{"id":891,"date":"2008-04-01T02:31:28","date_gmt":"2008-04-01T06:31:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/s265039441.onlinehome.us\/philpaine\/?p=891"},"modified":"2018-08-14T11:26:53","modified_gmt":"2018-08-14T15:26:53","slug":"15976-%c2%a0-timothy-findley-famous-last-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.philpaine.com\/?p=891","title":{"rendered":"15976.&nbsp;(Timothy Findley) Famous Last&nbsp;Words"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">This was Tim\u00ado\u00adthy Findley\u2019s fourth nov\u00adel, and it attempts to get into the mor\u00adbid world of the celebri\u00adties and intel\u00adlec\u00adtu\u00adals who cosied up to the Nazis and the Ital\u00adian Fas\u00adcists. This was iden\u00adti\u00adcal, psy\u00adcho\u00adlog\u00adi\u00adcally, to the coterie of celebri\u00adties who cosied up to the Com\u00admu\u00adnists. It was a loath\u00adsome time, in which there were very few voic\u00ades who spoke for any\u00adthing good. Every\u00adone was some kind of sleazy creep. Ezra Pound, the Duke and Duchess of Wind\u00adsor, Har\u00adry Oakes, Rudolf Hess, and von Ribben\u00adtrop appear as char\u00adac\u00adters, among oth\u00aders, all seen through the eyes of a fic\u00adtional Hugh Sel\u00adwyn Mauber\u00adley (the per\u00adsona of some of Pound\u2019s poems), whose frozen corpse is found in an Alpine hotel, with a tes\u00adta\u00adment scrawled in pen\u00adcil on the walls of three rooms.<span id=\"more-891\">&nbsp;<\/span>It\u2019s a good and intrigu\u00ading read, but the absence of any char\u00adac\u00adter that one can feel any sym\u00adpa\u00adthy for left me feel\u00ading worn out by the end. But that has always been my response to the intel\u00adlec\u00adtual world between the two World Wars. Frankly, I don\u2019t care about the fact that peo\u00adple like Ezra Pound of Bertolt Brecht were tal\u00adented writ\u00aders \u2014 they were dis\u00adgust\u00ading lit\u00adtle pieces of shit, and no amount of clev\u00ader\u00adness or artistry makes them admirable. The Nazi-Com\u00admu\u00adnist-Fas\u00adcist men\u00adtal\u00adity was the low\u00adest ebb of the human mind, when genius\u00ades degrad\u00aded them\u00adselves into moron\u00adic sav\u00adages. There is prob\u00ada\u00adbly no way to write about it, or read about it, with\u00adout feel\u00ading ill. We are still suf\u00adfer\u00ading the after\u00adef\u00adfects of that intel\u00adlec\u00adtual holocaust.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This was Tim\u00ado\u00adthy Findley\u2019s fourth nov\u00adel, and it attempts to get into the mor\u00adbid world of the celebri\u00adties and intel\u00adlec\u00adtu\u00adals who cosied up to the Nazis and the Ital\u00adian Fas\u00adcists. This was iden\u00adti\u00adcal, psy\u00adcho\u00adlog\u00adi\u00adcally, to the coterie of celebri\u00adties&nbsp;who&nbsp;\u2026<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.philpaine.com\/?p=891\">Read more \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wp_typography_post_enhancements_disabled":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[946,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-b-reading","category-bs-reading-2008"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.philpaine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.philpaine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.philpaine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.philpaine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.philpaine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=891"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.philpaine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8569,"href":"http:\/\/www.philpaine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/891\/revisions\/8569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.philpaine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.philpaine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.philpaine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}