The New Age, October 16 1913

Here's what's in this issue:

My favorite piece is (I think) a one-off by one Guglielmo Ferraro, entitled "Quantity and Quality." It is about the current tensions rising between Germany and France over France's decision to require "made in X" labels on all imported goods. Here's a sample: "Modern industry has succeeded in multiplying the production of commodities... From the point of view of quantity... we have performed prodigies. But from the point of view of quality, modern industry threatens to make the world one colossal mystery. It so mingles and confuses models with imitations that very soon nobody will be able to tell one from the other." Globalization of commodity production has overwhelmed quality to the point that people have confidence in empty labels: "The blind confidence in certain labels, with which people are reproached, only shows their need of a standard of value by which to judge the quality of things" (721). "Hence it comes that quality is judged by price instead of price by quality. In American journals one already finds advertisements which recommend their goods because they are the most costly." I can vouch for that--look at the car advertisements in a 1913 Scribner's and there are some that use their extra-high cost as a selling point. Ferraro's main point is that quality counts, even if it is invisible, even if it doesn't appear in balance-of-trade calculations. Still true?

Pound wraps up "An Approach to Paris" in this issue, welcome if only so that Beatrice Hastings can stop her mean-spirited lampoons of them (I hope) and get to writing mean-spirited things about something else. EP ends writing about Rimbaud, Paul Fort, and Henri-Martin Barzun, who apparently wrote poems for simultaneous voices (Velvet Underground "Murder Mystery" style). Paul Fort I've encountered in a strange series of translations in a later issue of Poetry, worth a look. I think he's going to come up a lot, judging by the number of hits I got when searching for the poems I'd already read. Weird thing: the translator is John Strong Newberry, but apparently not the paleontologist. A son?

Further notes:

There's been an angry writer named Grant Hervey occasionally contributing about a "young Australia" movement that he represents. He's threatened England with Australian diplomatic independence, not contributing to the Navy, etc. In the "Foreign Affairs" column, S. Verdad replies with this prophetic tidbit (after much hemming and hawing in many directions): "How would they [Hervey and co.] deal with a German-Japanese alliance? That event is at least as likely as the Young Australia movement coming to power" (718). Likely indeed, though not for a while yet...

Romney explains that a grassroots guerilla campaign could paralyze a modern state, and advocates everyone arming themselves if they want to be taken seriously (emulating the Ulster militias).

There's an article about the tyranny of time-clocks at places of employment, including horror at "clock" becoming a verb (clock in, clock out).

A.E.'s "Open Letter to Dublin Employers" is a masterpiece of the genre, calling out the bastards for locking out the workers and threatening them with general rebellion. Phew.

A letter to the editor under "The Plaugue of Advertisements" goes after billboards. "The Dog in Civilization" has a man protesting the population (I swear I accidentally typed "pupulation" just a second ago) density of barking dogs in the city.

That's all for now...