Pounding mad styles (2013)
Conversation between Ezra Pound and Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967.
"It should not be necessary to argue at any length that Pound's slogan "Make It New" is the most durably useful of all modernist expressions of the value of novelty. ... The crucial fact to begin with is that the phrase is not originally Pound's at all. The source is a historical anecdote concerning Ch'eng T'ang (Tching-thang, Tching Tang), first king of the Shang dynasty (1766-1753 BC), who was said to have had a washbasin inscribed with this inspirational slogan. ... Given the nature of the novelty implied by the slogan, it is appropriate that it is itself the result of historical recycling. This was a fact that Pound himself always tried to keep in the forefront by using the original Chinese characters and letting his own translation tag along as a perpetual footnote. The complex nature of the new--its debt, even as revolution, to the past, and the way in which new works are often just recombinations of traditional elements--is not just confessed by this practice but insisted on. This is what makes the slogan exemplary of the larger modernist project, that by insisting on the new it brings to the surface all the latent difficulties in what seems such a simple and simplifying concept." Michael North, Novelty: A History of the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)
45 sec.
Conversation between Ezra Pound and Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967.
"It should not be necessary to argue at any length that Pound's slogan "Make It New" is the most durably useful of all modernist expressions of the value of novelty. ... The crucial fact to begin with is that the phrase is not originally Pound's at all. The source is a historical anecdote concerning Ch'eng T'ang (Tching-thang, Tching Tang), first king of the Shang dynasty (1766-1753 BC), who was said to have had a washbasin inscribed with this inspirational slogan. ... Given the nature of the novelty implied by the slogan, it is appropriate that it is itself the result of historical recycling. This was a fact that Pound himself always tried to keep in the forefront by using the original Chinese characters and letting his own translation tag along as a perpetual footnote. The complex nature of the new--its debt, even as revolution, to the past, and the way in which new works are often just recombinations of traditional elements--is not just confessed by this practice but insisted on. This is what makes the slogan exemplary of the larger modernist project, that by insisting on the new it brings to the surface all the latent difficulties in what seems such a simple and simplifying concept." Michael North, Novelty: A History of the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)
45 sec.
