Right and wrong and writers …

… Anecdotal Evidence: 'Otherwise We Shouldn't Love Him So Much'.

Few sane people who are not scholars of totalitarianism will read Mein Kampf or The State and Revolution a second time. One probably ought to read them once, as it’s prudent to recognize evil of the systematic sort when it masks as a solution to all of our problems. In other writers the proportions are more troubling, and here’s where the reader’s sense of tolerance and judgment comes in. I can no longer read Pound. I’m tired of the excuses his partisans make (insanity, crackpot economic theories) for his anti-Semitism and Fascist sympathies. Besides, much of his poetry is gibberish, so he fails aesthetically too. 

I tried reading Mein Kampf when I was in high school. I was a real history buff in those days and it is a primary source. But I reached a point where it struck me as just plain nuts and put it down, never to pick it up again. I feel much the same way as Patrick does about Pound, whose ear often fails him.