:: more about Ezra Pound network ::
Usually it's a bad idea to try a serious upgrade of one's platform, right before a public presentation. My lecture would last four hours, and was but an hour away. I chose to upgrade the entire base.
Correction: I had an older base (3.6) to fall back on. And I needed it. This morning, doing a postmortem, I've decided to completely blow away py37 and reinstall from scratch. That's a somewhat daring maneuver (not really, in my case) but I don't lecture again until Tuesday.
On the Youtube front, I went down the Ezra Pound rabbit hole a little further. You might think I'd have explored it thoroughly, before having said Modernist poet's visage pop up all over, in my body of work (Youtube corpus). Was it the same sense of derring-do that led me to upgrade my Spyder?
What happened was Spyder became slow as molasses. "Full disk" joked a student. Indeed, but that wasn't really the problem.
Ezra was thrown in a cage for having made some wrong choices. He had some monetary theories that piggy-backed on his fame as a poet, and these led him into the murky ideologies of the 1900s, with the usual mysticism around banks and banking.
That turned him into a Henry Ford Sr. for awhile there, in terms of spouting antisemitism, but Ford got away with it and then changed his mind (he was no historian -- successful business folk tend to be self educated and interested in crusades).
Ezra changed his mind too, or said he did, but it was too late. He was sentenced to a hell hole of a mental hospital, that actually had some nicer parts too. He was later released and he fled back to his friends in Italy, who'd been on the losing side in WW2.
What is the relationship between poetry and taking risks? James Jesus Angelton, an early admirer of Ezra's, heard the calling of paramilitary service, yet he fought on the side of democracy against the specter of some future USSA (a USA subjected to a USSR style tyranny). Then the USSR went away.
How could these two Yale friends end up on opposite sides in the matter? I don't really suppose they did at this point, meaning that's a big oversimplification. Angelton took his thinking to a next chapter after WW2, the Cold War chapter.
Indications are Ezra got late-in-life updates thanks to Bucky Fuller (a cold warrior as well). They hung out in Spoleto and near Venice, as I understand the story.
