httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWPKiuFmY4M
Forrester singing Gustav Mahler’s “Urlicht” (the conductor is Glenn Gould)
Today is Maureen Forrester‘s birthday (1930 – 2010).
Obituary in The Guardian here.
Maureen Forrester
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Monthly Archives: July 2010
Your Daily Reminder
Samuel Coleridge
On this date Samuel Coleridge died (1772-1834).
Frye in “Rencontre: the General Editor’s Introduction”
Coleridge took over from Spinoza the distinction between natura naturata, nature as structure or system, and natura naturans, nature as creative process, and all his philosophy turns on the superiority and priority of the latter. The importance of this for literature is mainly in the new status given to the poet, or the artist or creative person generally, as a result. As long as it is assumed, in Sir Thomas Browne’s phrase, “Nature is the art of God,” the poet cannot be more than an imitator of nature at one remove, and of God at two removes. Man’s creative power is at best a faint shadow of the power that made the realities of the world. But for Coleridge, and increasingly for Romantic writers, man’s creative power does not imitate a structure of things out there, but participates in the organic structure of nature. The poet creates, first, because he is alive and participates in the being of God (primary imagination), and second, because creation is the highest effort of conscious life. (CW , 121) L&S
Saturday Night Video: New York Underground
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIIxlgcuQRU
Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs “Maps”
New York, if it hasn’t always been the home of alternative music, seems always to have been home base — the place you’ve got to get to if you want to score. Los Angeles has reliably turned out commercially viable music for decades. But New York has just as reliably been the proving ground for the artistically adventurous but commercially tenuous: from the Velvet Underground to Patti Smith to Talking Heads to The Strokes and the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs. And, oh yes, a tatty little punk band from Queens — the borderline-unlistenable Ramones — famously began their tour of Britain on July 4th, 1976 and ignited the culture-shifting punk movement there: almost as though the American Revolution had returned to its roots and left in its wake an entire subculture.
What has always defined the New York underground is the notoriously indefinable attribute of cool, an elusive combination of something and something-or-other. It is tough and street smart, but has a surprisingly nostalgic streak manifested by poignant tunes with inviting sing-a-long choruses (see, for example, Karen O in the video above, apparently swallowing her grief throughout before spontaneously releasing one lone tear late in the song). How? Why? It’s evidently life in the big city — you take it as it comes, but invariably take it home with you. The key to it is irony, which, as Frye says, is the point at which we rather unexpectedly return to myth.
It would have made sense to present these songs in chronological order, but in this case it seemed more appropriate to begin in the present and move back to origins, if only to remind ourselves just how clever and variable and consistent the New York underground has always been.
If I may plug just one of these videos, it is Talking Heads’ “And She Was.” As art school nerds, Talking Heads were as much interested in the visual as the musical, so their videos are always superior. This particular video is 25 years old, but you’d never know that to see it. It perfectly captures the whimsy of a song about a suburban housewife who possesses an unexplained ability to fly.
Frye Alert
John Geddes in yesterday’s online edition of Maclean’s reviews a list of some of the best political books to come out of Canada, and then, out of left field, adds a book he thinks is missing:
Still, casting an eye over their catalogue, I’m reminded of how often the most penetrating political insights are found in books that we would not put on the politics shelf. I’m sure examples would spring to any reader’s mind. For me, Northrop Frye’s slim The Modern Century, published in 1967 to coincide with Canada’s centennial, is the prime case of a book that made me think differently about politics, even though it’s not about parties or elections or leaders.
Frye writes about how hard it is—given our age’s incessant soundtrack of commercial and political spin, ad copy, PR hype and on-message blather—to keep from being bludgeoned into a passive stupor. Resisting everything in the air makes a person feel anti-social. “When propaganda cuts off all other sources of information,” he observes, “rejecting it, for a concerned and responsible citizen, would not only isolate him from his social world, but isolate him so completely as to destroy his self-respect.”
Thinking too much is stigmatized as snobbery. Let’s say you read up on global warming and conclude that a carbon tax is the way to go; The Modern Century prepares you to be dismissed as an out-of-touch elitist. “Democracy is a mixture of majority rule and minority right,” says Frye, “and the minority which most clearly has a right is the minority of those who try to resist a passive response, and thereby risk the resentment of those who regard them as trying to be undemocratically superior.”
A truly active, original response is almost always attacked. On the other hand, a phony sense of urgency is encouraged. We’re bombarded with messages pretending to be important, like so many emails flagged with red exclamation marks.
Linda Hutcheon, “Oh, the Humanities”
Linda Hutcheon’s post “Oh, the Humanities” at The Mark here.
Money quote:
The reason given for one of these cuts – that Comparative Literature has been so successful that every department now does that same theoretical and comparative work, and thus the centre is no longer needed – echoes, or perhaps parodies, Yale comparatist Haun Saussy’s famous lament about the institutional weakness and yet the great intellectual strength of comparative studies in Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, the 2004 report of the American Comparative Literature Association. But the negative implications of one of Saussy’s sobering conclusions are worth considering: “We may all be comparatists now – and for good reason – but only with a low common denominator.” In intellectual terms, this is hardly something to be proud of supporting.
Jacques Cartier
On this date in 1534 Jacques Cartier planted a cross on the Gaspe Peninsula and declared it for Francis 1 of France.
Frye in “Levels of Cultural Identity”:
Even careless populizers are more hesitant to write such sentences as “Jacques Cartier was the first man to set foot on Canadian soil,” which were fairly recent usage not long ago. Even when the word “white” was inserted, the implication “first genuine human being” was often there. (The Eternal Act of Creation, 179)
TGIF: Russell Peters
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw6RgIf6epQ&feature=related
Indian accent
It was hard not to be moved by the testimonials for the Centre for Comparative Literature this past week. Olga Bazilevica, for example, cited the Centre as representing everything she’s come to love about this country: our peaceful diversity, our generous expressions of tolerance.
Nice.
But it’s Friday and this is our comedy slot, so let’s laugh a little at Canada (affectionately, of course) by way of our hottest standup comedian, Russell Peters — the guy who, even though he is of Indian descent, has the name of a WASP banker.
After the jump, Peters on the white Canadian accent, racial mixing, and gay Indians.
Centre for Canadian Literature Roundup of Posts and Links
In chronological order:
Centre for Comparative Literature’s graduate student Jonathan Allan’s original post on the issue when the story began to break here.
Front page (above the fold) story in Globe and Mail here.
Roanoke College professor emeritus and editor of a number of Frye’s Collected Works Bob Denham’s letter to U of T President Naylor here.
Jonathan Allan’s account of the Centre’s unique scholarship and international communication, as well as links to the petition and the Save CompLit Facebook page here.
Centre graduate student Natalie Pendergast’s praise of the CompLit Centre and the closing of it as representative of “Canada’s cultural famine” here.
Former student of Frye, past president of McMaster University and current General Editor of the Collected Works Alvin Lee’s letter to the Globe and Mail here.
Letter to President Naylor by former Frye research assistant, current Chair of English at Baldwin-Wallace College, and editor of a number of volumes in the Collected Works, Michael Dolzani, here.
An update of developments here.
Story in The Varsity here.
Nicholas Graham of the University of Toronto on the legacy of the Centre here.
Bob Denham offers some interesting insight on a promised “Northrop Frye Chair” and its once proposed affiliation with the Centre here.
Globe and Mail Editorial on Frye and the Centre here.
Further media links, including to the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New Yorker here.
Update here.
Bob Denham’s no-nonsense response to the Globe and Mail editorial here.
A reminder to sign the petition here.
Jonathan Allan’s account of the history of the post of Professor of Literary Theory and the Centre of Comparative Literature here.
Neil ten Kortenaar, director of the Centre of Comparative Studies, in a letter to the Editor of the Globe and Mail here.
Jonathan Allan’s update on the public campaign to save the Centre here.
Frye Festival Newsletter here.
The creation of a separate “Category” for the “Centre for Comparative Literature” to assist readers here.
Graduate student Olga Bazilevica’s testimonial to the Centre here.
A reminder to sign the petition and visit the Save CompLit Facebook page here.
United Province of Canada
On this date in 1841 the United Province of Canada was created by the Act of Union, which lasted until the creation of the Dominion of Canada in 1867.
Frye on the “anarchist tradition” in Canada in a 1969 interview, “CRTC Guru”:
Frye: There are other things in the Canadian tradition that are worth thinking about. Thirty years ago [in the 1930s] the great radical movement was international Communism, which took no hold in Canada at all. There were Marxist poets, there were no Marxist painters… The radical movement of our time is anarchist and that means that it’s local and separate and breaks down into small units. That’s our tradition and that’s our genius. Think of Toronto and Montreal (I know Toronto better than Montreal, but I think the same is true of both cities): after the Second World War, we took in displaced persons from Europe to something like one-quarter to one-fifth of the population. In Toronto in 1949, one out of every five people had been there less than a year. We have not had race riots,we have not had ethnic riots, we have not had the tremendous pressures and collisions that they’ve had in American cities. Because Canada is naturally anarchist, these people settle down into their own communities; they work with other communities and the whole pattern of life fits it. I do think we have to keep a very wide open and sympathetic eye towards radical movements in Canada, because they will be of the anarchist kind and they will be of a kind of energy that we could help liberate. (CW 24, 92)