Monthly Archives: April 2010

Dawn Arnold: Frye Festival Diary

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Friday, April 16, 2010

The Frye Festival banners are up on Main Street, Moncton, which is a sure sign of spring (or that it may snow again…just one more time!). Programs have been inserted in 100,000 newspapers all over the region and giant billboards encourage everyone to visit www.frye.ca for all the Festival details. This year all 31 authors (every single one!) will be visiting schools, which means that more than 10,000 kids will have the opportunity to meet an author in their classroom, library or auditorium. I just counted and we have 56 different non-school events this year, which must be a record. I drove to Halifax yesterday (wake-up call, 3:00 am!) for a 4 minute live interview for Breakfast TV – you try and cover 56 different events (workshops, round tables, book clubs, dialogues, lectures, readings, etc.) and 31 authors in four minutes (after driving 3 hours in the dark!). Northrop Frye is of course our inspiration and his commitment to an informed and civil society lies behind everything that we do, but it is sometimes difficult to get the message out.

We don’t want to lose Frye in all that we do and one tangible example of Frye’s continuing presence in Moncton is a project I’m just now discussing with Moncton’s mayor, George LeBlanc.  I’ve had a long-time dream of creating a bronze sculpture of Frye, sitting on a park bench, casually reading a book. He would be life-sized and hardy (I see kids climbing on him and tourists getting their photos snapped with him). The inspiration for this idea came recently when we commissioned an artist to create a prize for our inaugural “Frye Academy Award” – you should see the gold Northrop Frye bobble head that he created (he is waving and has a jaunty stance!)! If my head is not too “Frye’d” by Sunday, April 25, I will post a photo of the bobble head prize, because I know you will all want one! Anyway, once the Festival is over I hope to start work on getting an enduring tribute to Frye created. Better get back to work…still lots to be done!

Monday, April 19, 2010

The Frye Festival was officially launched today at Moncton City Hall. We had lots of politicians make appearances (Premier Shawn Graham, Senator Rose-May Poirier, MP Brian Murphy, Municipal politicians, etc.) so that generated lots of media coverage (and in fact, the first time the RCMP has ever called us about protestors – we thought maybe they thought our authors might be radicals, but alas, it was about the Premier!). As always, it is tough to get the story out there, but somehow, the media is coming out in droves this year. The hook? Volcanic ash. Yep, we have had some cancellations due to the cancellation of two European authors’ flights. This is something that they can understand and then, they actually pick-up on the Festival story. Who knew? We’ve dealt with cancellations for SARS, 9/11, fog and snow, but volcanic ash is new!

While today was the official launch, we had a wonderful event on Saturday at The Bay. Sandwiched in between women’s fashions and lingerie we displayed more than 200 K-Grade 4 student creations. All the kids received an invitation to attend, pick-up a certificate, a Festival t-shirt, a pass to Magic Mountain and the opportunity to shine in front of their family and friends. I brought my son along to help out and he simply couldn’t believe how excited the kids were. He is a hockey player and gets accolades everywhere he goes (our community is truly hockey obsessed – it hasn’t changed much on that front since Northrop was here!), but this event is one of the few that gives young creators the opportunity to celebrated by their community.

Tonight I’m looking forward to Prelude: Emerging New Brunswick Authors. We have six up-and-coming authors (three English, three French) who have all just recently published their first books. I love this event. We have so much for kids (K-12) and so much for commercially successful authors, but it is nice to nurture our own local authors.

Got to go…interviews with CTV’s Alive at Five and Rogers Radio…

Northrop Frye Festival Begins Today! [Updated]

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Congratulations to our friends and colleagues in Moncton!  We wish you the very best, and look forward to hearing from you.

We wish we were there!!

Update: Here’s a report from Ed Lemond on day 1:

The Official Launch of the Festival is this morning at 11am, with bells and whistles, musicians, sponsors and politicians, and our own Poet Flyé, Jesse Robichaud, whose task is to follow the festival for a week, make notes and come up a long poem to present at the closing next Sunday.  Since Jesse is also a reporter at the local newspaper, we’re assured of some good coverage.

There’s snow on the ground, so it must be Frye Festival time.  We always get at least one snowstorm during the festival, or at least a dusting.  In 2001 the plane carrying Robert Bly and Marie-Claire Blais had to be diverted to Halifax because of a major snowstorm.  They finally got here in the early morning hours, in time for their events.

We’re lucky that we haven’t lost any authors to the volcano.  Craig Stepenson, scheduled to give a talk Wed. evening (“Reading Frye Reading Jung”), fortunately decided to visit friends in Toronto before coming to Moncton.  He left Paris last Wed. or Thur., before flights were grounded.  I’ll meet him tomorrow and drive him to a local school, for a ‘school visit.’  It will be interesting to see how a Jungian Analyst based in Paris, France, addresses a class of high school students in Riverview, New Brunswick.

The main event today, after the Official Launch, is called Prelude: Emerging Writers of New Brunswick, featuring 6 young writers, 3 French, 3 English, each with one or two books to their credit, just beginning their careers.  8pm, we’ll be there.  Tomorrow things start to heat up.

Picture of the Day

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Sarah Palin at a fund-raiser in Hamilton, Ontario, April 15th.

I am posting this only at the special request of Californian Trevor Losh-Johnson, who will be joining the graduate program at McMaster in September and was curious to know how the Palin appearance played here.

Well, you can see by the photo that she’s turned writing on her hand into Christianist shtick.

If you want to know how the Hamilton Spectator covered the event, you can read its headline story here.

Here are the first four grafs:

Hamilton’s NHL ambitions have the support of Sarah Palin.

The former Alaska governor, in town last night for a fundraiser at Carmen’s Banquet Centre that raised $50,000 for a children’s charity, was at the Sheraton hotel in downtown Hamilton before the evening event.

“I’m overlooking Copps Coliseum and I thought, what a great place for an NHL franchise,” she told a sellout crowd of more than 900 people at the east Mountain banquet centre.

“You’re all set up for it,” she said to applause. “If I ever meet the president of the NHL, I’ll put a little bug in his ear,” Palin said.

That about capture it for you, Trevor?

To be fair, you can read Spec columnist Jeff Mahoney’s very funny “sneak peek” at her speech here — which perhaps confirms that satire may now be more relevant than what otherwise passes for news.

Bill Maher on the whole writing-on-the-hand thing after the jump.

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Thomas Middleton

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Today is playwright Thomas Middleton‘s birthday (1580 – 1627).  I once joked to a prof that if there’d been no Shakespeare, we’d be reading Middleton by default.  Not meaning to diss the birthday boy but, the impressive output notwithstanding, we got the better end of the deal.

Frye in Notebook 9:

One, or two, reasons why this is not an age of great tragedy are improved methods of contraception and of police investigation.  In The Changeling two people are arrested for murder on the ground that they left town the day after the murder took place: one needs ghosts of victims & confessions by the guilty to improve the quality of detection.  (CW 20, 256-7)

Trailer for a current English production of The Changeling after the jump.

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Quote of the Day [Updated]

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Masaccio, Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise, 1427

Creation, sex, shame, and sin in Milton’s Paradise Lost:

In refusing to recognize the Son as their own creative principle, then, the devils are closing the gate of their own origin.  This theme of closing the gate of origin recurs all through the epic, and is the basis of the feeling which later appears in humanity as what Milton calls shame.  Shame to Milton is something deeper and more sinister in human emotion than simply the instinctive desire to cover the genital organs.  It is rather a state of mind which is the fall itself: it might be described as the emotional response to the state of pride.

Frye, The Return of Eden (University of Toronto, 37)

Update: Andrew Sullivan has been running a discussion on Christ and sexuality at his blog; you can pick up the thread here.

John Ford

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On this date playwright John Ford (1586 – 1640) was baptized.

In Notebook 9 Frye makes some telling comparisons between Shakespeare and the Jacobean playwrights, particularly Ford, Webster, Tourneur, and Dekker.

As compared with his contemporaries, Shakespeare’s sense of tragedy is much more firmly rooted in history, and he lacks the moralizing tendency that makes Tourneur call his characters by such names as Lussurioso & Ambitioso.  Hence he does illustrate my point about tragedy being closer to a reality-principle than comedy.  Outside him, I’m not sure that that’s true: there’s just as much fantasy & manipulation in Tourneur or Ford as there is in Shakespearean romance.  Shakespeare’s tragic vision also has something to do with his adherence to popular theatre: he has a public sense of dramatic action, not a ruminative psychologizing one…

In Ford’s TPSW [‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore] an amiable & harmless old woman who has connived at the heroine’s incest first of all has her eyes put out, & then, as an applauded act of justice, is led out to be burned at the stake.  That really is brutality.  And Hamlet’s excuse about Claudius’ murder until he’s sure to go to hell is nothing compared to what the viallains in Tourneur & Webster do.  We expect a very high standard of sensitivity from Shakespeare, even the senstivity of readers who on the whole don’t live in tragic worlds.  We understand, but don’t realize, Dekker’s remark: “There is a hell named in our creed, and a heaven, and the hell comes before; if we look not into the first, we shall never live in the last.”  Several tragic dramatists, especially Webster, pick up M’s [Marlowe’s] remark in Faustus…

A manipulated tragic situation is often one where providence or Heaven or some power overreaching Nature takes a hand in the action, & functions as the eiron.  Many dramatists put up “Danger: God at Work” signs: there’s a good example in Ford’s TPSW [‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore].  (CW 20, 256-7)

A trailer for a recent San Fransisco production of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore after the jump.

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CODCO: “Pleasant Irish Priests in Conversation”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iqtkwr-YJI

The skit banned by the CBC in 1991 in the wake of the Mount Cashel Orphanage scandal.

The latest child sex abuse scandals in the Church seem to have broken through the last outpost of public forbearance which for so long put the whole issue into a bizarre moral and legal limbo.

Not many people outside of Eastern Canada seem to remember that the scandal actually began in Canada just over 20 years ago — in Newfoundland, in fact, at the Mount Cashel Orphanage.

Anyone who loves Newfoundland culture knows that nothing distills the black humor and native irreverence of the Newfoundland character better than the legendary comedy troupe CODCO.  Some might even recall that head writer and performer Andy Jones quit CODCO’s weekly CBC TV series back in 1991 over the network’s refusal to air the skit featured above involving a deadpan satire on the sexuality of the supposedly celibate.  (As regularly happens with CODCO, you don’t necessarily laugh out loud, but you do wince and cringe, and that’s the way they sometimes preferred it.)

In this case, we can clearly see that satirists at their best are like EMTs — the first on the scene with potentially life-saving aid.  And yet, in this case, sadly enough, the service being offered was refused by antsy Canadian censors, and the public remained in its peculiar state of denial about what all of this really entailed for another 20 years.

Frye and the Mona Lisa

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Further to Michael’s post

“I must run across to the Louvre now, as it is getting late. The mob always goes straight to the Mona Lisa as the greatest drawing card. I’m a little annoyed with Leonardo just now. That miserable Bacchus and John the Baptist—which are of course open to doubt as to their authenticity—with their sickly smiles and their rather cloying chiaroscuro” (Frye to Helen Kemp. 25 September 1938)

Two years earlier Frye had reported to Helen on his visit to the Art Institute in Chicago: “The Art Institute has a special exhibit which I have visited twice, once with [my sister] Vera, once with Eleanor [Craig].  Renaissance painting–Tintoretto, Titian, two Leonardos‑‑one called the “Madonna of the Yarn Spinners,” a magnificent Italian Madonna, with the same inscrutable Mona Lisa smile, and the freshest and rosiest youngster I have ever seen.  Some of the representations of the Christ‑Child are almost blasphemous‑‑he looks sometimes like a manikin of forty, sometimes like a wizened old priest.  One Raphael‑‑very simple but breath‑taking‑‑a man dressed in black.  Two Botticellis‑‑one I could have sworn was modern French.  Our old friend Lippo Lippi, and one of his incubi, Fra Angelico.  (Try your hand at Fra Lippo Lippi sometime, contrasting the medieval type with Early Renaissance in initial letters or marginal designs.)  The Renaissance pictures were all very soft and quiet in color.  But the medieval ones were different.  Nearly all of them had gold backgrounds, and the figures were splashes of brilliant reds and greens.  The haloes were bewilderingly ornamented.  Poses stiff and architectural, often notably Byzantine.  But a sort of quaint childlike humor all through.  One picture of the Last Supper shows a little spaniel in the foreground gnawing a bone.  One Madonna and Child shows the latter with his fist stuck in a dish of candy.  A weird one of John the Baptist’s head brought to Sabine has a moving picture effect.  The head appears twice, and so do three attendants, at different stages in the procession.  I liked these medieval pictures best of all, I think.  Then the Dutch school.  Some rare humor here too.  One a young group of smokers trying to blow rings.  A beautiful Rembrandt‑‑“Girl at Half‑open Door” and a portrait of his father.  Several Franz Hals‑‑all the “Laughing Cavalier” type.  And an exquisite picture of a “Woman Weighing Gold.”  And so on.  The Dutch primitives disappointed me a bit.  There is an English room‑‑several graceful Gainsboroughs, a Romney, Reynolds, Raeburn, Zoffany, and Hogarth.  American colonial painting, including the two famous Gilbert Stuart portraits of Washington.  Whistler‑‑the great portrait of his mother‑‑one of the biggest attractions‑‑a superb picture in gray and black.  And the Thames “nocturne”‑‑the one that started the row with Ruskin.  Sargent‑‑a lovely study of an Egyptian nude girl‑‑surprisingly slim for the Orient.  Modern French too‑‑a room full of Matisse and Picasso.  That man Matisse knew how to handle color.  A picture of Picasso’s of a youngster eating out of a bowl called “Le Gourmet” is very popular‑‑Eleanor said it was her favourite” (Frye to Kemp, 1 July 1933).

From Northrop Frye’s Student Essays: “The relation of the artist to the scientist boils down to one very similar to his relation to the moralist or propagandist.  The scientist explains, and his words and images denote; the artist suggests, and his words and images connote.  No two people will look at a picture in the same way; and if I am looking at one, all the other possible reactions to it, which I may or may not share, form a sort of nimbus around my head, which I try to get away from.  If I am looking at Mona Lisa, for instance, I withdraw into myself in order to escape from both Walter Pater, except by responding to a meaning in the picture essentially “evocative” and “spell‑bearing” (CW 3, 377).

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A Tale of Two Conferences

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I have just returned from two conferences: the American Comparative Literature Association and the North Eastern Modern Language Association.  Six flights, ten days.

My attendance at the NeMLA was limited because my flight out of Toronto was cancelled and I arrived a day late; just in time for my own panel, in fact.  However, as I walked among the book stalls at the conference, I was very happy to stumble across Robert Denham’s edition of Northrop Frye’s letters front and centre at the McFarland Press table.  When I wandered by later in the day, it was gone, sold out completely.  So I made my way over to the Queen’s-McGill University Press table to purchase J. Russell Perkin’s Theology and the Victorian Novel – a really rather stunning book.

At the American Comparative Literature Association’s meeting – convened this year in New Orleans (“Nawlins,” if you’re native) – I was part of a seminar discussing the romance.  Unlike many similar settings, the ACLA meeting has excellent organization in that participants send abstracts to the seminar group which also meets each day of the conference.  The result is real discussion on ideas being steadily accumulated by way of ongoing lectures and discussions.  In our seminar group, at least half of the panellists quoted Frye directly, and Frye made his way into almost every discussion period precisely because the romance as a genre is not dying and neither are Frye’s explorations, explications, and expectations of it.

At the ACLA I was quite impressed to find people reading Frye’s work on genre not with disdain but rather with a great deal of respect and curiosity.  His work was applied from the romances of Virginia Woolf right through to Chick-Lit, and from the Anglo-American tradition all the way to Bollywood, Latin America, and Africa.   If Frye is to have his much anticipated “resurgence,” it may well occur in the field of romance studies.  Allow me to conclude by plugging an organisation where this seems most likely to happen, the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance: www.iaspr.org.

At any rate, both conferences re-affirmed and refreshed my own ideas about the romance and Northrop Frye’s continuing influence on the field.  I have four more conferences to prepare for in the next few months, including the annual meeting of the IASPR where Frye will undoubtedly be present.  His work will certainly make a star turn in my talk on Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series.  So, I look forward to continuing to discover Frye being read closely and carefully by my peers; and, additionally, to posting brief dispatches from these conferences.

Hope to see you all again soon.