The Masses, December 1913

Well, I've done a crappy job keeping up with this over the month, so I'll inaugurate the new year with the traditional flurry of blogging.

I think part of the reason I've been so slow is because the journals have been so offensive (The New Age in particular). I've been unplugging early. I decided to go back to The Masses for a pick-me-up.

This issue is largely devoted to what has come to be called the war on Christmas--it's an unabashed attack on organized Christianity, complete with Jesus-is-a-Socialist cover image and multiple stories. The first article follows this pattern: they call out the church for not taking a strong stand against child labor. They call out St. Cyprian for perverting the radicalism of Jesus into a monopoly on salvation. The call out Martin Luther for convincing people to remain in subjugation.

Apparently an Episcopal Bishop made the same points, which is pretty interesting (6), calling out "My friends, we're doped!"

But even The Masses cannot escape the pall of associative racism that infects the thought of the time, as one attack on the Catholic Church compares a priest to an African medicine man (like in October when Eisenstein pulls the same move).

The Masses is taking a page from The New Age, adding a section for ridiculous claims in the press a la TNA's "Current Cant." The winner this week is a journalist who reports, approvingly, that France is instituting a medal for exemplary domestic service. Ha.

In further empty-ha-has, there's a piece titled "An Economical Christmas Dinner" which is pure bitter satire of such helpful hints. Resonantly, the dessert section of the article is largely a protest against corn syrup.

John Reed, my favorite writer in The Masses, contributes a short story titled "Seeing is Believing" about a free-spirited young woman who is exploring New York City on the generosity of strangers. The story, though, is told from the perspective of a man who tries to pick her up as a prostitute, and is largely filtered through his prejudices. Oblique writing, well done.

The leaders of the Paterson strike are being sent to jail for six months, and Reed and The Masses protest the unfairness of the charges. It makes me think about this story: when William Carlos Williams wrote Paterson, a London review thought he had invented the town--but it was big news in the teens. I wonder how much the celebrity of Paterson city contributes to Paterson...

Further talk about a possible war with Mexico on page 7.

Lastly, a short piece that deserves to be read in its entirety, "Prescription for a Modern Drama" by Max Endicoff (page 19):

FIVE paragraphs from an authoritative work on the Technique of the Drama.
Two paragraphs from the latest report of the Federal Vice Investigation Commission.
Two paragraphs from the current report of the State Commissioner of Labor.
One paragraph from the report of the Municipal Bureau of Charities.
Sprinkle over with a dose of statistics to make the concoction palatable.
Season well with gunpowder.
After mixing thoroughly and bottling, send sample
to an ethical laboratory for stamp of approval.

The New Age, Dec. 4 1913

Quick hits from TNA (so I can get back up to date).

Marmaduke Pickthall writes an intense article about an assassination in Turkey, including a nasty characterization of Armenians as bloodthirsty.

An odd column includes the Orange argument for Home Rule: that Northern Ireland will be able to rationally represent its interests in the Irish parliament.

Otakar Brezina writes in appreciation for TNA's coverage of his work.

Well, that's a pathetic post. Someday I'll go back and fill in the gaps...

The New Freewoman, December 1 1913

Dynamite issue for modernist names, the penultimate New Freewoman.

F.S. Flint may win the Pre-WWI-Tragic-Opening-Lines Competition" with the first sentence of this issue: "The River Marne will be associated with two of the most interesting artistic statements made of late years in France." The two statements are:

One: the mansion of the "Abbayist" poets (who I'll confess I don't know about). Two: Jaques Copeau's theater company. Praising Copeau for not being distracted by famous actors, he writes "the whole aim of his training has been to produce a homogeneous company; wherein each actor's part and action on the stage would be subordinated to the total effect to be produced, so that the pleasure of the audience would be in the interpretation of the play, and not in some one actor's business." Very Flinty modernism, that. 

"Views and Comments," the regular editorial, takes a crack at our colleagues at The New Age: "who of a certainty were never startlingly original." Check out TNF's analysis of the source of economic revolution, a direct critique of TNA: "The thing is that "industrial unrest" is not in the main an affair turning about material necessities. If it were, state-socialism or guild-socialism could cure it. As it is, their attempted application rouses more temper than the goad of poverty itself, and it is precisely this temper which vitalizes the agitation." All this in the context of Larkin and the Dublin strikers (see earlier posts). The upshot comes back to TNF's philosophical materialism. They distrust labels, and advise the oppressed to gather physical power rather than rely on Justice, etc. 

One Clarence Lee Swarts contributes and entertaining piece about Tennessee's new prohibition laws: he makes fun of the fact that TN has to pass laws requiring the enforcement of laws. Ha. More chillingly, he speculates that the legal profession will balloon and prisons will fill up.

Richard Aldington contributes a gem of a review of Marinetti's futurist declamations: I've read that he and Ezra Pound made futurist costumes and crashed one of these, but RA doesn't mention it here. Anyway, he makes a few solid points. First, he claims that Futurism is a natural evolution of impressionism: "M. Marinetti and his poems grow out of Mallarme, Whitman, Laforgue and Romains". Well and good. Then double-edged put-downs: "It would be humorous if M. Marinetti were not so serious, and really an artist in his fashion." Then a pastiche: RA shows his dexterity at imitation by creating his own version of Marinetti's "Battle" (I think this is the same as "Bombardment"). RA's own response is characteristically Hellenistic and self-deprecating: "And there is an ignorant fellow in the room here who asserts that he prefers Sappho any day. After all it is not for us to criticize our contemporaries. It is nonsense to condemn a man and his work because you do not agree with him or because you did not invent his particular way of writing yourself." Here we also see a tipped hand: who, exactly, are you defending, Aldington? Ultimately the problem with Marinetti is his "unrestrained rhetoric... use of abstractions... vagueness." Imagism fights back, but also admits a kind of kinship: "One must do M. Marinetti the justice to admit that he is a fearless experimenter. He is a great deal better than the bourgeois and women who grin at him when he reads. And he must be very good for Italy." We'll see. 

Ezra Pound reviews William Carlos Williams' "The Tempers." Here's a sampler: "He makes a bold effort to express himself directly and convinces one that the emotions expressed are veritably his own, wherever he shows traces of reading, it would seem to be a snare against which he struggles, rather than a support to lean on." And: "At times he seems in danger of drifting into imaginative reason, but the vigor of his illogicalness is nearly always present to save him." 

He then contributes his own poems-about-poems (and other things), the same as were in Poetry in November (I should probably make a detailed cross-reference at some point, seems like a thesis is hiding here). 

Edgar A. Mowrer complains that it is impossible to make a living at writing, as was possible only recently. Familiar? Too bad he dabbles in antisemitism, which curdles it quickly. No shortage of nastiness these days. 

For the H.D. fans among you: some pieces by Frances Gregg! I know her only as H.D.'s lover. Anyway, her stories are dark and gothic and (her own word) macabre, neo-Poe. Very disturbing, kind of fun.

RA translates a piece by a medieval scholar of Homer claiming that there were eight Homers, doing so to prove that the speculations of classicists at once have precedent and shouldn't be taken seriously (and, incidentally, establishing his own cred).

Finally, the cosmic Huntley Carter goes off about how awful the Futurists really are.

What a cool thing to read. 

Poetry, Novemeber 1913

I'm a bit behind, so I'm going to make this one quick.

As usual, Poetry has a mixture of hip and un-hip poems in it. This time hip's represented by omnipresent Ezra Pound's clutch of poems and Lustra. There's not much imagism-istic about them, 'cepting moments (pale carnage).

Joseph Campbell, and Irish ethnomusicologist, has a few poems in here. Unclear whether the poems are folk-found lyrics or originals, but one is about a puca (see Jimmy Stewart and Harvey).

Harriet Monroe writes a cool editorial about meter--citing Sidney Lanier, she claims that English verse is quantitative. She uses musical notation to scan Shakespeare quantitatively, which could have been picked up more broadly as the stress-unstress system is just as clunky now as then.

Yeats and Vachel Lindsay won the inaugural poetry prize--though the editors do mention that they weren't eligible.

Sorry for the dash'ed dashedness of this--

The New Freewoman, November 15 1913

This issue of The New Freewoman has some excellent moments, especially stemming from a small feud between Dora Marsden and a correspondent, Benjamin R. Tucker. Marsden happily quotes a letter from a bewildered Midwestern American woman, who delightfuly calls TNF "so post-everything." Throw that into the debate about what is postmodern! In responding to Tucker's criticism that TNF is "pure nonsense, unanswerable because intangible," Marsden makes a pretty nice point about the emptiness of linguistic signs, and refers back to the correspondant:

 "We are not post-anything by intention," a lovely ambiguity. She goes on to explain: "The use of ideas should be strongly discouraged... In thinking, they have no true place. Their use corresponds to that of incantations in science. They are made up of misty thought-waste, confusions too entangled to be disentangled; bound together and made to look tidy by attaching an appellation-label, i.e. a sign. It is the tidiness of the sign which misleads. It is like a marmalade label carefully attached to an empty jar. Remove the label, and confusion vanishes: we see the empty jar, we see the printed label, and we know there is no marmalade. And so with abstract terms and ideas. Consider liberty--we have already considered it." Tucker's arguments are about the definition of anarchy or communism or private property, and it will be interesting to see how he responds to this meta-argument: that the terms he uses are empty.  

Allen Upward's translations from Confucius continue, including this gem that must have attracted the once-and-future Pound:

"The subjects on which the Master did not talk were,

—marvels, feats of strength, treasons, and spirits."

Pound contributes a very positive  review of Upward's book The Divine Mystery, which seems like a sort of Golden Bough style anthropology of religion. Pound also continues "The Serious Artist," interestingly rejecting the term "connoisseur" to instead "restore the foppish term dilettante," because a dilettante "has no axe to grind." Intriguingly, he explains that the definition of great art is inherently subjective, that "One knows fairly well what one means" by the term great art, and that "One means something quite different at different times in one's life." This is followed up with admission of the place of personality in criticism: "It is for some such reason that all criticism should be professionally personal criticism." The professionally personal, what a great phrase to describe EP's persona in the magazines circa 1913. This personality is a liberation, and a sign of respect for the "heritage." Lots of stuff about "race heritage" floating around the magazines these days, I wonder what it's about.

John Cournos, who I remember from reading about H.D.'s life (love quadrangle, I think I recall? Lopsided love quadrangle?), contributes an interesting essay about cubism and mannerism/impressionism, in which he goes first to the Dore show of cubist art and then the Grafton of historical art. When he gets to the Grafton gallery, he agrees with a personal bias of my own for El Greco by claiming that El Greco is a "modern." More to the point, he's skeptical of cubism.

Henry Meulen, a Fabian, explains that the government should allow banks to issue transferrable notes because the govt. monopoly on currency leads to a lack of trust. Because everyone trusts their bankers.

All for now...