesto of the Vorticist movement, Blast.

Harry S Truman was appointed postmaster in Grandview, Missouri. He suffered losses in an investment in a zinc-mining venture.

January: Ezra Pound began his study of Confucius, probably by way of M.J. Pauthier’s translation of Chung Yung. CHINA LIGHT FROM CHINA

February: Ezra Pound’s “Imagism and England.”

In Turkey, the vice-governor of Mush ordered 70 gendarmes to attack the village of Koms and kill the Armenian Dashnak leader Rupen, and all persons with him (Rupen and his companions would be able to resist, and eventually escape into the Caucasus region). ARMENIAN GENOCIDE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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March: Ezra Pound’s “Provincia Deserta.”

A traveling commission of parliamentary deputies toured all the cities of Anatolia. The commission included Dr. Fazil Berki, parliamentary deputy from Chankri, Ubedulla, parliamentary deputy from Smyrna, and Behaeddin Shakir, member of the Central Committee of the Ittihad Party. In the mosques, they addressed the Moslem population of Turkey, characterizing the Armenian Christians of Turkey as internal enemies who must be destroyed.

In Sivas Province, the population in all the Armenian villages was disarmed.

Omer Naji, a circulating Ittihad propagandist, traveled to Aleppo, Adana and nearby towns to arouse the Muslims.

Azadamart, the leading Armenian newspaper in Constantinople, was closed by a government order issued through the office of Osman Bedri, Police Commissioner of that city. The contents of the petty cash box, some 300 Turkish pounds, box were stolen. The printing presses were removed to the Ittihad Press, where the organ Tanin was published by the CUP, with Huseyin Jahid (Yalchin) as editor-in-chief and Ahmed Emin as associate editor. ARMENIAN GENOCIDE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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April: Ezra Pound’s “Cathay.”

The movie The Clansman premiered in New York under the title The Birth of a Nation. In part because it cost an unprecedented $2 per ticket, it would become one of the top five blockbuster successes of all time. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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September: During this month Ezra Pound would mention in a letter that he was starting work on what would eventually become his CANTOS: “I am also at work on a cryselephantine poem of immeasurable length which will occupy me for the next four decades unless it becomes a bore.”3

General Vehib Pasha would in the course of postwar courts martial, reveal that during this month Behaeddin Shakir had assembled murderous cutthroats and deployed them in the Third Army Zone, that is, in the six eastern or Armenian provinces of Turkey.

November: Ezra Pound’s “Near Perigord.”

18 crewmen of the Indian Monarch arrived at St. Helena Island in a rowboat (their ship had gone under 420 miles to the south-southeast).

Professor Albert Einstein finished his work on the general theory of relativity and presented it in a 4-part speech at the Prussian Academy of Sciences.

3. His CANTOS became an epic poem, in 120 sections. Its approximately 800 pages are a blend of personal experiences and reminiscences with historical detail, politics, and economics, intertwingled with classical allusions to Greek mythology, to the Italian Renaissance, and to the history of China. Its topics include his personal pet hobby horses — the pernicious influence of organized religion, the monopoly by Western banks of credit and interest rates, and, unfortunately, his antisemitic conspiracy theories. If you don’t have the time and motivation to make an exceedingly close study of such materials, perhaps it would be better if you simply kept yourself away from them. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1916

April: In Poetry, Ezra Pound acclaimed James Joyce as “by far the most significant writer of our decade.”

Pound’s “Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir.”

September: Ezra Pound’s “Lustra” and “Certain Noble Plays of Japan.”

December 29, Friday: Lili Boulanger recorded in her diary, “I am so tired that I can’t get up ... I am so ill I can hardly eat.”

Publication of PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce, in New York (this has been serialized by Ezra Pound in the London literary magazine The Egoist). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1920

Ezra Pound’s HUGH SELWYN MAUBERLEY.

During this decade, in Paris, Pound would be editing T.S. Eliot’s THE WASTE LAND for publication.

Until this decade, plate glass used for oversized glass windows had been being produced entirely by the casting method. Workers would pour molten glass onto cast-iron tables from large regenerative pots, then roll, anneal, grind, and polish the resultant slab into a finished sheet. The process had been slow and labor-intensive, therefore plate glass had been expensive. Not surprisingly, it had seen very limited residential use during the 19th Century. In this year, however, continuous ribbon production of sheet plate was begun by the Ford Motor Company.

(One has cause to wonder whether Pound’s preparation of Eliot’s poetry during this decade was more similar to the old, labor-intensive rolling, grinding, and polishing of plate, or more similar to the new, continuous ribbon production of plate.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1922

Ezra Pound and the violinist Olga Rudge began what would be a lifelong relationship (the union would produce a daughter). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1923

October 4, Thursday: The elite of artistic Paris was on hand to witness a concert given by George Antheil in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées to publicize the upcoming season of the Ballet Suédois. Those present include Erik Satie, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso, and Man Ray. A riot was staged by Margaret Anderson, editor of The Little Review, for a film she was making, which was realistic enough that afterward police carted off a number of the participants.

End of the year: By the end of this year Ezra Pound had formulated a rough outline for the CANTOS, and finished the opening ones. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1924

Ezra Pound and his wife Dorothy Shakespear Pound went to Rapallo in Italy (with Olga Rudge, his mistress, following). By this point the poet was becoming involved in economics and social theory.

(Speaking of economics and social theory, this was the year in which Ovaltine became the first commercial sponsor for the Olympic Games. By 1932, football and Olympic figures such as Red Grange and Dorothy Poynton Hill would routinely be endorsing Camel cigarettes and Hollywood swimming suits. Most of the athletes who were taking part had derived from working-class backgrounds, and commercial sponsors were offering what seemed huge sums of money for such endorsements, but the whole thing needed to be hush-hush because were the Olympic Committee to suspect that a player had made any such arrangements, he or she would be instantly dropped from the roster. — It will become clear as this thing develops, however, that this sort of conflict of agendas was not at all the sort of economics and social theory that was coming to intrigue the poet Pound. His would be, unfortunately, a darker involvement.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1925

A DRAFT OF XVI CANTOS was published by Three Mountains Press in Paris, where Ezra Pound had employment as an editor.

Hector Charles Bywater’s THE GREAT PACIFIC WAR: A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN-JAPANESE CAMPAIGN OF 1931-33 described the possibility of a Japanese military conquest of the Pacific Ocean region. This book was reviewed in the New York Times and an attaché with the Japanese embassy in Washington DC at the time, Isoroku Yamamoto, would have a great deal to do with the staging of the conflict. The embassy was aware of this, for it registered an official protest characterizing it as “provocative.” There are any number of similarities between the course of the war projected in this book by the imagination of the author, and the actual development of WWII in the Pacific Theater as planned by Admiral Yamamoto, despite the fact that the initial sneak attack imagined by Bywater hit the US Navy in Philippine waters rather than at its Pearl Harbor base. In addition, the monograph may very well have been accessed during British planning for a naval air attack on the Italian naval base at Taranto during November 1940. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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April 24, Friday: Two works for female chorus by Aaron Copland, The House on the Hill to words of Robinson, and An Immorality to words of Ezra Pound, were performed for the initial time, in New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1928

A DRAFT OF CANTOS XVII-XXVII was published by the Three Mountains Press in Paris.

The Briand-Kellog anti-war pact was signed in Paris. READ THE FULL TEXT

Finally, all was quiet on the Western Front:

The graves lay silent, row on row. WORLD WAR I WORLD WAR II

“Killing to end war, that’s like fucking to restore virginity.” — Vietnam-era protest poster HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1930

All the cantos so far were brought together and published by the Hours Press in Paris, under the title A DRAFT OF XXX CANTOS. During the following decade Ezra Pound would complete CANTOS LII-LXXI (focused on Chinese history) and begin to contribute anti-Semitic pieces to magazines.4 He had recently become a supporter of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. ANTISEMITISM

At the end of the movie “All Quiet on the Western Front,” the Hollywood actor Lew Ayres took a sniper bullet

4. “... my worst mistake was the stupid suburban anti-Semitic prejudice, all along that spoiled everything ... I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron ... I should have been able to do better ....” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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through his helmet, upon which butterflies alighted.

OHNE MICH!

In World War II, this actor would register as a conscientious objector and would instantly be fired by L.B. Mayer of MGM, He would wind up a labor camp and from there volunteer to serve as a combat medic, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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accumulating three battle stars for courage under fire in the rescue of wounded soldiers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1933

Ezra Pound was granted an audience with the Italian swordsman Benito Mussolini and presented him with his digest of economic reforms and a draft of his CANTOS.

Il Duce (acting impressed)

In ABC OF ECONOMICS, Pound presented all cultural history as a struggle between producers and usurers, presenting a pantheon of heroes in which Mussolini stood, fiscally, alongside Thomas Jefferson.

In a related development, the Lone Ranger and Tonto began heigh-ho’ing Silver, in radio broadcasts from Detroit’s WXYZ-AM. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1935

Jusef Stalin decreed that anyone above age 12 who got caught stealing food would be punished as an adult: 5 years in a labor camp for cucumbers, 8 for corn or potatoes.

In the US, people began playing the Monopoly board game, a frank celebration of the capitalist ethos. The Social Security Act was signed into law. During a test-marketing done in Richmond, Virginia, the Kroeger Beer Company of Newark, New Jersey introduced canned beer.

In JEFFERSON AND/OR MUSSOLINI, Ezra Pound attempted to demonstrate that from a fiscal point of view these two leaders had a great deal in common. His conceit was that what Italian Fascism amounted to was a completion of the American Revolution. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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To complete the American Revolution in Africa, the Italian army invaded Ethiopia.

“War, stress or conflict is to the man what maternity is to the woman. I do not believe in perpetual peace; not only do I not believe in it but I find it depressing and a negation of all the fundamental virtues of man.” — Benito Mussolini HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1941

Concord’s “Great Elm,” or “Whipping Post Elm,” or “Town House Elm,” or as it had been known by Henry Thoreau, “Jones Elm,” ravaged by insects and damaged as it had been by the hurricane of 1938, was cut back to a standing trunk (which itself would be turned into kindling during the following spring).

Swami Govinda Tirtha’s THE NECTAR OF GRACE: OMAR KHAYYAM’S LIFE AND WORKS (Kitabistan, Allahabad). THE NECTAR OF GRACE

During the early 1940s we know that, in Europe, the poet Ezra Pound, despite his virulent antisemitism,5 despite his affection for Hitler and Mussolini, despite his growing respect for Nazism and Fascism, in fact had been rereading Thoreau with enthusiasm!

Maybe he was being influenced? –Maybe enough contact might have brought this man back from his delusions? –Tugged him back from the rabid brink? Maybe, but we’ll never know — for this didn’t have a chance to happen. In this year, when Pound applied for permission to return to the USA, he got rebuffed by the federal government. “Get lost,” he was told in effect, “for we don’t need you.” Until 1943 therefore the

5. “... my worst mistake was the stupid suburban anti-Semitic prejudice, all along that spoiled everything ... I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron ... I should have been able to do better ....” In early 1941, what Pound was fulminating against over the radio was “usury,” the loaning of money at interest, as a cause of war throughout history. In his consideration, understanding the issue of usury was central to understanding history: “Until you know who has lent what to whom, you know nothing whatever of politics, you know nothing whatever of history, you know nothing of international wrangles.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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poet would be broadcasting pro-fascist propaganda in English on Rome radio. Was this man unredeemable? Was the Jones Elm a goner? Did we chop them up unnecessarily? –Does this Pound thingie amount to one of the great missed opportunities in our history? Was the publication of that volume on Khayyam’s poetry by Swami Tirtha the sole event of lasting significance during this eventful year? WORLD WAR II

October 2, Thursday: Movements 2, 5 and 6 of American Melting Pot for chamber orchestra by Henry Cowell were performed for the initial time, in Philadelphia.

Operation Typhoon, the German advance on Moscow, began.

German forces launched a massive offensive toward Moscow.

Six synagogues in Paris were dynamited by the S.S. 2,146 Jews were shot in Zagare, Lithuania. 976 Jews were shot in Butrimonys, Lithuania, with German soldiers placing benches at the site to give Lithuanians a “good view.” ANTISEMITISM

Ezra Pound considered Japan’s Chinese enemies to be as much the victims of the international money lenders and intriguers as were the Japanese themselves. In his typical lively imagery, he offered that: There are millions of Chinamen, many of them living on very short rations in the interior and about as much interested in Chiang Kai-shek as they are in the White Socks and the Phillies, if there still are any Phillies. You could get more enthusiasm out of those Chinks for a Hot Dog Championship on the Northside than you could for Chiang’s foreign party in China. A lot of China is not pro-Kai-shek. A lot of China is not for that gang of foreign investors.

October 26, Sunday: According to Ezra Pound, Americans had no idea why they were being expected to fight in Britain’s war with Germany: “Even Mr. Churchill hasn’t had the grass to tell the American people why he wants them to die, to save what. He is fighting for the gold standard and monopoly. Namely the power to starve the whole of mankind, and make it pay through the nose before it can eat the fruit of its own labor.”

Croatian partisans organized themselves on Petrova Gora mountain. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November 6, Thursday: German blockade runner Odenwald disguised as United States ship Willmoto was captured by cruiser Omaha (CL-4) and destroyer Sommers (DD-381) in Atlantic equatorial waters.

Jewish citizens were assembled in the central square of Rovno in a blizzard and taken to five large pits that had been prepared by Red Army prisoners. Naked under the German gun barrels, on this day and the following one 17,500 would be forced to clamber down into these five pits. ANTISEMITISM

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, leader of Palestinian Arabs, arrived in Berlin and a German government spokesman described him as a great man. The US Constitution, Ezra Pound offered over the airwaves, had been “for more than a century, in fact for 130 years, far and away the best on earth. I had always thought we could get all the social justice we need, by a few sane reforms of money, such as Adams and Lincoln would have thought honest and Constitutional. The grafters would rather throw you into a ten years war and kill off five or ten million young men than even let the discussion of monetary reform flower on the front pages of the American papers.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1942

January 29, Thursday: Japanese forces landed at Badoeng Island and Mampawan, Celebes.

US and Philippine troops eliminated the Japanese bridgehead on Point Longoskayan, Bataan.

Ezra Pound resented as racist the post-Pearl Harbor attacks on the Japanese by the Allies: “A BBC commentator somewhere about January 8 was telling his presumably music hall audience the Japs were jackals, and that they had just recently, I think he said within living men’s lifetime, emerged from barbarism. I don’t know what patriotic end you think, or he thinks, or the British authorities think is served by such fetid ignorance.”

Soviet troops captured Sukhinichi from German forces, 225 kilometers southwest of Moscow.

German forces took Benghazi, Libya.

The foreign ministers of Ecuador and Peru signed a treaty ending their 125-year-old border dispute. Ecuador broke off relations with Germany, Italy, and Japan.

Off Iceland, United States Coast Guard Cutter Alexander Hamilton (PG-34) was sunk by a torpedo from a German submarine. WORLD WAR II

February 2, Monday: Japanese naval vessel sunk: Minesweeper #9, by mine, Netherlands East Indies area, 3 degrees 42 minutes South, 128 degrees 10 minutes East.

What was the American tradition? According to Ezra Pound: “The determination of our forbears to set up and maintain in the North American continent a government better than any other. The determination to govern ourselves internally, better than any other nation on earth. The idea of Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, to keep out of foreign shindies.”6

The following headline, and commentary about the remorselessness of accidents, appeared in The Los Angeles Times: THE QUESTION OF JAPANESE-AMERICANS

6. In response to media claims that he was a fascist propagandist Pound would say the following in an undated script from the 1942 period: If anybody can find anything hostile to the Constitution of the U.S.A. in these speeches, it would greatly interest me to know what. It may be bizarre, eccentric, quaint, old-fashioned of me to refer to that document, but I wish more Americans would at least read it. It is not light and easy reading but it contains several points of interest, whereby some of our present officials could, if they but would, profit greatly. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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by W. H. Anderson Perhaps the most difficult and delicate question that confronts our powers that be is the handling —the safe and proper treatment— of our American-born Japanese, our Japanese-American citizens by the accident of birth. But who are Japanese nevertheless. A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched. WORLD WAR II TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS

February 3, Tuesday: Ezra Pound told his radio audience that the United States had, “with unspeakable vulgarity ... insulted the most finely tempered people on earth [the Japanese], threatening them with starvation, threatening them with encirclement and telling them they were too low down to fight.” This was what, he said, had brought about the attack at Pearl Harbor and consequent American intervention in the world war.

The South East London Tribunal at Lambeth required the composer Michael Tippett to perform military tasks of a non-combat nature, refusing his request for conscientious objector status (he would appeal against this).

It was announced the Arnold Bax has been appointed Master of the King’s Music.

Submarine Trout (SS-202) delivers ammunition to Corregidor, Philippine Islands and removes gold, silver, securities, and mail. The Japanese bombed Surabaya, Java, Netherlands East Indies. Japanese planes attacked Port Moresby, Papua.

Japanese soldiers landed from five barges on the shore of Henry Reid Bay, an indent on Wide Bay near the Tol and Waitavalo plantations, and immediately set out to round up various Australian fugitives who had been hiding out in the surrounding jungle.

The following two headlines appeared in The Los Angeles Times: CALIFORNIANS SEEK MORE ALIEN CURBS. Washington and Oregon Members of Congress Join in Plea for Expansion of Program.

AMERICAN JAPS REMOVAL URGED. Internment of All Dual Citizens Asked by [LA] County Defense Council. WORLD WAR II CALIFORNIA HDT WHAT? INDEX

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February 18, Wednesday: In Singapore, 5,000 leaders of the Chinese community were rounded up by the Japanese. Within two weeks all would be dead.

Ezra Pound opinioned: “Don’t shoot the President. I dare say he deserves worse, but ... [a]ssassination only makes more mess.”

During a howling blizzard the American destroyer USS Truxtun (DD-229) and stores ship USS Pollux (AKS- 2) ran into trouble in Chambers Cove of Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. The ships had been en-route to the US Naval Base at Argentia, Newfoundland. In poor visibility and raging seas, the USS Truxtun plowed straight into a 200-foot cliff and broke in half. About two miles away, the USS Pollux became stranded on the beach at Lawn Head. Miners at a nearby camp rushed to the rescue and within hours, all those still alive had been plucked from the raging waves. From the Truxtun, only 3 officers and 43 ratings survived. The total number to survive was 168. The next day 204 bodies would be recovered along the shore. In June 1954, when the US Government would place a hospital on the Burin Peninsula, the hospital would memorialize those who had failed to survive that night. WORLD WAR II

February 19, Thursday: A Japanese air attack on Port Darwin, Australia devastated that city.

An inferior Japanese naval force beat back Dutch and Australian ships in the Badung Strait between Bali and Lombok. Japanese troops landed on Bali.

At Riom, several pre-war leaders of France were put on trial, including Edouard Daladier, Léon Blum, Maurice Gamolin as well as others.

In regard to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s interventionist bias, Ezra Pound commented: “To send boys from Omaha to Singapore to die for British monopoly and brutality is not the act of an American patriot.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The poet’s primary concern, referenced repeatedly throughout his broadcasts, was the issue of usury and the control of money and economy by private special interests. “There is no freedom without economic freedom,” he offered. “Freedom that does not include freedom from debt is plain bunkum. It is fetid and foul logomachy to call such servitude freedom ... Yes, freedom from all sorts of debt, including debt at usurious interest.”

The President signed Executive Order #9066 which established the War Relocation Authority responsible for interning 110,000 people of Japanese descent in concentration camps (many of these people being detained without trial or hearing were United States citizens). All the military would need to do under this Executive Order, to exclude you and your family from any region within the United States, or to confine you in a remote concentration camp for the duration, would be to allege “military necessity.”

WHEREAS the successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage, ... I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War ... to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with such respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion. The Secretary of War is hereby authorized to provide for residents of any such area who are excluded therefrom, such transportation, food, shelter, and other accommodations as may be necessary ... to accomplish the purpose of this order. J APANESE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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This would constitute the legal authority behind the mass removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast.

Japanese bombers raided harbor, airfields, and shore installations at Darwin, Australia.

Bali, Netherlands East Indies, was invaded by the Japanese. The Battle of Badoeng Strait started at night and continued the next day. An Allied naval force (Rear Admiral K.W.F.M. Doorman, Royal Netherlands Navy) of three cruisers and accompanying destroyers attacked the retiring Japanese Bali occupation force in Badoeng Strait. One Netherlands destroyer was sunk, and 2 Netherlands cruisers and a United States destroyer were damaged. One Japanese destroyer was damaged.

United States Destroyer Peary (DD-226) was sunk by a dive bomber off Darwin, Australia, at 12 degrees 30 minutes South, 130 degrees 50 minutes East. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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March 2, Monday: According to Ezra Pound, it was the money issue (above all) that united the Allies during this 2d of the 20th-century wars upon Germany: “Gold. Nothing else uniting the three governments, England, Russia, United States of America. That is the interest — gold, usury, debt, monopoly, class interest, and possibly gross indifference and contempt for humanity.”

In accord with that sort of mindset, more than 5,000 Jews were taken from the Minsk ghetto and murdered, and some 900 were taken from Krosniewice to Chelmno and asphyxiated in gas vans. ANTISEMITISM

The 6,830-ton Australian cruiser HMAS Perth and the American cruiser Houston attempted to escape southwards from the battle of the Sunda Strait into the Indian Ocean. Unfortunately they ran straight into a Japanese invasion fleet of destroyers and troop transports, and after a long running battle during which all ammunition was expended, just after midnight, they were sunk by torpedoes about 4 miles from St. Nicholas Point in Java. On board the Perth were 45 officers, 631 ratings, 4 canteen staff and 6 Royal Australian Airforce personnel, a total of 686 men. 23 officers and 329 ratings died.7 334 would become prisoners of war, of whom around 105 of the ratings would die in captivity. (Due no doubt to the privileges granted to men of officer rank, none of the Perth’s officers would die while a POW.) The USS Houston went down a few minutes later about a mile from the Perth, in approximately 107 feet of water just north of Panjang Island. 643 died. The captains of the Perth and Houston went down with their ships and Captain Robert Rooks, the commander of the Houston, would posthumously receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. 368 from the Houston would managed to reach Bantam Bay on the western shores of Java to surrender to the Japanese. 77 of them would die in captivity.

Antisubmarine Warfare Unit, Atlantic Fleet, was established at Boston, Mass. Japanese troops land at Zamboanga, Mindanao, Philippine Islands.

7. Isn’t is curious, the macabre way these statistics are routinely kept? The number of officer deaths gets cited, then the number of “ratings” deaths? Imagine trying to say to a “rating” who is going down for the third time, “Look, fellow, you’re obviously taking this pretty hard –it’s your death and all that– but can’t you at least derive some consolation from the fact that this would have been a significantly greater loss to us, had you been an officer? God must have loved you enlisted types, he made so many of you. Soon you will lose consciousness — and then you’ll be a mere nameless, painless statistic who has given your life for your country! Don’t sweat it, it’s the way things are. Come on now, at least you can hum a bit from ‘There’ll always be an England’....” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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News Headline: “Concentration Camps for Japanese Wanted by Western Governors”

News Headline: “‘Behind the News’; Negro-Japanese Fifth Column Possible”

John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command, issued Public Proclamation No. 1 creating military areas 1 and 2. Military area 1 included the western portions of California, Oregon and Washington, and part of Arizona, while military area 2 included the balance of the land of these states. The proclamation indicated that Japanese Americans were to be excluded from military area 1 and encouraged them to depart voluntarily. For various reasons, voluntary resettlement was doomed to failure and would effectively be called off on March 27th after fewer than 5,000 out of a population of over 110,000 had fled.

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March 8, Sunday: Although “gold” was central to the world’s struggle according to Ezra Pound, the precious metal was “a coward. Gold is not the backbone of nations. It is their ruin. A coward, at the first breath of danger gold flows away, gold flows out of the country.” Beware the rule of pelf.

Pound perceived Germany under Hitler as a nation that stood against the international money lenders and communist Russia under Stalin as a system that stood against humanity itself. He told his listeners: Now if you know anything whatsoever of modern Europe and Asia, you know Hitler stands for putting men over machines. If you don’t know that, you know nothing. And beyond that you either know or do not know that Stalin’s regime considers humanity as nothing save raw material. Deliver so many carloads of human material at the consumption point. That is the logical result of materialism. If you assert that men are dirty, that humanity is merely material, that is where you come out. And the old Georgian train robber [he was referring to Josef Stalin] is perfectly logical. If all things are merely material, man is material — and the system of anti-man treats man as matter. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The real enemy, suggested Pound, was international capitalism. All people everywhere were victims: “They’re working day and night, picking your pockets,” he said. “Every day and all day and all night picking your pockets and picking the Russian working man’s pockets.” Capital, however, was “not international, it is not hypernational. It is subnational. A quicksand under the nations, destroying all nations, destroying all law and government, destroying the nations, one at a time, Russian empire and Austria, 20 years past, France yesterday, England today.”

The Japanese Army entered Rangoon, Burma.

Japanese troops landed at Lae and Salamaua in New Guinea. WORLD WAR II

April 30, Thursday: The Pinsk ghetto was established. We can afford to bear in mind that while Ezra Pound definitely made use of ethnic slurs, behind such rabble- rousing his intended target was always the international banking establishment — which he perceived as dominated by families that were, at least ethnically, Jewish. For whatever intentions are worth, he did not intend to be an enemy of Jews as such: “Don’t start a pogrom,” he suggested, “That is, not an old-style killing of small Jews. That system is no good whatsoever. Of course if some man had a stroke of genius and could start a pogrom up at the top, there might be something to say for it. But on the whole legal measures are preferable.” We can bear in mind that Herr Hitler took Pound’s advice, at the start of his extermination program, excluding German Jews first from the professions and the universities (and only then proceeding to the so on and so forth).

Fons salutifer op.48 for chorus, orchestra and organ by Hans Pfitzner was performed for the initial time, in Karlsbad.

Concerto for cello and orchestra by David Diamond was performed for the initial time, in Rochester, New York, conducted by Howard Hanson.

Allied troops in Burma took up new defensive positions north of the Irrawaddy.

Under National Guard protection against the local white Americans, 14 black American families were able to move into the federally-funded Sojourner Truth housing project.

News Headline: “New Japanese Evacuation Order”

Two naval patrol planes evacuated military and civilian personnel from Corregidor, Philippine Islands.

Admiral H.R. Stark assumed command of United States Naval Forces Europe.

The battleship Indiana (BB-58) was commissioned at Newport News, Virginia. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May 4, Monday: Ezra Pound declared that “The Bolshevik anti-morale comes out of the Talmud, which is the dirtiest teaching any race ever codified. The Talmud is the one and only begetter of the Bolshevik system.” Benjamin Britten made a “Statement to the Local Tribunal for the Registration of Conscientious Objectors.” This began, “Since I believe that there was in every man the spirit of God, I cannot destroy, and feel it my duty to avoid helping to destroy as far as I am able, human life, however strongly I may disapprove of the individual’s actions or thoughts.”

Japanese troops defeated Chinese troops at Bhamo in Burma. General Joseph Stilwell started the “Walkout” at Shwebo, Burma.

After sending 16,000 artillery shells onto the island within 24 hours, a small Japanese force landed on Corregidor to fierce resistance by American and Philippine troops.

The Battle of the Coral Sea (4-8 May) commenced with an air strike on Tulagi, Solomon Islands, by United States carrier-based aircraft. Allied naval forces (Rear Admiral F.J. Fletcher, USN) comprised Attack Group (Rear Admiral T. C. Kinkaid, USN) of United State cruisers Chester (CA-27), New Orleans (CA-32), Portland (CA-33), Astoria (CA-34), Minneapolis (CA-36) and destroyers Farragut (DD-348), Dewey (DD-340), Monaghan (DD- 354), Aylwin (DD-355) and Phelps (DD-360); Support Group (Rear Admiral J. G. Crace, RN) with United States cruiser Chicago (CA-29), Australian cruisers Australia and Hobart, and United States destroyers Perkins (DD-377) and Walke (DD- 416); Carrier Group (Rear Admiral A. W. Fitch, USN) consisting of United States carriers Lexington (CV-2) and Yorktown (CV- 5) with destroyers Anderson (DD- 411), Hammann (DD-412), Russell (DD-414), and Morris (DD-417); Fueling Group (Captain J.S. Phillips, USN) including United States oilers Tippecanoe (AO-21) and Neosho (A0-23) and destroyers Worden (DD- 352) and Sims (DD-409). Commander in Chief United States Fleet (Admiral E. J. King) directed Coast Guard Auxiliary to organize civilian small craft as coastal pickets. The United States Minesweeper Tanager (AM-5) was sunk by the coastal defense guns of Corregidor, Philippine Islands. The Japanese Destroyer Kikuzuki was sunk by US carrier-based aircraft off Tulagi in the Solomon Islands. WORLD WAR II

May 28, Thursday: Benjamin Britten appeared before a British court to explain why he should be exempted from military service as a Conscientious Objector: “I cannot took part in acts of destruction.” He claimed he can best serve his country through his creative activities. The court exempted him but required him to do non- combatant duties (he would appeal).

Basso Ezio Pinza was released from Ellis Island, having been held since March 12th as an enemy alien.

United States forces arrived at Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides Islands.

The Axis advance in Libya faltered. The German soldiers continued to attacked toward Acroma, and engaged HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the British near Bir el Harmat.

200 Poles were taken from Warsaw to Magdalenka and shot.

The Germans defeated the forces of the USSR at Kharkov.

Ezra Pound broadcast that: “Class war is not an American product, not from the roots of the nation. Not in our historic process. And the racial solution, which is Europe’s solution, which is in Europe’s process, rooted deep down, un-uprootable.” He told his listeners it was vital they study the evolution of the American system, why the American Revolution took place to begin with — yes, it had to do with money: Colonies, pretty much racially homogeneous, evolved. They found a solution for the problem of money, not of fields against money, not of colonists, farmers fighting money, but of fields and money working together, and they found it in Pennsylvania, and the world said, “How marvelous.” And an unjust, usurious, monopolist government shut down on the money — money handed out to the colonists to facilitate their field production, the repayment not going to a set of leeches and exploiters. And the unjust monopolist government, namely the British, was hoofed out [of] the colonies 30 years later. WORLD WAR II

May 31, Sunday: Kenneth Patchen’s radio play The City Wears a Slouch Hat with music by John Cage was broadcast for the initial time, over the airwaves of WBBM, originating in Chicago, conducted by the composer himself.

Ezra Pound although never an advocate of mass extermination or of any program of discrimination against Jews definitely did perceive communism as an outgrowth of ancient Judaic teachings, terming communism “the left hand of Judah” (the right hand, presumably, being international finance capitalism).

Japanese kaiten suicide submarines raided the harbor of Sydney, Australia. WORLD WAR II

July 13, Monday: United States Naval Air Facility, Grand Cayman, British West Indies, was established.

Ezra Pound orated about his version of the original intent of the American Founding Fathers: “I am telling you how to oil up the machine and change a few gadgets so that it would work as the founders intended.”

German submarine U-153 was damaged by the US submarine chaser PC-458 and by Army aircraft off the coast of Panama, and then sunk by the US destroyer Landsdowne (DD-486), at 9 degrees 56 minutes North, 81 degrees 29 minutes West. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July 17, Friday: Ezra Pound detected in many historical problems the covert but direct involvement of Jewish financiers. For example, he pointed out, “Nobody with any historical knowledge says that the French revolution occurred without Jewish assistance. Nor that since that somewhat bloody upset and series of subsequent upsets the Jew weren’t cock-a-hoop in the French capital. A knowledge of the French commune would have helped us to understand the Russian November revolution if we had had it. But handy and useful knowledge has an easy way of getting mislaid. Now what causes that?”

A total of 12,884 non-French Jews had been rounded up in Paris for deportation. 6,900 were confined at the Velodrome d’Hiver, the huge sports stadium on the Boulevard de Grenelle. Five days later, the 4,051 children among them would be separated from their parents and transported to the camps near Auschwitz in Poland. Without food and with little water and but four toilets, the remaining victims were in a deplorable state by the time they boarded the trains for Poland. When the Red Army liberated Auschwitz on January 26, 1945, they would find only 2,819 inmates still alive, with only 30 of these 6,900 non-French Jews among them. Not one of these 4,051 children would survive. It is estimated that around 60,000 Jews perished in France during the German occupation (this figure includes 22,193 French Jews and 14,459 Polish Jews who had fled to France). WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1943

March 25, Thursday: Some 2,000 Jews were taken from Zolkiewka, Poland to a nearby forest and killed. ANTISEMITISM

Naval and Army aircraft bombed Japanese-held Nauru Island in the South Pacific. WORLD WAR II

Ezra Pound was traced the history of the current war, perceiving all things through his lens of usury: This war did not begin in 1939. It is not a unique result of the infamous Versailles Treaty. It is impossible to understand it without knowing at least a few precedent historic events, which mark the cycle of combat. No man can understand it without knowing at least a few facts and their chronological sequence. This war is part of the age-old struggle between the usurer and the rest of mankind: between the usurer and peasant, the usurer and producer, and finally between the usurer and the merchant, between usurocracy and the mercantilist system.... The present war dates at least from the founding of the Bank of England at the end of the 17th century, 1694-8. Half a century later, the London usurocracy shut down on the issue of paper money by the Pennsylvania colony, A.D. 1750. This is not usually given prominence in the U.S. school histories. The 13 colonies rebelled, quite successfully, 26 years later, A.D. 1776.

May 23, Sunday: Ezra Pound was fulminating against usury: The usury system does no nation ... any good whatsoever. It is an internal peril to him who hath, and it can make no use of nations in the play of international diplomacy save to breed strife between them and use the worst as flails against the best. It is the usurer’s game to hurl the savage against the civilized opponent. The game is not pretty, it is not a very safe game. It does no one any credit.

As far as the English were concerned, in Pound’s broadcasts aimed at the British Isles he was warning his listeners that although Russian-style communist totalitarianism was a threat to British freedom, it was not the biggest threat Britain faced: You are threatened. You are threatened by the Russian methods of administration. Those methods [are not] your sole danger. It is, in fact, so far from being your sole danger that I have, in over two years of talk over this radio, possibly never referred to it before. Usury has gnawed into England since the days of Elizabeth. First it was mortgages, mortgages on earls’ estates; HDT WHAT? INDEX

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usury against the feudal nobility. Then there were attacks on the common land, filchings of village common pasture. Then there developed a usury system, an international usury system, from Cromwell’s time, ever increasing.

In the end, Pound suggested, it would be the big money interests who would really win the war — not any particular nation-state — and the foundation for future wars would be set in place: “The nomadic parasites will shift out of London and into Manhattan. And this will be presented under a camouflage of national slogans. It will be represented as an American victory. It will not be an American victory. The moment is serious. The moment is also confusing. It is confusing because there are two sets of concurrent phenomena, namely, those connected with fighting this war, and those which sow seeds for the next one.”

The original band setting of Commando March by Samuel Barber was performed for the initial time, in Convention Hall at Atlantic City.

The battleship New Jersey (BB-62) was commissioned at Philadelphia.

United States naval vessels sunk by the Japanese: • PT-boat tender Niagara (AGP-1), by horizontal bomber, Solomon Islands area, 11 degrees 0 minutes South, 163 degrees 0 minutes East • PT-165 and PT-173, by submarine torpedoes, off New Caledonia, 23 degrees 45 minutes South, 166 degrees 30 minutes East WORLD WAR II

June 1, Tuesday: Los Angeles’s “zoot suit” riot was triggered by an assault on a white serviceman. TIME Magazine would term this “the ugliest brand of mob action since the coolie race riot of the 1870s.”

A flight of 20 P-40s dive-bombed warehouses and railroad yards at Changanyi in China.

Ezra Pound used the bully pulpit offered him by his radio broadcast to suggest that the US could constitutionally embrace a version of Italian corporatism: “You have not made use of the machinery provided in the Constitution itself, to keep the American government modern.” You could keep the Constitution, and under that Constitution every state in the Union could reorganize its system of representation. Any or every state could elect its Congressmen on trade basis.... Any or every state could organize its congressional representation on a corporate basis. Carpenters, artisans, mechanics, could have one representative; writers, doctors, and lawyers could have one representative. You could perfectly legally and constitutionally divide up the representatives of any or every state on the basis of trades and professions and the life of that state, every man in it, would gain representation in Congress; and Congress would take on an honesty and reality no American in our time has dreamed of. Present Congressmen are mostly so ignorant that some people have thought it might be useful to have a bit of congressional education. Insist on Congressmen being able to pass an exam in HDT WHAT? INDEX

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at least some of the subject matters they are expected to vote on ... I think the representation by trades and profession would be a better way out, with, if you like, different exams for the different trades and professions. That could do no harm whatsoever. Man to represent steel workers, to be able to show he knows the working of steel; miner to know the workings of mines; professional to represent his profession, really to represent his profession, the best qualities, most acute knowledge of his profession. That would certainly lead to efficiency. Health regulations would be decided by someone who knew something about sanitation. Rules for mining coal, rates per day, decided by someone who knows coal don’t just crawl out of a mine, while somebody sits round playing pinochle.... WORLD WAR II

(Isn’t it interesting, that half a century after the defeat of Italy in this world war, the USA has indeed constitutionally embrace a version of Fascist corporatism? Imagine this, we have embraced the agenda of Duce Benito Mussolini without even once embracing Mussolini himself! The votes of individual citizens still govern us — but these votes are entirely manipulable in accordance with the latest “free speech” TV spots purchased with the latest “free speech” campaign donations from the biggest “free speech” lobbyists for the most politically active “free speech” corporations in accordance with the Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court!)

July 26, Monday: Marshal Badoglio declared martial law in Italy and began negotiations with the Allies.

A federal grand jury in Washington indicted eight American expatriates, including Ezra Pound, for treason, on account of their pro-fascist broadcasts from Axis countries.

United States Destroyer Mayrant (DD-402) was damaged by a horizontal bomber near Palermo, Sicily, at 38 degrees 16 minutes North, 13 degrees 20 minutes East.

Germany Submarine U-759 was sunk by naval land-based aircraft (VP-32) in the Caribbean, at 18 degrees 6 minutes North, 75 degrees 0 minutes West. WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1945

April 28, Saturday: Allied troops took Brescia and Bergamo. Italian Communist partisans captured Duce Benito Mussolini in northern Italy while he and his mistress Clara Petacci were attempting to flee, stood them up against a wall and machine-gunned them, and then hanged up the bodies by their heels at a local filling station.

Some fifteen other leading fascists were gunned down by Italian partisans as well. Among them were Alessandro Pavolini, secretary of the Fascist Party, and four cabinet ministers

As the Red Army moved to within a few kilometers of the Chancellery, Führer Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were married in his Berlin bunker.

American troops took Augsburg.

Symphony for voices and orchestra by Norman Dello Joio to words of Stephen Vincent Benét was performed for the initial time, in New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The Allies took Venice, Italy.

At about this same time these partizans were arresting Ezra Pound at his home in northern Italy — but they would hand this disloyal American poet over to the US Army for confinement in a steel cage in Pisa, at the Disciplinary Training Center.

WORLD WAR II (American doctors would take brain samples from Mussolini’s corpse and test them for syphilis. The corpse would be buried in an unmarked grave outside Milan. The remains would be dug up by a neo-Fascist and hidden in the mountains in a steamer trunk. When the remains would be recovered, they would be reburied in Predappio, Italy.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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April 29, Sunday: British forces reached Pegu, Burma (Myanmar) just as early monsoons began. They also took Allanmyo, 300 kilometers northwest of Rangoon. Indians took Nyaunglebim, 135 kilometers northeast of the capital.

Soviet troops reached Potsdam Station, while others captured Anklam, 75 kilometers northwest of Stettin (Szczecin).

An instrument effecting the surrender of almost a million Germans in Italy was signed in Caserta, ending the war on the peninsula.

Allied troops entered Milan and Venice.

An all-party provisional government for Austria was set up under Karl Renner.

Italian partisans turned Ezra Pound over to the United States Army.

The RAF dropped 6,000 tons of supplies into German-occupied Netherlands.

Shortly after 3PM American soldiers entered Dachau death camp, northwest of München. They found 33,000 prisoners and a garrison of 560 SS. The Americans were so horrified by what they found that they killed some of the guards. The balance were killed by the inmates.

A Quartet Movement in F by Antonin Dvorák was performed for the initial time, over the airwaves of Prague Radio, 64 years after it was composed.

Seven of Les chants de Nectaire for flute op.198 by Charles Koechlin were performed for the initial time, in the Grand Amphithéâtre de la Sorbonne.

Zwei Lieder aus Gedichten von Berthold Viertel by Stefan Wolpe was performed for the initial time, in New York.

United States naval vessels damaged: • Destroyer Hazelwood (DD-531), by Kamikaze suicide plane, Okinawa area, 27 degrees 2 minutes North, 129 degrees 59 minutes East • Destroyer Haggard (DD-555), by Kamikaze suicide plane, Okinawa area, 27 degrees 1 minute North, 129 degrees 40 minutes East

• Light minelayer Shannon (DM-25), by Kamikaze suicide plane, Okinawa area, 26 degrees 0 minute North, 127 degrees 0 minute East HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• Light minelayer Harry F. Bauer (DM-26), by Kamikaze suicide plane, Okinawa area, 26 degrees 47 minutes North, 128 42 minutes East • Motor minesweeper YMS-51, by mine, off Tarakan, Borneo, 3 degrees 18 minutes North, 117 degrees 33 minutes East

Japanese naval vessel sunk: • Submarine I-44, by aircraft (VC-92) from escort carrier Tulagi (CVE-72), Philippine Sea, 24 degrees 15 minutes North, 131 degrees 16 minutes East WORLD WAR II

April 30, Monday: 2:30PM. Sgt. Kantariya of the Red Army placed the Red Banner on the Second floor of the Reichstag. By 10:50PM it would fly from the roof.

American troops reached Garmisch and intended to billet themselves in a large villa. Answering their knock, an 80-year-old man opened the door and announced, “I am Richard Strauss, the composer of Der Rosenkavalier and Salome.” The officer in charge recognized Strauss who invited them in and offered them wine and food. The soldiers did not to disturb the composer’s privacy and proceeded to take over another house.

American forces captured München and Turin.

Yugoslav forces entered Trieste battling German defenders.

3:30PM. After Herr und Frau Führer Adolf Hitler entered Hitler’s room in the Berlin bunker and closed the door, Eva took poison. Shortly thereafter Adolf shot himself in the head.

Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz proclaimed himself head of the German state.

United States naval vessels damaged in operations against Japanese forces: • Destroyer Jenkins (DD-447), by mine, off Tarakan, Borneo, 3 degrees 12 minutes North, 117 degrees 37 minutes East • Destroyer Bennion (DD-662), by Kamikaze suicide plane, Okinawa area, 27 degrees 26 minutes North, 127 degrees 51 minutes East • Minelayer Terror (CM-5), by Kamikaze suicide plane, Okinawa area, 26 degrees 10 minutes North, 127 degrees 18 minutes East

German submarines sunk: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• U-548, by destroyer escorts Thomas (DE-102), Bostwick (DE-103), Coffman (DE-191), and frigate Natchez (PF-2), off Virginia, 36 degrees 34 minutes North, 74 degrees 0 minute West • U-1055, by naval land-based aircraft (VPB-63), west of France, 48 degrees 0 minute North, 6 degrees 30 minutes West

German submarines sunk sometime in April by United States Army and British aircraft: • U-677 U-906, U-982, U-3525, Baltic area. • U-1131, U-1227, U-2516, Kiel, Germany. • U-2532, U-2537, Hamburg, Germany HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In the bunker under the Reich Chancellery gardens in Berlin, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were wed8 and then offed themselves with cyanide capsule and pistol. Adolf had lately been reading in Thomas Carlyle’s FREDERICK THE GREAT, but we don’t know the point he had reached or the conclusions he was drawing from this review — maybe he had just been killing time. Then their corpses were mostly burned in the courtyard, using precious gasoline. (What remained after the gasoline fire would be buried in secret. The remains would then be exhumed and reburied in secret in another location. The remains would then be re-exhumed and cremated. The Russians would recover some pieces of Hitler’s corpse — enough to resolve lingering doubts by proving the guy was actually dead without even needing to have a stake driven through his heart. The Russians still possess a piece of this guy’s skull, for all the good it will ever do them.) WORLD WAR II

To the US military authorities in Pisa, Ezra Pound was characterizing Hitler as a martyr, and paralleling him with Joan of Arc. While sleeping on the concrete floor of a 10- foot-square by 7-foot-high steel cage, the poet would produce the PISAN CANTOS (LXVIV-LXXXIV), in which the influence of Benito Mussolini is

8. Would she have a tombstone that reads “Wife of the Führer for one Day”? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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particularly apparent.

May 5, Saturday: The successful Japanese units of May 4th on Okinawa were forced back, with heavy losses.

The German surrender signed on the previous day went into effect at 8AM. At 2:30PM in Baldham, all forces between the Bohemian mountains and the Upper Inn River surrendered.

Czech resistance fighters in Prague rose against the Germans and invited American forces under General Patton to entered the city. Street battles would over the following 4 days consume 2,000 lives.

Soviet troops captured Peenemünde and Swinemünde (Swinoujscie), northwest of Stettin (Szczecin).

American forces captured Linz and when they entered the nearby Mauthausen concentration camp, found 110,000 survivors and 10,000 bodies.

Ezra Pound was arrested by American troops in Genoa and accused of having made treasonous radio broadcasts in 1943 (judged mentally incompetent, he would never face a treason trial).

As British troops arrived in Copenhagen, King Christian X of Denmark formally accepted the resignation of Prime Minister Erik Scavenius and his government. The government resigned on August 29th, 1943 but the king held this in abeyance. King Christian named Wilhelm Buhl to replace Scavenius. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Ross Lee Finney, a member of the OSS, arrived in Paris by plane from Marseilles.

There’s always someone who doesn’t get the word! Our last U-boat loss was Captain Charles Prior’s freighter SS Black Point, sunk on this day while carrying a load of coal to Boston by Captain Helmut Fromsdorf’s U853, off Point Judith, Rhode Island. 12 crewmen died, 34 survived.

U853 would be found by depth charges from escort destroyers, with no survivors.

The Japanese home islands had for some time been launching balloons with high explosive devices, to drift in the recently discovered “jet stream” in the general direction of America. Some 9,000 such devices were launched and there would be a sum total of 342 bomb reports filed in the US. Tragically, east of Bly, Oregon on this spring Saturday a pastor and his wife were taking five children for a picnic. While the Reverend Archie Mitchell was parking the car he heard his pregnant wife Elsie call out, “Look what I found, dear.” There was HDT WHAT? INDEX

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an explosion.

During a bombing run over southern Japan, one of our B-29s was rammed by a Japanese kamikaze. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The crew of our B-29 bomber parachuted and the planes crashed near the town of Takete. The American flyers were taken to Fukuoka, about 100 miles north of Nagasaki. The pilot, Captain Marvin Watkins, was taken on to Tokyo for interrogation, and would survive the war. However, at the anatomy department of Kyushu University, the other 8 flyers would be being used for bizarre student “medical experimentation.” One of the flyers, badly wounded, was anesthetized for an operation and presumed that what was happening was that these medical students were going to attempt to repair his body — nope, instead they practiced their surgical techniques by removing one of his lungs. Soon afterward, he would die. Some would be having portions of their livers excised, to find out how much could be chopped out of a human liver and the patient remain living. They would deliberately shoot a flyer in the stomach, in order to practice the removal of bullets. In one of their experiments they would use sea water as a substitute for saline solution, in order to discover whether this might prove to be an adequate substitute. The students would be practicing their amputation skills on the legs and arms of the flyers exactly as if they were doing this training as usual on cadavers. (After the war 23 of the doctors and hospital staff would be found guilty on various charges at the Allied war crimes trials held at Yokohama. There would be 5 death sentences, which would not, however, be carried out, and there would be prison sentences, although when the Korean war would begin in June 1950, General Douglas MacArthur would reduce most of the sentences. All those who would be convicted in this atrocity, including those sentenced to death for their war crimes, would by 1958, which is to say, 13 years later, again be free men.)

All’s fair in love and war.

United States naval vessels damaged, Okinawa area: • Seaplane tender St. George (AV-16), by Kamikaze suicide plane, 26 degrees 10 minutes North, 127 degrees 19 minutes East HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• Surveying ship Pathfinder (AGS-1), by Kamikaze suicide plane, 26 degrees 38 minutes North, 127 degrees 53 minutes East WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December 21, Friday: While George Smith Patton, Jr. was being driven around Germany, his military chauffeur got in an accident. Here is his command car — except that it has now been repaired, and all restored and cherried out and polished:

TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS

Unfortunately, after the accident Patton died from an embolism at the 130th Station Hospital in Heidelberg. WORLD WAR II

The Kingdom of Iraq and the Republic of Ecuador ratified the United Nations Charter.

Back from Fascist Italy in Washington DC, a district court, considering him unfit to stand trial for treason, committed the 60-year-old Ezra Pound to the Howard Hall of Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Criminally HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Insane.9

9. Following protests by influential figures, he would be transferred to the hospital’s more humane Chestnut Ward facility. Pound’s wife Dorothy would take a room nearby and his visitors would include a number of longtime friends, including the literary figures T.S. Eliot, e.e. cummings, Robert Lowell, and William Carlos Williams. During his dozen years under commitment the poet would produce some of his most personal and powerful work, including ROCK DRILL, LXXXV-ICV, and THRONES, ICVI-CIX. A few more fragments of cantos would appear over the following decade but by 1962 such work would be abandoned, so that the CANTOS remain unfinished. Pound would comment to Allen Ginsberg that nothing made sense to him anymore and that the worst mistake he’d made was “that stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1946

October 15, Tuesday: President Harry S Truman ended price controls on meat.

In the course of that night the swordsman Hermann Göring, former Reichsmarshall and head of the Luftwaffe, offed himself with a capsule of cyanide a couple of hours before they were to come get him out of his cell for hanging. GERMANY WORLD WAR II War-Guilt Trials10 The mumble-jumble drones on, the hangman waits; the shabby surviving Leaders of Germany are to learn that Vae Victis Means Weh den Gesiegten. This kind of thing may console the distresses Of Europeans, but for us! — Also we’ve caught A poet, a small shrill man like a twilight bat, Accused of being a traitor to his country. I have a bat in my tower That knows more about treason, and about her country. — Robinson Jeffers EZRA POUND

10. This poem was entirely suppressed by the publisher, Random House — even after the war was in the history books. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1949

While confined at the St. Elizabeth’s mental institution, Ezra Pound was the recipient of the Library of Congress Bollingen Prize for Poetry, for the PISAN CANTOS.

As might be expected, this award created something of an uproar in literary circles. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1951

Publication of THE POETRY OF EZRA POUND.

By this point the Amerika-Häuser reading room of the Psychological Warfare Division in Frankfurt am Main, in the US Army’s ongoing “campaign for truth,” was one of 27 such establishments created in various German population centers, and in addition 135 affiliated reading rooms had been enabled in various small towns. The books on the shelves were being provided in part by private donations from United States citizens. You can bet your sweet patootie that no copy of POETRY OF EZRA POUND ever graced the card catalog of such a psych-war facility!

In the war stories told by Joseph Raymond McCarthy, the number of bombing runs he remembered having flown over enemy territory in the South Pacific during World War II had risen from 14 to 17 to 32 — the man’s HDT WHAT? INDEX

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memory was improving by leaps and bounds!

May 16, Wednesday: Chinese forces counterattacked in several places along the line in Korea, most successfully in the east.

A mass execution of “counter-revolutionaries” took place in Shanghai.

Moslem extremist leader Abolghassem Rafiee was arrested and admitted to an assassination plot against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh.

Two Songs for baritone and piano by Thea Musgrave to words of Ezra Pound were performed for the first time, in Paris, with the composer at the keyboard. KOREAN WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1952

After his release from two years of service in the US Army, Guy Davenport got a job teaching at Washington University in St. Louis. During Ezra Pound’s incarceration in St. Elizabeths Hospital, he would visit him annually until Pound’s release in 1958, and later at his home in Rapallo, Italy.

Our government put out a citizens-advisory pamphlet in this year, informing us about the hazards of atomic attack and advising us as to what to do to protect ourselves:11

11. The above government drawing may be a bit over-prettified. Here’s an actual photo, of a woman who had been caught in the Hiroshima heat flash, before she died on October 15, 1945: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1955

A selection of the letters of Ezra Pound was published. At about this point The Pound Newsletter, devoted to the poet’s life and work, began to appear. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1958

April 18, Friday: When the pianist Van Cliburn gave a recital at Moscow Conservatory to an overflow crowd, they demanded seven encores.

Symphony no.1 by Easley Blackwood was performed for the initial time, in Boston.

At the federal courthouse in Washington DC, the treason indictment against Ezra Pound was dismissed on the ground that the poet was incurably, permanently insane and therefore not competent to stand trial, and custody over him was granted to his wife Dorothy. Released from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Pound and his wife would reside in Rapallo, Italy.

Robert Frost had been instrumental in securing the release.

A Japanese pagoda shape hewn out of rough stone was positioned on the west bank of the Tidal Basin near the Jefferson Memorial, and dedicated as a gift to the City of Washington DC by the Mayor of Yokohama to “symbolize the spirit of friendship between the United States of America manifested in the Treaty of Peace, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Amity and Commerce signed at Yokohama on March 31, 1854....” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1959

November 28, Saturday: Three Chinese Lyrics for soprano and two violins by Ben Johnston to words of Li Po (translated by Ezra Pound) was performed for the first time, at Donnell Library, New York (also premiered was Johnston’s Nine Variations for string quartet). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1968

July 9, Tuesday: The International Herald Tribune went on sale in Moscow — the first US newspaper to be sold in the Soviet Union in 40 years.

Talks aimed at the unification of the three main Quebec separatist groups ended in failure.

Paragraph 1 of The Great Learning for chorus (speaking, playing stones and whistles, and organ by Cornelius Cardew to words of Confucius, translated by Ezra Pound, was performed for the first time, in Cheltenham. Some in the audience reacted disrespectfully, and produced disruptive sounds. Fffffffffffffff. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1969

March 16, Sunday: John Barry, a reporter for the London Sunday Times, published an article about having visited Mikis Theodorakis in Zatouna, where the composer is being held by the Greek Security Police. He had returned with tapes of new songs performed by Theodorakis as well as with letters directed to the attention of U Thant, Secretary-General of the United Nations, and of the Subcommission on Human Rights of the Council of Europe. These were published with the article, and would be excerpted in periodicals throughout the world.

Paragraph 2 of The Great Learning for singers and drummers by Cornelius Cardew, to words of Confucius translated by Ezra Pound, was performed for the initial time, at the Leeds College of Art.

1776, a musical by Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone, opened in New York City.

May 4, Sunday: Paragraph 2 of The Great Learning for singers and drummers by Cornelius Cardew, to words of Confucius, translated by Ezra Pound, was performed publicly for the initial time, at the Round House in London. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1972

January 21, Friday: After ten weeks of impasse, Prime Minister Gaston Eyskens of Belgium formed an new coalition government.

Paragraph 5 of The Great Learning, for a large number of untrained musicians making gestures, performing actions, speaking, chanting, and playing a wide range of instruments, plus, optionally, ten solo singers singing “Ode Machines,” by Cornelius Cardew to words of Confucius translated by Ezra Pound, was performed for the initial time, in the Cecil Sharp House of London. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November 1, Wednesday: Concerto for piano and orchestra no.2 by Ross Lee Finney was performed for the initial time, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Ezra Pound died in Venice at the age of 87.

Fifteen letter bombs addressed to Jewish businesses and organizations in Britain were discovered at the Kuala Lampur post office and deactivated by the Malaysian army. A local Arab organization was responsible for these, and twenty others like them found in Malaysia. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1984

July 7, Saturday: At the Union Chapel, Upper Street, Islington, London, the beginning of the first complete performance of The Great Learning for vocalists doing various things, by Cornelius Cardew to words of Confucius translated by Ezra Pound.

July 8, Sunday: At the Union Chapel, Upper Street, Islington, London, completion of the initial performance of The Great Learning for vocalists doing various things, by Cornelius Cardew to words of Confucius translated by Ezra Pound.

Ikon of Light for chorus, violin, viola and cello by John Tavener was performed for the first time, in Tewkesbury Abbey, Cheltenham. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2005

July 7, Thursday: On page 22 in the July 7th issue of the London Review of Books, David Trotter told us about the poet Ezra Pound’s reading of Henry Thoreau. Pound reread Thoreau with enthusiasm in the early 1940s. One thing they had in common was an admiration for the motto supposedly inscribed on the Emperor T’ang’s bathtub: in Thoreau’s version, in WALDEN (1854), “Renew thyself completely every day; do it again, and again, and forever again”; in Pound’s, in MAKE IT NEW (1934), “AS THE SUN MAKES IT NEW / DAY BY DAY MAKE IT NEW / YET AGAIN MAKE IT NEW.”... The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, Thoreau wrote, “is the awakening hour.” Pound evidently agreed.

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Ezra Pound HDT WHAT? INDEX

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2015. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: March 26, 2015 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.