Thursday, November 7, 2013

The New Age, October 30 1913

Highlights from this issue include:

Romney claims that the thing about modern armies is that they are good at having conclusive battles: "Almost as soon  it becomes apparent that one side or the other is about to win, and Fortune, no longer fickle, seldom gives the under dog a chance to recover himself" (781). Hindsight makes his constant bloody-mindedness ridiculous. See also his descriptions of how airship combat might change all this. Very steampunk.

M. B. Oxon. contributes an interesting review of Jessie Weston's book The Quest of the Holy Grail, which from his description seems to be a version of the Waste Land-inspiring (or was it?) From Ritual to Romance (on page 790). Oxon's mystical critique of the book claims that Weston doesn't go back far enough, as the source for the grail legends is probably older than vegetation rituals. He's wink-wink nudge-nudging toward the fantastic. Anyway, I think Eliot would have been intrigued by the general goal of the review, which is to claim that materialism hasn't taken over at all.

There are, of course, lots of other things in the issue, but I'm going to finish this post with a few letters to the editor.

First, there's a clutch of the sort that praise The New Age and make it sound powerful, always written in the same New Age-y tone, almost as if Orage wrote all of them. The letter from repetition of his suggestion that the "National Guild" articles be bound as a book (made by Orage, who I think wrote the articles, while under pseudonym) by one "W.L." is suspect, especially as the letter does not refer to the earlier article at all. Hmm.

J.M. Kennedy and TNA continue their feud, with Kennedy asking for an apology before he will respond (and getting one, albeit a backhanded one).

Anti-feminism galore in the letter by Pallister Barkas, another pseudonym, naturally. Sorry I'm in conspiracy theory mode.

All for now...

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