John Palattella

David Trotter writes that the stockade in which Ezra Pound was detained in 1945 ‘remained on active service in literary criticism for rather longer than it did in the US army’s penal system’ (LRB, 7 July). At Guantanamo Bay, the US army detains terrorist suspects in open-air cages virtually identical to the one in which Pound was confined for three weeks at the US Army Disciplinary Training Center...

I’m glad Michael Wood noted the rash of pronouncements in the US press about the ‘failure of language’ to account for the catastrophic events of 11 September, as if words were ‘supposed to make sense of everything’. ‘When,’ he goes on to ask, ‘did words ever make such extravagant, untenable promises?’ It is also worth noting that intellectual journalism in the US is often little more...