Respect to a man who, truly, could not shut the fuck up. Not to save his life. Not to prevent charges of treason. Perhaps this is a common platitude in an era of writing book reviews from a phone but Pound was, without a shred of doubt in my mind, the first Internet poster. Tormented by a brain that seems to have careened at full bore exactly 100% of the time, even isolation in a chain link cell exposed to the elements could do nothing to stymy the flow of information that must have swirled like a fiery tornado around the inside of his head.

I can’t imagine being in similar circumstances and doing anything other than just lying there, waiting to die. But then, I can’t imagine myself doing most of what Ezra Pound did in his life. Befriending essentially every modernist poet and author in the early 1900s, becoming a willing mouthpiece for Benito Mussolini, dying in an asylum. I guess it’s impossible to argue that this man didn’t wring life for all it was worth. But any partaking of Pound’s life always feels disturbing. There’s an odd feeling you get when you see a man who has demonstrated an inhuman level of processing power and recall cling to ideas that are so reactionary. Today I think it causes a guarded concern that maybe they’re being ironic? Like there’s some joke that they’re in on at the expense of everyone else on earth?