Monday, October 26, 2015
Electric Beauty
I was just reading The New Age when a new glitch occurred--it's happened a few times, so this time I was ready and caught it in a screenshot. I'm posting it because it's lovely. Real posts again soon!
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
The Egoist, October 1915
The Egoist is replete with interesting material, as usual. I'm currently working on a paper on Dora Marsden, and I really should be spending all my time on it... but here goes.
Speaking of Marsden, she continues her anti-government reading of contemporary politics. The upshot of the month's "Views and Comments" is that the media is misrepresenting the people--that the controversy over conscription is unnecessary because the people support the war, and are willing to do what they need to do to win it.
M. Montagu-Nathan continues a series on problems with the translation of Russian literature into English. He wants more Gogol.
Edward Storer contributes many translations of Sappho, giving his own take on the sort of Greek lyric poets that Aldington has been publishing lately. He cited the Wharton edition as his source, and translated both whole poems and fragments, but corrects Wharton's more prudish reading of the poems with this: "That her poems were chiefly love-poems, and love-poems written to women, is clear even from the mutilated fragments which remain. Any other explanation destroys at once their art and their reality. Yet sedulous hypocrites are to be found to-day who will wilfully mistranslate and misconstrue in order to envelope the manners of antiquity in a retrospective and most absurd respectability." Cool. So are the poems. I have read many translations of Sappho, but in these, the aphoristic epigrams stand out:
The indefatigable Huntly Carter reviews A.J. Eddy's book, "Cubists and Post-Impressionism," an early critical work on those movements. Carter, having been on the scene since Manet and the Post-Impressionists in winter 1910, weighs in quickly and decisively. He accuses Eddy of jumbling up which artist belongs in which school ("Picasso is not a Cubist, but an essentialist." [!!!]) Carter does point out that writing about avant-garde art should be investigated with caution, especially when "painted theories of a school do not agree with the written ones." Intriguingly for me, Carter boils Eddy's theory down to a paraphrase of imagist doctrine (without citing imagism): "the painter is seeking to make an abstraction of the individualising features of a movement experienced by him in a moment of time. In this trifle resides the only possible theory and practice of art." Here Carter is condensing Eddy's reading of Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase," and this is the first time I've seen Duchamp referenced. Carter has nice things to say about Kandinsky.
Someone signing as "E. H. W." translates Peter Altenberg's story "Une Femme est un Etat de Notre Ame." It's very interesting, a portrait of the emptiness of a young woman's bourgeois life, written in an experimental fashion. It's ambiguous to me on a first reading whether Altenberg is using the relationship with the young man to redeem and transform this life, or whether the relationship and its poetry is also ironized as empty. I lean to the latter. I wonder who "E. H. W." is.
John Gould Fletcher continues Ghosts of an Old House, his southern Gothic serial poem. I'm not into it, but he prophesies my (and your!) reading his poem after his death in this one:
Perhaps the perfect answer to this comes on the same page, facing: Marianne Moore's "Diligence is to Magic as Progress is to Flight," a poem in part about how a poem can escape becoming ephemeral. The other Moore poem is "To a Steam Roller," and both are amazing, but here I'll post just "Diligence" because of my (contrived) attempt to make it a response to Fletcher's anxiety:
I should wrap up this post, and I'll do so with Richard Aldington: he writes about Laurent Tailhade, praising him for his obscene satire. What does this suggest? Yes! Aldington's own attempt at poetic satire follows it. To continue the theme established by Fletcher and Moore: Aldington's satire ends with another accurate prophesy:
And here he is, by Raoul Kristian, who I can't locate online, and that's all for now:
Speaking of Marsden, she continues her anti-government reading of contemporary politics. The upshot of the month's "Views and Comments" is that the media is misrepresenting the people--that the controversy over conscription is unnecessary because the people support the war, and are willing to do what they need to do to win it.
M. Montagu-Nathan continues a series on problems with the translation of Russian literature into English. He wants more Gogol.
Edward Storer contributes many translations of Sappho, giving his own take on the sort of Greek lyric poets that Aldington has been publishing lately. He cited the Wharton edition as his source, and translated both whole poems and fragments, but corrects Wharton's more prudish reading of the poems with this: "That her poems were chiefly love-poems, and love-poems written to women, is clear even from the mutilated fragments which remain. Any other explanation destroys at once their art and their reality. Yet sedulous hypocrites are to be found to-day who will wilfully mistranslate and misconstrue in order to envelope the manners of antiquity in a retrospective and most absurd respectability." Cool. So are the poems. I have read many translations of Sappho, but in these, the aphoristic epigrams stand out:
The indefatigable Huntly Carter reviews A.J. Eddy's book, "Cubists and Post-Impressionism," an early critical work on those movements. Carter, having been on the scene since Manet and the Post-Impressionists in winter 1910, weighs in quickly and decisively. He accuses Eddy of jumbling up which artist belongs in which school ("Picasso is not a Cubist, but an essentialist." [!!!]) Carter does point out that writing about avant-garde art should be investigated with caution, especially when "painted theories of a school do not agree with the written ones." Intriguingly for me, Carter boils Eddy's theory down to a paraphrase of imagist doctrine (without citing imagism): "the painter is seeking to make an abstraction of the individualising features of a movement experienced by him in a moment of time. In this trifle resides the only possible theory and practice of art." Here Carter is condensing Eddy's reading of Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase," and this is the first time I've seen Duchamp referenced. Carter has nice things to say about Kandinsky.
Someone signing as "E. H. W." translates Peter Altenberg's story "Une Femme est un Etat de Notre Ame." It's very interesting, a portrait of the emptiness of a young woman's bourgeois life, written in an experimental fashion. It's ambiguous to me on a first reading whether Altenberg is using the relationship with the young man to redeem and transform this life, or whether the relationship and its poetry is also ironized as empty. I lean to the latter. I wonder who "E. H. W." is.
John Gould Fletcher continues Ghosts of an Old House, his southern Gothic serial poem. I'm not into it, but he prophesies my (and your!) reading his poem after his death in this one:
I should wrap up this post, and I'll do so with Richard Aldington: he writes about Laurent Tailhade, praising him for his obscene satire. What does this suggest? Yes! Aldington's own attempt at poetic satire follows it. To continue the theme established by Fletcher and Moore: Aldington's satire ends with another accurate prophesy:
And here he is, by Raoul Kristian, who I can't locate online, and that's all for now:
Monday, October 12, 2015
The Masses, October-November 1915
I love this issue: the Women's Citizenship Number.
There's a lot to cover, but I'll start with a general observation: The Masses devoting a special issue to women's citizenship would seem to imply a shift of focus to a single topic, but despite the cover, the issue discusses the vote, labor relations, and race relations--all common topics in its pages. Probably less than half of the text is explicitly in reference to suffrage. It doesn't feel strange, though: the cover is an act of solidarity. Here's the kind of solidarity attempted by The Masses: a short piece apologizing to the suffrage movement for the conflation of its activities with those of The Masses, they print this:
The Masses positions itself as a supporter and acknowledges that this support requires nothing from the suffragists. It's about human rights, not about The Masses. The article continues, and things begin to run together: the piece is about Leo Frank's lynching and the cover of The Masses that foreshadowed this lynching by depicting Frank on a cross. Apparently the suffragists were blamed for The Masses "blasphemy" when an anti-suffragist used it to implicate that suffrage and The Masses were one and the same. It all holds together--the fact that Frank tried for the murder of a child laborer in the South comes back to have implications for women's suffrage. The whole issue feels like this.
Floyd Dell and Max Eastman contribute pieces directly on women's suffrage. One interesting component of Eastman's argument is that women are already in the workforce--the bourgeois preoccupation with women remaining in the domestic sphere is a hypocrisy in that these pinnacles of traditional gender roles hire women to run their homes, as maids, cooks, etc.
Amos Pinchot explains that labor is reaching a crossroads: the oversupply of labor means that strikes can never really be effective again, and the state-industry monopoly of violence means that strikes will be fatal as well as futile. The only avenue left to reach an equitable society is political, as the wealth of the elites must be countered by creating self-sustaining labor-led alternatives to the mainstream society.
While this issue has bigger issues on its mind, B. Boysen writes a piece titled "What the Universities Need," protesting the dismissal of a professor from U. Penn for his political views, like our current situation with Steven Salaita. Boysen points to the capitalist takeover of the university system as the root problem, and proposes a national instructor's union with heavy student input as a counterweight to the power of the wealthy trustees. Awesome stuff.
Mary White Ovington, cofounder of the NAACP, contributes a short story about a black couple undergoing horrific crimes in the American South, illustrating the cycles of violence that can extend for decades. It links closely, though not overtly, with the coverage of the Frank case elsewhere in the issue.
Jeanette Eaton castigates the women's magazine for its pernicious influence on women, driving them deeper into the domestic sphere instead of focusing their energies on real living, moving into a general critique of men for encouraging this kind of thought:
There's more, but that's all for now...
There's a lot to cover, but I'll start with a general observation: The Masses devoting a special issue to women's citizenship would seem to imply a shift of focus to a single topic, but despite the cover, the issue discusses the vote, labor relations, and race relations--all common topics in its pages. Probably less than half of the text is explicitly in reference to suffrage. It doesn't feel strange, though: the cover is an act of solidarity. Here's the kind of solidarity attempted by The Masses: a short piece apologizing to the suffrage movement for the conflation of its activities with those of The Masses, they print this:
The Masses positions itself as a supporter and acknowledges that this support requires nothing from the suffragists. It's about human rights, not about The Masses. The article continues, and things begin to run together: the piece is about Leo Frank's lynching and the cover of The Masses that foreshadowed this lynching by depicting Frank on a cross. Apparently the suffragists were blamed for The Masses "blasphemy" when an anti-suffragist used it to implicate that suffrage and The Masses were one and the same. It all holds together--the fact that Frank tried for the murder of a child laborer in the South comes back to have implications for women's suffrage. The whole issue feels like this.
Floyd Dell and Max Eastman contribute pieces directly on women's suffrage. One interesting component of Eastman's argument is that women are already in the workforce--the bourgeois preoccupation with women remaining in the domestic sphere is a hypocrisy in that these pinnacles of traditional gender roles hire women to run their homes, as maids, cooks, etc.
Amos Pinchot explains that labor is reaching a crossroads: the oversupply of labor means that strikes can never really be effective again, and the state-industry monopoly of violence means that strikes will be fatal as well as futile. The only avenue left to reach an equitable society is political, as the wealth of the elites must be countered by creating self-sustaining labor-led alternatives to the mainstream society.
While this issue has bigger issues on its mind, B. Boysen writes a piece titled "What the Universities Need," protesting the dismissal of a professor from U. Penn for his political views, like our current situation with Steven Salaita. Boysen points to the capitalist takeover of the university system as the root problem, and proposes a national instructor's union with heavy student input as a counterweight to the power of the wealthy trustees. Awesome stuff.
Mary White Ovington, cofounder of the NAACP, contributes a short story about a black couple undergoing horrific crimes in the American South, illustrating the cycles of violence that can extend for decades. It links closely, though not overtly, with the coverage of the Frank case elsewhere in the issue.
Jeanette Eaton castigates the women's magazine for its pernicious influence on women, driving them deeper into the domestic sphere instead of focusing their energies on real living, moving into a general critique of men for encouraging this kind of thought:
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