The New Age, January 7 1914

I've been down hard with the flu this last week, so this post is a little out of date. I'm going to do back-to-back New Age posts to catch up. This post will be a bit dashed-off, I apologize in advance...

Starting with eerie coincidence: Alice Morning/Beatrice Hastings continues her "Impressions of Paris" by recounting a dream in which a dead friend returns to her. She then reports that a friend, the Spanish author Mesa, has been killed at the front...

...but (spoiler alert) in the January 14th issue she'll find him alive! But wounded. So the dream of a friend who died coming back was immediately followed by a different dead friend, Mesa, returning.

Back to January 7th's "Impressions": she reports meeting a pair of wounded soldiers, each supporting the other:  "Two fractures in the leg one, and the other--you couldn't say what he had; he  laughed it off" (245). Premonitions of The Sun Also Rises. She goes on to write about rumors of German women fighting at the front, with characteristic disgust at women who take on men's roles. This contrasts to a description of a wild New Year's party, and a short digression on the ugly architecture of Paris.

Immediately following BH's piece is the first of Pound's series of "Affirmations," an essay on the ancient musical instruments of Arnold Dolmestch. He praises this early music for its elegant and intellectual patterns, framing it as a vortex:

"That is the whole flaw of impressionist  or "emotional” music, as opposed to pattern music. It is like a drug; you must have more drug, and more noise  each time, or this effect, this impression which works from the outside, in from the nerves and sensorium upon the self--is no use, its effect is constantly weaker and weaker. I do not mean that Bach is not emotional, but the early music starts with the mystery of pattern; if you like, with the vortex of pattern; with something which is, first of all, music, and which is  capable  of  being,  after  that, many things. What I call emotional, or impressionist music, starts with being emotion or  impression  and  then  becomes only approximately music. It is, that is to say, something in the  terms of something else. If it  produces  an effect, if from sounding as music it moves at all, it can only recede into the original emotion or impression. Programme  music is merely a  weaker, more flabby and descriptive sort of impressionist  music,  needing,  perhaps, a guide  and  explanation." (247).

Quick Notes:

E.A.B., the American correspondent, writes a racist piece about the failure of American immigrants to naturalize, in "The Hyphenated States of America" (as in German-American, Irish-American, etc.). Prophecies doom.

E. A. B. also writes "American Notes," takes time to savage Rebecca West's contributions to "The New Republic," which is only a few issues old and is causing some stir. See also the strongly negative reviews of Harriet Monroe's new book, and Amy Lowell's Sword Blade and Poppy Seed. 

Upton Sinclair writes in, holding up George Sterling's poetry as the exemplar of American art (261-2).

Though The New Age has been against conspiratorial anti-Semitism, they print Oscar Levy and responses to him, so much remains--in the correspondence pages of this issue, for instance.