There's a luxury to posting on an issue of The New Age before the next issue has come out.
This issue, though, makes me feel like I'm seeing double (or triple). The last few issues have been remarkably similar. Each is headlined, for me, by a Pound article about a French poet; followed by Beatrice Hastings attacking him in brutal satire. It happens again here, with Pound turning his attention to Laurent Tailhade, Henri de Regnier, and Tristan Corbiere. Really these mini-essays seem quite nice to me, introductions suitable for a literate but not necessarily fluent audience. I kept thinking about how nice it would be to get an update like this about French poetry today. And Orage does the same durn thing in his essays on German poetry in this issue's incarnation of "Readers and Writers." Hastings lets him off the hook, though.
A telling addition to my growing thesis that their attack on Pound comes from their feeling of being threatened by him: the first article in this issue is about how England has already lost the trade war with America in terms of quantity, but can still retain an edge in quality. Hence the asymmetrical attacks on Pound.
TNA also prints a conciliatory essay by Hilaire Belloc, who they usually are happy to maul. He's quite into guild socialism, but manages to put forth a version that protects private property. I sense a swift and stormy response brewing in the next issue...
Romney seems to think that England and France are about to go to war.
Sometimes TNA does make an accurate prophesy. Check out this one about whether or not corporations are people: "The dehumanizing of industry processed pari passu with its development; the joint stock companies, for example, have produced an employer that has no body, but only a corporation, and that abstraction is closely akin to the economic man... the laws of economics tend to become more imperative, to assume the qualities of inevitability and necessity..."
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