There is an indescribable joy

My lady friend claims George Mackay Brown, Scottish writer, was the first to spell the word, "culture" with a capital "K," so that the word looked like this, "Kulture."

Who am I to argue, but I'm almost sure Ezra Pound wrote a book titled, "A Guide to Kulchur," using not only a "K" for the "C," but purposely misspelling that words' final syllable to make some sort of point, that he published it before World War Two, and that he told his publisher, a very young James Laughlin who founded New Directions and who often sent the much older Pound poems for criticism, to "go to Harvard and do something useful with your life."

I'm guessing that both Brown and Pound--whoever got there first--were making the kind of point that only those who've done a great deal of deep reading, and who use that reading to their advantage in their own writing, have a right to make: that no matter how much one venerates the ancient formative texts, one is to hold nothing sacred when trying to write something so good it might transcend them.