Difficult to immediately say, but Pound dissects certain fractions in thought about economics, music, literature and history placing them against classical Chinese and Greek philosophy. Ezra suffuses all this with his own wit calling philosophers such as Aristotle "Arry" throughout and observes his distaste with a distilled acerbic snarl. His views on money are very interesting especially in relation to Aristotle's view of it being a matter of custom and easily altered or rendered useless at will.

Primarily I think Pound set out to cover two quite over-casting levels of mental firmament with this text: one is that ideas only work when they are put into action and the other is that the value of knowledge is not in the facts but in the processes involved through-out history.

This was a fairly challenging read for me, and I laughed when Pound talked of not liking authors that required of him to have a dictionary handy whilst reading.

I think that with a basic knowledge of literature and history, you will enjoy this work, and if you have curiosity or interest in the analects you will draw much from Pound's work. Pace yourself through it, remembering that Pound was as much an anti-academic as was Shaw, and certain vibrancy of ideas are particular to that person, not necessarily a mimesis of other's ideas. ( )

Much of Pound's prose should be considered indispensable if you want to become a decent person. 'An ABC of Reading,' and the essays gathered in 'Literary Essays of Ezra Pound' are brilliant, and some of his social criticism works too, although you might want to take small bites of his 'Selected Prose' rather than swallowing it whole; start with the stuff from before the 1930's, and you'll be quite enlightened I think.

But 'Guide to Kulchur' is more or less straight decadence. If you already know what Pound thought about economics, poetry, music, architecture, politics and philosophy, you'll be able to grab a few interesting sentences. But it's infuriating and often deathly dull, which is quite an achievement considering how fiery he is. Pound's ideogrammic method - a throwing together of apparently different items - is meant to communicate knowledge more clearly than is sometimes possible with linear prose. The emphasis here, for Pound, was always on *clarity*. But GTK is not clear. At times it reads less like an honest attempt to say something, and more like a 370 page long name-drop: Brancusi, Picabia, Gaudier, Cocteau, Mussolini... yeah, I met 'em all. And anyone I didn't meet, not worth meeting.

The ideogram here is not clear, and we know from Pound's earlier works that it could have been: the effect of monetary policy on art or kulchur is ridiculous in GTK; in earlier essays it's quite convincing. The relation between language and politics is completely opaque in GTK, in earlier essays it's fascinating. The exposition of Confucian thought is incomprehensible here, in earlier essays, or Pound's translations, eccentrically brilliant.

One thing we might be thankful for: the absurdity of GTK and the writings which followed it might have helped convince the powers that be that Pound was, indeed, insane while living in Italy, and thus have saved his life. According to the laws of the time, he certainly deserved to be executed as a traitor. But nobody could read this guff and believe that old Billyum was serious. That's a major failing for a serious man. ( )