Just quick notes for now, because, dissertation, but I will return to this issue when Pound completes the essay on the Renaissance that he begins in it, and compare that to his recent "Affirmation" on the same topic. Exciting! Well, perhaps not.
Quick Notes:
Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, and Richard Aldington all get printed in this one. Lindsay's poem is kind of painful Chinoiserie, but note how it dovetails with Pound's essay's Chinese thesis. Aldington's poem to Nijinsky, "Dancers," is notable for the quotation that is its last line: "Mon sembable, mon frere!" So, is the line in The Waste Land an extended quotation of a quotation? I'm having fun picturing Aldington reading The Waste Land for the first time. His A Fool i' the Forest is clearly his attempt at a Waste Land...
Pathetic post! All for now, because I need to do my post on The Egoist before the end of the month. And work on the dissertation!
Friday, February 27, 2015
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
The New Age, February 18 1915
This post will be brief because I'm making good progress on my dissertation. Hopefully I'll be able to return to this one sometime, because there's a lot of good stuff.
Histoire D'Enfant by Augustus John, pg 429:
This issue contains two unwitting prophecies. Sorry if this is overly mystical, but again, I'm going to rush this one for the sake of my diss.
Ezra Pound is the subject of one prophecy: in a satire of Vorticism by one John Triboulet, this pre-vision of his incarceration in Pisa. The context is that Obadiah has become a "euphemiste," and is a fool compared to his interlocutor. But look, page 434, bottom right, Pisa! Or Pisa, interpreted by Obadiah, who is a fool, after all.
The second prophecy: the Lusitania is the subject of a false flag controversy. When worried about encountering Germans, the Lusitania flew an American flag, which was a legal move--but it made the Germans state that in the future they will target ships that they suspect are British, even when under neutral flags. The Lusitania creeps closer to its doom (420-21).
Max Jacob contributes aphorisms as "Extracts from Unpublished Volumes."
de Maeztu contributes an essay on "Marx and Wealth and Power."
Beatrice Hastings' "Impressions" continue her discussion of sculpture, reacting against Pound. Of particular interest is her critique of Pound's prose style.
There's a hilarious and comprehensive response to Austin Harrison's scurrilous anti-Semetic rant from last week's correspondence pages.
Correspondence in general is really good, but Austin Hertslet's letter about Pound, Lewis, and representation in painting might be useful for my work.
"Notes of the Week" is on British speculation against British interests--English capital is cornering the grain market in America, according to the editor, which is putting strain on the lower classes. Pretty nasty, if true.
All for now--apologies for the rush.
Histoire D'Enfant by Augustus John, pg 429:
This issue contains two unwitting prophecies. Sorry if this is overly mystical, but again, I'm going to rush this one for the sake of my diss.
Ezra Pound is the subject of one prophecy: in a satire of Vorticism by one John Triboulet, this pre-vision of his incarceration in Pisa. The context is that Obadiah has become a "euphemiste," and is a fool compared to his interlocutor. But look, page 434, bottom right, Pisa! Or Pisa, interpreted by Obadiah, who is a fool, after all.
The second prophecy: the Lusitania is the subject of a false flag controversy. When worried about encountering Germans, the Lusitania flew an American flag, which was a legal move--but it made the Germans state that in the future they will target ships that they suspect are British, even when under neutral flags. The Lusitania creeps closer to its doom (420-21).
Max Jacob contributes aphorisms as "Extracts from Unpublished Volumes."
de Maeztu contributes an essay on "Marx and Wealth and Power."
Beatrice Hastings' "Impressions" continue her discussion of sculpture, reacting against Pound. Of particular interest is her critique of Pound's prose style.
There's a hilarious and comprehensive response to Austin Harrison's scurrilous anti-Semetic rant from last week's correspondence pages.
Correspondence in general is really good, but Austin Hertslet's letter about Pound, Lewis, and representation in painting might be useful for my work.
"Notes of the Week" is on British speculation against British interests--English capital is cornering the grain market in America, according to the editor, which is putting strain on the lower classes. Pretty nasty, if true.
All for now--apologies for the rush.
Friday, February 20, 2015
The Masses, February 1914 (Just Djuna Barnes' Trombone)
...no, that's not a mistake. I just realized that I hadn't posted about last year's Feb's Masses while digging for this drawing. So, here it is, Djuna Barnes' breakout into the periodicals of the MJP:
Thursday, February 19, 2015
The New Age, Feb 11 1915
This will be a very Hastings-heavy post.
In her "Impressions of Paris" this week, Alice Morning/BH tells about a fire breaking out in her flat--she grabbed a sculpture of a head by Modigliani to some ridicule: the artist thought she was foolish for rating the sculpture above all of her other possessions. That makes this part of her "Impression" a double retort: she's responding to Modigliani, "the value of works of plastic art has to be settled by the critics because, of course, artists seldom know their good work from their bad" (401). She claims that artists revile writers out of vanity, but that they should see critics/writers as their "best friends" because they teach the public how to appreciate their works. It's worth reading.
The other side of the retort is to Pound, who has been boosting Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska's sculpture in his "Affirmations" (more on that below). By stating her reading of Modigliani's sculpture, she acts as a counterweight to Pound's opinions: "The whole head smiles in contemplation of knowledge, of madness, of grace and sensibility, of stupidity, of sensuality, of illusions and disillusions--all locked away as matter of perpetual meditation. It is as readable as Ecclesiastes and more consoling, for there is no lugubrious looking-back in this effulgent, unforbidding smile of intelligent equilibrium." She also overtly half-replies to Pound: "I could point out millions of muddles in his articles--but he knows I am handicapped by not being on the spot [London]. He would only patronise my Parisian explorations and warn me, on the pain of his ingratitude, to leave him alone. I will leave him alone, then, the Clusterist." I recently got my hands on a copy of Hastings' The Old New Age, her 1930s exposee of The New Age, in which she claims complete responsibility for getting Pound published there, and even says that the money he was paid came out of her own pocket sometimes. This gets some corroboration in the "ingratitude" referenced above.
For the record, Hastings was probably right about the head being her most valuable possession. The image below is of a Modigliani head that sold for 50+ million dollars. I am not sure if it is the same one referenced in the story (photo from the Wall Street Journal, here's a link).
Interestingly, BH quotes Shaw as a riposte to Pound: "'With the technique of Michael Angelo, they set themselves to produce primitives!' The falsity of modern art is defined there." I wonder how much this points back to Modigliani, too?
She also includes a beautiful war poem by a soldier, titled "The Hours," originally published in Figaro:
I can't identify the author or find anything else about the poem online.
I think I will hold off on writing about Pound's "Affirmation" of the week because it dovetails very nicely with his essay in Poetry: I'll do a combined post on Pound and the Renaissance, Feb 1915. He has, though, also been writing in to the correspondence pages. In this one, he responds to the critics of his column on imagism with a few examples:
He goes on to say that telling the difference between rhetoric and ornamentation and an authentic image is a matter of intelligence. He can feel/see/know the difference, and we should be able to, too.
Quick Notes:
The issue opens with a declaration that the war is a "war of idea," and won't be won by battles or machines. This leads into an argument that the compulsory health insurance act has undermined the spirit of the English common folk...
"Romney"'s weekly "Military Notes" explain that English common folk can't rule, and need proper upper-class officers to boss them around. I don't see this as very New Age-y, so we'll see what next week's correspondence brings in response.
Marmaduke Pickthall's "National Honor and Personal Honor" predict much of what happens to (the legend of, at least) Lawrence of Arabia, explaining that individual Englishmen are trusted in the middle east, but the government isn't, and that's because the government will betray anyone for its own ends.
Morgan Tud continues his "Three Tales" in this issue, and again I'm struck by how modernist they are. This one is a shaggy dog joke, combining Old West imagery with trying to buy pills from a pharmacist. I want to know more about the author! Nothing in the MJP pseudonym database. I suspect Hastings, but the texture is Joyce, and the last was so Irish?
The correspondence section contains an absolutely venomous response to J.M. Kennedy's articles accusing Austin Harrison of selling out Oscar Levy (I think I mentioned this last post?). Harrison replies: "Jew M. Kennedy is a liar and had better go to Germany" (415). Yikes. Kennedy responds calmly, pointing out Harrison is the editor of the English Review, which is owned by Alfred Mond, who would later be a prominent Zionist. Awkward.
Last, a prophecy: "The ridiculous threat of the German Government to blockade England-and an ineffective blockade, which is the only kind Germany can attempt, is contrary to The Hague Convention-is not likely to affect our shipping, but it may likely jeopardise the lives of American travellers on the big liners. Even the American papers have begun to point out facts like this. The best argument we can use in the United States-and we can prove it-is that it will “pay” the Americans to support us," S. Verdad, 396.
In her "Impressions of Paris" this week, Alice Morning/BH tells about a fire breaking out in her flat--she grabbed a sculpture of a head by Modigliani to some ridicule: the artist thought she was foolish for rating the sculpture above all of her other possessions. That makes this part of her "Impression" a double retort: she's responding to Modigliani, "the value of works of plastic art has to be settled by the critics because, of course, artists seldom know their good work from their bad" (401). She claims that artists revile writers out of vanity, but that they should see critics/writers as their "best friends" because they teach the public how to appreciate their works. It's worth reading.
The other side of the retort is to Pound, who has been boosting Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska's sculpture in his "Affirmations" (more on that below). By stating her reading of Modigliani's sculpture, she acts as a counterweight to Pound's opinions: "The whole head smiles in contemplation of knowledge, of madness, of grace and sensibility, of stupidity, of sensuality, of illusions and disillusions--all locked away as matter of perpetual meditation. It is as readable as Ecclesiastes and more consoling, for there is no lugubrious looking-back in this effulgent, unforbidding smile of intelligent equilibrium." She also overtly half-replies to Pound: "I could point out millions of muddles in his articles--but he knows I am handicapped by not being on the spot [London]. He would only patronise my Parisian explorations and warn me, on the pain of his ingratitude, to leave him alone. I will leave him alone, then, the Clusterist." I recently got my hands on a copy of Hastings' The Old New Age, her 1930s exposee of The New Age, in which she claims complete responsibility for getting Pound published there, and even says that the money he was paid came out of her own pocket sometimes. This gets some corroboration in the "ingratitude" referenced above.
For the record, Hastings was probably right about the head being her most valuable possession. The image below is of a Modigliani head that sold for 50+ million dollars. I am not sure if it is the same one referenced in the story (photo from the Wall Street Journal, here's a link).
Interestingly, BH quotes Shaw as a riposte to Pound: "'With the technique of Michael Angelo, they set themselves to produce primitives!' The falsity of modern art is defined there." I wonder how much this points back to Modigliani, too?
She also includes a beautiful war poem by a soldier, titled "The Hours," originally published in Figaro:
I can't identify the author or find anything else about the poem online.
I think I will hold off on writing about Pound's "Affirmation" of the week because it dovetails very nicely with his essay in Poetry: I'll do a combined post on Pound and the Renaissance, Feb 1915. He has, though, also been writing in to the correspondence pages. In this one, he responds to the critics of his column on imagism with a few examples:
Quick Notes:
The issue opens with a declaration that the war is a "war of idea," and won't be won by battles or machines. This leads into an argument that the compulsory health insurance act has undermined the spirit of the English common folk...
"Romney"'s weekly "Military Notes" explain that English common folk can't rule, and need proper upper-class officers to boss them around. I don't see this as very New Age-y, so we'll see what next week's correspondence brings in response.
Marmaduke Pickthall's "National Honor and Personal Honor" predict much of what happens to (the legend of, at least) Lawrence of Arabia, explaining that individual Englishmen are trusted in the middle east, but the government isn't, and that's because the government will betray anyone for its own ends.
Morgan Tud continues his "Three Tales" in this issue, and again I'm struck by how modernist they are. This one is a shaggy dog joke, combining Old West imagery with trying to buy pills from a pharmacist. I want to know more about the author! Nothing in the MJP pseudonym database. I suspect Hastings, but the texture is Joyce, and the last was so Irish?
The correspondence section contains an absolutely venomous response to J.M. Kennedy's articles accusing Austin Harrison of selling out Oscar Levy (I think I mentioned this last post?). Harrison replies: "Jew M. Kennedy is a liar and had better go to Germany" (415). Yikes. Kennedy responds calmly, pointing out Harrison is the editor of the English Review, which is owned by Alfred Mond, who would later be a prominent Zionist. Awkward.
Last, a prophecy: "The ridiculous threat of the German Government to blockade England-and an ineffective blockade, which is the only kind Germany can attempt, is contrary to The Hague Convention-is not likely to affect our shipping, but it may likely jeopardise the lives of American travellers on the big liners. Even the American papers have begun to point out facts like this. The best argument we can use in the United States-and we can prove it-is that it will “pay” the Americans to support us," S. Verdad, 396.
Thursday, February 12, 2015
The New Age, Feb 4 1915
This issue continues Pound's "Affirmations," this one on Gaudier-Brzeska, and Pound also appears in the correspondence pages to respond to the critics noted in my last post. First he writes about reading The Book of the Courtier and discussions of art history--intriguingly, he claims "we have lost the idolatry for the Greek" (380). He's speaking for the Vorticists here, and qualifies the statement, but in a Greece-obsessed climate, this is a reaction. It leads up to a claim for the Vorticists and Brzeska--that they judge art not by the best recent work, but by the best work of all time. On Blast: "The large type and the flaring cover are merely bright plumage. They are the gay petals which lure."
Pound appears twice the correspondence pages. First, he rebuts Wright's essay from the last issue that linked Futurism and Vorticism genetically. That's important. EP claims to be the opposite of futurism, and then calls Vachel Lindsay a futurist! Or rather, that he practices the futurist manner. Good stuff.
Then Pound calls out "Schiffsbauer"'s critique from the last issue: "Mr. Schiffsbauer is a ‘‘very humble ” philosopher ; he shines through the holes in his alias and is a cenotaph to the year 1912." I'll try to track this down later, and will (hopefully) edit this post to say who I think this Schiffsbauer is. I think I suspected Hastings when I read the letter in question...
Speaking of Alice Morning (aka B. Hastings), she continues her "Impressions of Paris," this time with her wits further sharpened by reading Voltaire: "What a difficult person to read is Voltaire! By the third page he sets you aching to write something yourself. He reminds you in some fashion of that thing you have begun and which, just now, seems more than ever worth finishing and polishing" (374).
One "Morgan Tud" contributes "Three Tales" of Ireland--I suspect that we just get the first tale here, because it's divided into six sections. The story is very unclear, and are mostly dialog. That gives it a kind of Joycean feel, though--I wonder if they are satires of Portrait, currently running in The Egoist, or good faith imitations, or coincidental.
I'm hoping that Giovanni Papini is going to make many more appearances in TNA in the coming days: he contributes a story/essay titled "Hamlet's Advice" to this issue--it is a bombastic "Forward, Forward!" sort of affair, urging its readers to passion and activity. I prefer Morning's witty pricks to these big swats, but will always have a soft spot for Papini.
Quick Notes:
E.A.B. responds to criticism about American poetry. The controversy over George Sterling continues. On Sterling's poems: "These can best be suggested by saying that they remind me vaguely of “AE.” If one could imagine the vision of “Æ” emptied of its mystic content, one would have an idea of a great deal of George Sterling’s work."
...a poem by AE, funnily enough, appears earlier in the issue.
A.S. Neill contributes a story titled "The Lunatic," a satire of society centering on an up-to-date Scot idealist. It's silly, but it references futurism and TNA in its text, so I wanted to remember it.
A Constantia Stone writes in to dismantle Pound's essay on Imagism from last week.
There's a lot more in this one about the war, about tensions between England and the USA over Mexican oil, about the military and militarism (Romney defends militarism, naturally)--but I must stop for now. On to the next issue.
Sunday, February 8, 2015
The Masses, February 1915
After giving The Masses short shrift in January, I'm going to do my post on it early this month.
This image stands for one of the main meditations of The Masses this month: how impoverished women relate to sex, especially as prostitutes, or otherwise exploited. January's issue had the story "Nobody's Sister" on the same subject--but this month's Masses is anchored by a story by John Reed, Daughter of the Revolution. He tells about meeting a prostitute from a third-generation Socialist family--she is impoverished because her father rejected her desire for freedom. That's the irony of it. As a story, the writing is good, if a little prone to over-exposition. Marcelle, the prostitute, tells the story of her grandfather dying at the fall of the commune, her father's activities as a strike leader, and all the rest of the family history. She herself hates socialism for the way her family has been crushed by the system--and yet, she herself feels free. The story comes off as part inspiring, part sordid--another glimpse into wartime Paris, and one more polished than the others I've covered. It's worth reading. Contrast this vision to that of "The Bachelor Girl" drawing above, and with the poem "You Turned" by Robert Carlton Brown below (page 9):
Robert Carlton Brown is one of my favorites--and a forgotten modernist I want to spend more time studying, someday. He doesn't even have a wikipedia page yet, as I think I've noted before--I keep meaning to write one, but finding sources on him is difficult. See also his drunken Whitmanic prose poem rollick, "A Nickel at Night" on page 20.
Quick gossipy note: when Reed is establishing the scene at the beginning of the story, and for no readily apparent reason, he writes that "Beatrice and Alice were farther down along under the glare of the yellow lights" (5). Could this be not two women, but Beatrice Hastings/Alice Morning of The New Age?! Conspiratorial of me to think it, but the coincidence--BH/AM would have been in Paris at the time the story was set.
Quick notes:
This issue of The Masses contains some interesting poems beyond Brown's above. Carl Sandburg publishes "Buttons," about the horror of abstracting the war.
I may have made a minor discovery in another one of the poems... but I'll keep some secrets for myself, until they are ready.
Karl Liebknecht, covered in my last post, has his tragic insurrection prophesied by The Masses on page 14.
Floyd Dell contributes an essay on Gilbert Murray's comparing the era to the Greece of Pericles. It's interesting for the connections with the Hellenism of so much of the art of the day.
The Masses has set up shop as a mail-order bookstore, a prototype of Amazon: you let them be your middleman, and the profits support the journal. We'll see how the scheme plays out.
I'm going to take off now, but there's plenty more to say about this issue--the best way to experience The Masses, its worldview, its black humor, its art, is not this blog post. Here's to the thing itself.
Saturday, February 7, 2015
The New Age, January 28 1915
"Hate us but hear," says R.H.C. in this week's installment of "Readers and Writers" (347). This is in response to one of the many New Age feuds, as someone is complaining that TNA makes too many personal attacks. The content is less important than the context: though this is about spelling reform, R.H.C. (probably Orage) explains that the reason TNA is so abusive is in direct relation to the mainstream media's tendency to only publish positive criticism.
Before ending on that note, R.H.C. closes a running dispute about a 18th century story that he claimed was written by a "1754 Blast School," which sparked a debate with a Mr. Duncan, an expert in the time period. The story is about "Hottentot" conceptions of beauty, and is very overwrought in its descriptions. Duncan finally succeeds in convincing R.H.C. that it's not a "Blast" from the past, because it is a satire, firmly a product of its time. While I'm just mentioning this here for the first time, I think it's important in my investigation of TNA's conception of modernism that Orage first attempts to show that the modern and new is a repetition--and only grudgingly admits that times have changed. This also redounds on my thinking of TNA's satire: by making Grub Street the old Blast, they also implicitly positioned themselves as modern Samuel Johnsons, Jonathan Swifts.
"R.H.C." also predicts that Kipling will soon fall out of fashion because there is no mystery in his stories. This intrigues me, and I'll try to keep an eye on Kipling.
I'll briefly one of the "Reviews" from this one: first, and more imporantly, Harold Munro's Poetry and Drama has suspended operations for a year due to the war. The New Age gives some credit to the journal, which it stabbed at hard enough while it was running--but says that ultimately PD was simply too big to contain much literature of lasting value, relative to its size. I don't have this issue of PD at hand, but I think R.H.C. takes a shot at "The Road Not Taken" specifically, and Frost in general. I should get the bound volume from the stacks and see: "Mr. Robert Frost piffles impertinently about setting forth somewhere where he will never go, worse luck" (352).
Moving on. Ezra Pound continues his "Affirmations," but before going there, I'd like to dip into the correspondence pages to show you his response to Beatrice Hastings/Alice Morning's criticism of him in the last issue, because it is so revealing of his relationship to both Hastings/Morning and Richard Aldington:
This letter appears on page 359. Is he joking about his lightest utterance? I sometimes think that he comes off much worse than he means to because he trusts the reader to take him lightly (which would make the joke circular). The Aldington reference is a pretty good burn, as he's pointing out that Aldington is the one who is always writing about the phallus, not Pound himself. Note, though, that Morning's criticism is placed above Aldington's satire in value, and this after Pound's repeated beatings at her hands in The New Age.
Turning to the "Affirmation" itself, this week's is particularly of interest to me because it is about Imagisme (349-350). I'm going to condense it, perhaps too much: an image happens when an artist receives a powerful emotion and this emotion leads to their perception of a "pattern-unit" or a "unit of design" that is new, unique, suited to the moment, etc. These are "fused ideas" rather than single ones, and finding these fused images is the goal of an Imagiste. That's the kernel of the essay, as I see it.
Quick notes:
Alice Morning hersel(ves) continues her "Impressions of Paris." She opens with an idea that isn't too far off from Pound's Cantos: that "light in balance" can describe the Mercury of Bologna. She also gossips about Max Jacob and Picasso's portrait of Jacob, saying that the cubists are trying to say that cubism was "never more than an experiment," and that rumors say "this portrait was photographic enough in all conscience. I can’t imagine that Picasso is really doing that" (343). Here it is:
There's a marked contrast between Romney's prediction of a "speedy decision of the struggle" and Morning's "No one hopes any longer for a speedy end to the war," with which she ends her impression (335, 344)
Richard Curle contributes a kind of whiny travelogue about how much he hated traveling in Madrid, Spain. In some ways, it is a negative image of The Sun Also Rises.
The New Age is full of fury for British commerce, which on the one hand is asking working people to sacrifice their lives, and on the other is claiming the right to sell war materiel at war market prices.
Marmaduke Pickthall continues to discuss the caliphate--a resonance across the century.
C.H. Norman's open letter to the House of Commons, "The Parliament of the Dead," proves legally that the members of the House are dead--as they voted themselves salaries, they violated a code that stated any MP who got a profitable job would be considered as if they had died in office, and a new election would be held immediately. The fire is somewhat lost in the legalese, but it's entertaining.
All for now...
Before ending on that note, R.H.C. closes a running dispute about a 18th century story that he claimed was written by a "1754 Blast School," which sparked a debate with a Mr. Duncan, an expert in the time period. The story is about "Hottentot" conceptions of beauty, and is very overwrought in its descriptions. Duncan finally succeeds in convincing R.H.C. that it's not a "Blast" from the past, because it is a satire, firmly a product of its time. While I'm just mentioning this here for the first time, I think it's important in my investigation of TNA's conception of modernism that Orage first attempts to show that the modern and new is a repetition--and only grudgingly admits that times have changed. This also redounds on my thinking of TNA's satire: by making Grub Street the old Blast, they also implicitly positioned themselves as modern Samuel Johnsons, Jonathan Swifts.
"R.H.C." also predicts that Kipling will soon fall out of fashion because there is no mystery in his stories. This intrigues me, and I'll try to keep an eye on Kipling.
I'll briefly one of the "Reviews" from this one: first, and more imporantly, Harold Munro's Poetry and Drama has suspended operations for a year due to the war. The New Age gives some credit to the journal, which it stabbed at hard enough while it was running--but says that ultimately PD was simply too big to contain much literature of lasting value, relative to its size. I don't have this issue of PD at hand, but I think R.H.C. takes a shot at "The Road Not Taken" specifically, and Frost in general. I should get the bound volume from the stacks and see: "Mr. Robert Frost piffles impertinently about setting forth somewhere where he will never go, worse luck" (352).
Moving on. Ezra Pound continues his "Affirmations," but before going there, I'd like to dip into the correspondence pages to show you his response to Beatrice Hastings/Alice Morning's criticism of him in the last issue, because it is so revealing of his relationship to both Hastings/Morning and Richard Aldington:
Turning to the "Affirmation" itself, this week's is particularly of interest to me because it is about Imagisme (349-350). I'm going to condense it, perhaps too much: an image happens when an artist receives a powerful emotion and this emotion leads to their perception of a "pattern-unit" or a "unit of design" that is new, unique, suited to the moment, etc. These are "fused ideas" rather than single ones, and finding these fused images is the goal of an Imagiste. That's the kernel of the essay, as I see it.
Quick notes:
Alice Morning hersel(ves) continues her "Impressions of Paris." She opens with an idea that isn't too far off from Pound's Cantos: that "light in balance" can describe the Mercury of Bologna. She also gossips about Max Jacob and Picasso's portrait of Jacob, saying that the cubists are trying to say that cubism was "never more than an experiment," and that rumors say "this portrait was photographic enough in all conscience. I can’t imagine that Picasso is really doing that" (343). Here it is:
There's a marked contrast between Romney's prediction of a "speedy decision of the struggle" and Morning's "No one hopes any longer for a speedy end to the war," with which she ends her impression (335, 344)
Richard Curle contributes a kind of whiny travelogue about how much he hated traveling in Madrid, Spain. In some ways, it is a negative image of The Sun Also Rises.
The New Age is full of fury for British commerce, which on the one hand is asking working people to sacrifice their lives, and on the other is claiming the right to sell war materiel at war market prices.
Marmaduke Pickthall continues to discuss the caliphate--a resonance across the century.
C.H. Norman's open letter to the House of Commons, "The Parliament of the Dead," proves legally that the members of the House are dead--as they voted themselves salaries, they violated a code that stated any MP who got a profitable job would be considered as if they had died in office, and a new election would be held immediately. The fire is somewhat lost in the legalese, but it's entertaining.
All for now...
Thursday, February 5, 2015
The Masses, January 1915
I realized that I forgot to write my post on The Masses of January. Bear with me while I take a step back before taking one forward.
I'll just jot down a few quick notes, and post a couple images of interest.
There are several pieces arguing against American involvement in the war, and there's further coverage of the Socialist Party's activities in Europe, including the story of Karl Leibknecht's lone opposition to WWI in the Reichstag (18).
On page 11, there's an entertaining selection of letters arguing for and against prohibition. I also noticed that there seems to be an image that has been removed: I wonder if it was pulled from the pdf or was cut from the original?
Max Eastman pens a lengthy article on "What is the Matter with Magazine Art." The issue also contains images like this one:
The interests of the journal come to a head here: in a country beset by the horrors of peace, how could we think about joining a war? The image is haunting, the caption contextualizes it.
Lastly, and more frivolously, an advertisement that speaks for itself:
I'll just jot down a few quick notes, and post a couple images of interest.
There are several pieces arguing against American involvement in the war, and there's further coverage of the Socialist Party's activities in Europe, including the story of Karl Leibknecht's lone opposition to WWI in the Reichstag (18).
On page 11, there's an entertaining selection of letters arguing for and against prohibition. I also noticed that there seems to be an image that has been removed: I wonder if it was pulled from the pdf or was cut from the original?
Max Eastman pens a lengthy article on "What is the Matter with Magazine Art." The issue also contains images like this one:
The interests of the journal come to a head here: in a country beset by the horrors of peace, how could we think about joining a war? The image is haunting, the caption contextualizes it.
Lastly, and more frivolously, an advertisement that speaks for itself:
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