This issue of The New Freewoman has the first rumblings of the transition to The Egoist: the first article, before this issue reserved for the editorial, is Ezra Pound's The Serious Artist.
I love it when authors reference their time--and Ezra Pound's concern with the modern usually means he'll feed my desire. He opens with: "It is curious that one should be asked to rewrite Sidney's 'Defense of Poesie" in the year of grace 1913." He uses the comparison with Sidney to set up his purpose, which is to examine the ethics of art. First he determines that art is necessary because ethics are based on the "nature of man" and "the arts give us a great percentage of the lasting an unassailable data regarding the nature of man, of immaterial man, of man considered as a thinking and sentient creature." Well and good, but this progresses to the evolutionary elitism so characteristic of the year of grace 1913: "From the arts... we learn that certain men are often more akin to certain especial animals than they are to other men of different composition." Ok.
EP goes on to explain that bad art comes when the artist lies, because it ends up spreading a contagion of misapplied knowledge of the nature of man and people end up confused. Expressed in the converse: "Purely and simply... good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise. You can be wholly precise in representing a vagueness."
How's this: "Now art never asks anybody to do anything, or to think anything, or to be anything. It exists as trees exist, you can admire, you can sit in the shade, you can pick bananas, you can cut firewood, you can do as you jolly well please."
Art provides data about how men (people?) are different. That's part one of the essay, anyway. Welcome to the front seat of TNF, EP.
Other notes:
Richard Aldington contributes a sort of nasty portrait of English women on a train. I wonder what H.D. makes of his hatred of Englishwomankind.
There's an article entitled "The Conversion of a Specialist" about a doctor who has moved to treat tuberculosis with "vegetables, cereals, and fruits without eggs, milk, cheese, or butter"
Ezra Pound responds to that weird Angel Club thing from last time (the people who were going to found their own country of superior people) by asking him to support artists once the new country is set up. I really wonder what he's make of the MFA.
Elsewhere in the letters-to-the-editor there's plenty of White Slave debunking, always double-edged and uncomfortable...
Ads include one for EP's Canzoni.
All for now...
Showing posts with label White Slave Traffic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label White Slave Traffic. Show all posts
Saturday, October 26, 2013
Sunday, December 30, 2012
The New Age December 12 1912
It's been a while, I can't really explain why. But I've been reading along, even if I haven't been writing, so I'll do a whirlwind set of posts today to make up for the gap.
First, The New Age Dec. 12th.
Romney's "Military Notes" are growing more disturbing, as when he declares that "tactical finesse" is "a positive danger" when soldiers should "simply go straight forward at their mark." Hello Somme. More on this next post, in which he takes this idea farther.
"The New Servitude" has a very familiar feel, claiming that business is unfairly speeding up the level of production without raising wages. This all funnels into advocating guild socialism, of course.
"More Hygienic Jinks," the column that satirizes public health issues, has a great depiction of the eugenics movement as a confused and intentionally confusing mass of pretensions.
John Masefield is brutally attacked in "Present Day Criticism." Might relate that to the dueling reviews of Masefield that will come up in Poetry at some point...
As has often happened in The New Age, the real gems are in the letters to the editor. R. B. Kerr responds to Pound's earlier claim that America doesn't have any geniuses by agreeing! Blames American lack of leisure. I wish I could blame the same for my late posts.
Really the most startling debate in the magazine is the struggle over the "White Slave Bill." Bewildering--it seems like the Archbishop of Canterbury and company are trying to bring back flogging as a punishment for pimps and johns. They have a groundswell of more moderate support from people who want to end sex trafficking in England. But Beatrice Hastings is dead against it. My picture of Hastings continues to develop: in this issue, a woman writes to her with an example of a time she met a prostitute who was being held against her will (and who the police did not protect). Hastings reiterates her earlier position that women cannot be forcibly made into prostitutes, then doubles down by attacking equal suffrage! I want to discuss this with an expert... maybe I'll try to find a book.
Onward.
First, The New Age Dec. 12th.
Romney's "Military Notes" are growing more disturbing, as when he declares that "tactical finesse" is "a positive danger" when soldiers should "simply go straight forward at their mark." Hello Somme. More on this next post, in which he takes this idea farther.
"The New Servitude" has a very familiar feel, claiming that business is unfairly speeding up the level of production without raising wages. This all funnels into advocating guild socialism, of course.
"More Hygienic Jinks," the column that satirizes public health issues, has a great depiction of the eugenics movement as a confused and intentionally confusing mass of pretensions.
John Masefield is brutally attacked in "Present Day Criticism." Might relate that to the dueling reviews of Masefield that will come up in Poetry at some point...
As has often happened in The New Age, the real gems are in the letters to the editor. R. B. Kerr responds to Pound's earlier claim that America doesn't have any geniuses by agreeing! Blames American lack of leisure. I wish I could blame the same for my late posts.
Really the most startling debate in the magazine is the struggle over the "White Slave Bill." Bewildering--it seems like the Archbishop of Canterbury and company are trying to bring back flogging as a punishment for pimps and johns. They have a groundswell of more moderate support from people who want to end sex trafficking in England. But Beatrice Hastings is dead against it. My picture of Hastings continues to develop: in this issue, a woman writes to her with an example of a time she met a prostitute who was being held against her will (and who the police did not protect). Hastings reiterates her earlier position that women cannot be forcibly made into prostitutes, then doubles down by attacking equal suffrage! I want to discuss this with an expert... maybe I'll try to find a book.
Onward.
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