The New Age, May 15 1913

Missing a few issues of The New Age has clearly had its price.  Trying to catch up with the 100-year-old contemporary issues after a few months hiatus faces me with serial articles by Aldington and Pound, of which I've missed large sections.  Alas.  Perhaps I'll squeeze in some retrospection soon. 

This week, The New Age is against the vote for women to the extent that its "Notes of the Week" are pretty painful this week.  The kinds of logic deployed are not unfamiliar. 

Pound has an essay in this issue raising familiar anxieties about graduate education, the third in a series titled "America, Chances and Remedies."  There was an especially weird moment when he castigates professors who are "passionately devoted, let us say, to literature, or more likely, each one of them devoted to some period, about which he knows more definite facts than any artist who lived in it!" (58).  A 100-year-old magazine article just called me out for studying it!  Perhaps that is overdramatic.  Really, what he seems to be saying is that artists should be invited into the academy to provide context for scholarly work.  I think that's happened to some extent, with the flowering of institutional creative writing.  Personally, I've studied under many artists and poet-scholars in my time in school, always to my great benefit, and often because of the conversations they were having with their all-scholarly peers.  Pound's a step ahead of an easy answer, though: "If fee were given, it would provide for the serious artist some means of support, other than that of overproduction and hurried production."  Sounds familiar to me.  Any of my friends pursuing MFAs want to comment on that?  And how about this issue coming fast on the heels of Contemporania in Poetry? 

Good gutting of The Blue Review, I'd wager it's by Hastings.  Interestingly, she includes John Middleton Murry in her scorn, but exempts Katherine Mansfield. 

There's also an article about Italy by Aldington, part of a series and a couple short stories by Beatrice Hastings under other names.  The story under the pseudonym "Alice Morning" would have been perfect for a paper that I have, alas, already turned in, on fashion and modernism.  The one under "T.K.L." is a great bash at scandalmongers.