ABC of reading

What Hacker News says

1. dri_ftAug 2020
   ABC of Reading is a good but extremely curmudgeonly guide to poetry in English through the ages. (He would rather have written a guide to european poetry, and it shows, but his publisher (Faber?) insisted it focus on English for the sake of accessibility.) A large part of it is basically an anthology with commentary. His commentary in it (as elsewhere) is maddeningly condensed and hermetic - one senses the insight within it without always being able to work out what he is saying. It's hard to say who it's for - in some sense it takes the shape of a kind of 'beginner's guide', but he doesn't exactly offer the friendly helping hand a beginner might wish for. No politics, fascist or otherwise, are anywhere to be seen in it.

   I haven't read Guide To Kulchur but it seems like it edges towards the 'crazier' (late, fascist) side of Pound.

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2. tannerbrockwellJan 2018
   Pound's ABC of Reading[0] has been popular since its publication. I would inlcude Adler's How to Read a Book[1] as well. While these focus on literature, I think that there is a lot of overlap in technical and CS based writing. The primary disctinction would be that the later would be repeatable or implemented by the reader.

   [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_of_Reading [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book

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3. BellsOnSundayAug 2016
   Ezra Pound's ~ABC of Reading~ changed the way I read poetry and literary fiction. When, much later, I started to be interested in technical things I don't think I found it too hard to adapt, but I still focus on style, allusion, irony and so on in the things I read. That's generally a recipe for disappointment of course but when you come across technical writers with a voice of their own it's a lovely surprise. Wilfrid Hodges, for instance, is a great writer who becomes a friend as you work through his books.
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4. dri_ftMay 2024
   >for more detail: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

   Oh, I see. We actually discussed Pound about four years ago - just a little back and forth about the ABC of Reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24196681

   >What's your explanation of why Pound went Fascist?

   I'm not sure I particularly have one; I haven't read any of his longer political or cultural (i.e. non-literary) works. I just think it's silly to correlate an approach to translation that you dislike with fascism. Especially as I'm not sure it even makes sense on its own terms: I can only read your comment as 'lazy translator? Figures that he would be a fascist', but if I imagine the type of translation a fascist would approve of, the approach I picture is fastidious, fussy, concerned with fidelity to the point of stickler-ishness. (Isn't that from where we get 'grammar nazi'?)

   And oh, well, since you ask I'll take a shy at it: my vague sense is that he became fascist because saw a society in decline due to it becoming more and more a sham society: opulence without virtue, power without vigour, money no longer tied to actually existing goods. (Of course, all of this shades easily into antisemitism.) He saw fascism as the answer; It's easier to see in retrospect that it wasn't.

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5. cafardDec 2021
   Interesting. Did you first encounter the Agassiz story in Pound's ABC of Reading?

   And was the recitation to be from memory?

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6. 082349872349872Aug 2020
   He may as well have been cancelled, as I'm utterly unfamiliar with him. Will report back on whether I got any useful bits out of "Guide to Kulchur" and "ABC of Reading" after I've read a bit of them.

   The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Sunfish was certainly worth some reflection, although Pound's willingness to translate chinese poetry without knowing much chinese may show his practice (as is most of ours!) was not quite up to his preaching. (Edit: he leads "...Kulchur" by quoting 一以貫之[1], so he is stronger in chinese than I.)

   Upon reflection: abstraction and instantiation are always dual, and just as we shouldn't exclusively fly abstract, neither should we exclusively rest concrete. There are more fascinating journeys to be had by skipping between both sides of the duality, passing between them adroitly, adjointly.

   [1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Classics/Volume_1...

   Bonus track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzQWYHHqvIw

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