Sunday, January 27, 2013

Rhythm December 1912

I've read a few issues of Rhythm, but this'll be the first I post about.  Rhythm features Katherine Mansfield, one of the minor modernist women who I have heard about but don't know much about--she's the assistant editor.  John Middleton Murray is the head editor.

The stand-out best thing in this issue is a retrospective on the Polish artist Stanislaw Wyspianski.  I'd never head of him before.  Here's a stained glass window of his, that I've flower-plucked from a Polish Blog.  Wyspianski died in 1907--the article in Rhythm is for the five-year anniversary of his death. While Rhyhtm praises his paintings, their mention of the stained glass as "color music" made me seek it out via google images (315).  Beautiful--Blake in glass.  On my list of things to see before ya' know.  His other works of visual art are quite beautiful--but alas, the Wikipedia article on him was rather more informative than the one in Rhyhtm. 

 
 
Of the rest of the work in this issue of Rhythm: the short stories are solid tales, but I can't recommend any of them as much as "The Blue Peter," from the November issue.  That one was about an outsider artist before they were called that. 
 
I'm a little bummed by Katherine Mansfield's poetry.  "The Opal Dream Cave" is not exactly... well.  What I like.  On the other hand, she's younger than I am, in the 100-year-later scheme of things.  Whatever I mean to imply by that.  Inferiority complex of blogger vs. editrix?  P'raps. 
 
Finally, the "Literary Supplement" (delightfully insulted by Beatrice Hastings in The New Age, see above) has a gem of a review: Ford Madox Hueffer's of H. M. Tomlinson's The Sea and the Jungle.  Hueffer claims that he told Tomlinson about Conrad, and then insinuates that Tomlinson just rips off Conrad.  Apparently The Sea and the Jungle is about Tomlinson's trip to the Amazon, where he follows the transcontinental railroad (or something).  Hueffer's best belly laugh comes from a moment when he implies that great anthropologists go to the jungle seeking poisons, great biologists go for creatures, but Tomlinson leaves his life catching the train to London to... well the punchline would ruin the joke, it's on page v of the literary supplement.

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