Harvey Pekar, author for 34 years of American Splendor, died today at the age of 70. Thanks to pioneers like Pekar, what were once comic books are now “graphic novels.”
A poignant little clip from the 2003 movie, American Splendor, after the jump.
On this date Mazo de la Roche died (1879-1961).
Frye in “English Canadian Literature, 1929-1954”:
The Canadian novelist who is perhaps best known outside Canada is Mazo de la Roche, whose long “Jalna” series of stories began in 1927. The formidable familiy with which these books deal is well representative of the colonial phase of Canadian development, and of the ability of well-to-do families during that phase to live apart from, and almost in defiance of, the real life of the nation around them. (CW 12, 248)
In “View of Canada”:
And so we developed that curious streak of anxiety that distinguishes us from other North Americans. Which we kept trying to sweep under the carpet . . . In the popular Jalna books, Mazo de la Roche manages to make life in Canada seem a pastoral idyll. The Whiteoaks are a British county family transplanted to the colonies. (ibid., 470)
Today is Harold Bloom’s birthday (born 1930).
Bloom has said a lot about Frye over the years, not all of it good or even consistent, but today let’s go with this one:
Frye is surely the major literary critic in the English language . . . . a kind of Miltonic figure. He is certainly the largest and most crucial critic in the English language since the divine Walter [Pater] and the divine Oscar [Wilde]; he really is that good.
Cited in Robert D. Denham, Northrop Frye Unbuttoned (309).
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Frye in a letter to Bloom dated 23 January 1969, responding to Bloom’s still developing theory about the “anxiety of influence”:
You don’t say much about the general direction or scope of your book. If you mean influence in the more literal sense of the transmission of thought and imagery and the like from an earlier poet to later one, I should think that this was simply something that happens, and might be a source either of anxiety or of release from it, depending on circumstances and temperament. But of course it is true that a great poet’s maturity bring with it a growing sense of isolation, of the kind one feels in Yeats’s Last Poems, Stevens’ The Rock, and perhaps even Blake’s Job series. I should very much like to hear more about the book and about your progress with it. (Northrop Frye, Selected Letters, 1934-1991, edited by Robert D. Denham, 101)
Frye in a letter to John E. Grant dated 20 May 1975, responding to Grant’s apprehensions about Bloom’s A Map of Misreading:
I am disappointed with Harold’s book: it seems to me such a perverse application of a quite sound critical principle. You are quite right using the word “anxieties” about him: I’m afraid they’re almost on the point of taking him over. (Selected Letters, 174)
Frye in a letter to Morton D. Paley dated 17 January 1978:
Thanks very much for your offprint of your review of Harold Bloom. I hope it isn’t too arrogant for me to think that I represent Bloom’s chief anxiety of influence; in any case he seems to me to be increasingly isolating himself from the general critical condition, and I find his books progressively less rewarding. (Selected Letters, 201)
Despite this growing misgiving, however, Frye recommended Bloom for the MacArthur Fellowship (otherwise known at the “genius grant”), which Bloom received in 1985. (Selected Letters, 262)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvWfElFuFnM
July 10th, 2010, day 82
From the Associated Press:
NEW ORLEANS — Robotic submarines removed the cap from the gushing well in the Gulf of Mexico on Saturday, beginning a period of at least two days when oil will flow freely into the sea [depicted in the video above].
It’s the first step in placing a tighter dome that is supposed to funnel more oil to collection ships on the surface a mile above. If all goes according to plan, the tandem of the tighter cap and the surface ships could keep all the oil from polluting the fragile Gulf as soon as Monday.
BP spokesman Mark Proegler said the old cap was removed at 12:37 p.m. CDT on Saturday.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPcSIN77yqU
Joy Division, “Love Will Tear Us Apart Again”
It’s no secret what the Brits did for us musically in the 60s and 70s. But it’s important to remember also what they were doing for us in the 80s, which was to push at the boundaries of pop music in all directions. Joy Division (above), who begat New Order, being a major case in point. (I opted for a high quality audio version of the song with footage from the film about Ian Curtis, Control. You can see the original band video with, unfortunately, inferior sound quality, here.)
And it’s only gotten worse, thanks to — you guessed it — the unrelenting trend of tax cuts for the richest of the rich:
The gap between the wealthiest Americans and middle- and working-class Americans has more than tripled in the past three decades, according to a June 25 report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
New data show that the gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest parts of the population in 2007 was the highest it’s been in 80 years, while the share of income going to the middle one-fifth of Americans shrank to its lowest level ever.
The CBPP report attributes the widening of this gap partly to Bush Administration tax cuts, which primarily benefited the wealthy. Of the $1.7 trillion in tax cuts taxpayers received through 2008, high-income households received by far the largest — not only in amount but also as a percentage of income — which shifted the concentration of after-tax income toward the top of the spectrum. (From The Huffington Post)
Now that’s redistribution of wealth! As Nouriel Roubini has noted, “We have invented socialism for the rich.”
The Canadian trend in income disparity is virtually identical.
In related news, 1 in 7 wealthy homeowners are in default or seriously behind in payments for at least one of their mortgages, which is by far the highest of any cohort: they’re simply walking away from what they consider to be a bad investment. So much for the vicious right-wing meme that the financial crisis was caused by poor (i.e. non-white) people taking out mortgages on homes they ought never to have had.
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Frye in “The Meeting of Past and Future in William Morris”:
We said that culture seems to develop spatially in the opposite direction from political and economic movements. The latter centralize and the former decentralize. (CW 17, 321)
So few words, so much truth. Our culture is remarkable for its lively decentralization (whose proliferating hybridization of course drives retrograde conservatives nuts — a very good sign that it’s the right way to go), while at the same time we see the unmistakable emergence of “plutonomy”: the economic and political domination of society by the few. As an old boss of mine liked to intone: “This has gotta cease.”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlsF_ZLpNHY
Alice interviewed at the Vancouver International Authors’ Festival in October 2009 on the occasion of the publication of her latest collection of stories, Too Much Happiness.
Today is Alice Munro‘s 79th birthday.
Frye in “Culture and Society in Ontario, 1784-1984”:
….[T]he [Bildungsroman] theme seems to have an unusual intensity for Ontario writers: the best and most skillful of them, including Robertson Davies and Alice Munro, continue to employ a great deal of what is essentially the Stephen Leacock Mariposa theme, however different in tone. Most such books take us from the first to the second birth of the central character. Childhood and adolescence are passed in a small town or village, then a final initiation, often a sexual one, marks the entry into a more complex social contract. (CW 12, 621)
In any case, as we saw, prose in Ontario began with the documentary realism of journals and memoirs, and when fiction developed, that was the tradition it recaptured. Documents, when not government reports, tend to have short units, and the fact may account for the curious ascendancy in Canadian fiction of the novel which consists of sequence of interrelated short stories. This form is the favorite of Alice Munro, and reaches a dazzling technical virtuosity in Lives of Girls and Women. (ibid., 624)
In “‘Condominium Mentality’ in CanLit,” an interview with the University of Toronto Bulletin, February 1990:
O’Brien: Which Canadian writers are you most enthusiastic about?
Frye: The obvious people: Peggy Atwood, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, Timothy Findlay, Mordecai Richler, . . . especially Alice Munro, who seems to be a twentieth-century Jane Austen. (CW 24, 1037)
Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” (1999) in the New Yorker here.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C570byQCLpI
Mighty Mouse
Andy Kaufman died of cancer 26 years ago at the tragically young age of 35. These performances are more than 30 years old but they still retain their liberating strangeness: mime-singing the refrain from a Mighty Mouse record, reading The Great Gatsby to an audience that doesn’t want to be read The Great Gatsby, and conducting a variety show in a sort of Mediterranean/Aegean gibberish, and then leading his audience through a sing-along in the same language.
Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe of Upper Canada, anti-slavery advocate
On this date in 1793, the Act Against Slavery was passed in Upper Canada (present day Ontario), also prohibiting the importation of slaves into Lower Canada (present day Quebec). This was a full fourteen years before the British Empire outlawed the slave trade, forty years before it outlawed slavery altogether, and sixty-nine years before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF2rEm_9KO4
Four minutes and eighteen seconds of nonsensical vocables from Sarah Palin. On her relevant experience in foreign affairs: “Our next door neighbors are foreign countries are in the state I’m executive of [sic] . . . Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of America. Where do they go?”
“[W]e have to realize that the US no longer has a truly adversarial press. It has a commercial press that is entirely driven by fear of losing readers and/or viewers. Remember that the MSM allowed Palin – then a total unknown – to go an entire campaign without an open press conference. She knows they’re patsies. She’s much less afraid of them than they are of her. And rightly so.” Andrew Sullivan
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Frye in “The Renaissance of Books” (1973) comparing the commercial interests of the “free” press with the dictatorial control of Orwell’s telescreen in 1984:
In the democracies, of course, radio and television reflect the economic anxieties of selling and making profits through consumer goods rather than the political anxieties of censorship and thought control, but the cultural consequences have many parallels. Newspapers also become one-way streets in proportion to their preoccupation with headlines and deadlines: however, the competition of television is now forcing them to becomes something more like journals of opinion. (CW 11, 154)
Roger Ailes, president of Fox News in January: “I’m not in politics. I’m in ratings. We’re winning.”