httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvi4iA3PnKE

Kim Deal and the Pixies, “Here Comes Your Man”

Today is the birthday of the Deal sisters, Kim and Kelley (born 1961).  Yes, yes, this is strictly a personal indulgence.  But if relevance is required, here’s Frye in a 1978 interview responding to a question about the relationship between scholarship and popular culture.

I think that what interest I have in popular culture has largely grown out of my teaching interest.  That is, I have always said that if you’re faced with a reluctant ten-year-old in a classroom and you’re trying to teach him literature and he prefers something he saw on TV the night before, the way to approach him is not to say, “Well this is good for you and that’s bad for you,” but to say, “Look, there are certain resemblances in structure between what I’m trying to give you and what you just saw.”  I think that pedagogically that’s reasonably sound.  That’s really where my interest in popular culture comes from–the fact that it records the same conventions and genres as serious literature, which of course keeps continually growing out of popular roots, just as Shakespeare grew out of the popular theatre.  (CW 24, 422-3)