Monthly Archives: September 2010

Quote of the Day: “History repeats myth”

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

All of the Ned scenes from Groundhog Day

I’ve been keeping my eye out for the source of this quote from Frye: “History doesn’t repeat itself; history repeats myth.”

Thanks to Bob Denham’s Northrop Frye Unbuttoned, I now have the complete quote, which comes from one of the late notebooks and appears in Collected Works 5, 164:

Why do people call me “anti-historical”? I talk about myth, and it’s myth that’s anti-historical. It’s the counter-historical principle, just as metaphor is the counter-logical principle. History doesn’t repeat itself; history repeats myth. (It’s not simple repetition, though: it’s not a da capo aria but a theme with variations.) As I’ve often said, you never get logic in literature: what you get is what Susanne Langer would call virtual logic, a rhetorical illusion of logic. Similarly you never get history in literature: you get virtual history, history assimilated to myth.

Henry Purcell

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qjc0qug-1NQ

“An Evening Hymn”

Today is Henry Purcell‘s birthday (1659-1695).

Frye in his 1950 diary records listening to some Purcell on the radio and suddenly encountering something he did not expect to hear:

Stayed around indoors all day, listening to the radio, hearing some good music — a program from Halifax of recorded music featuring Purcell, Boyce & Arne. At six I heard a most curious noise over the radio purporting to come from some Professor named Frye who was talking about books. It’s the first time I’ve heard my voice, except for a few remarks in that Infeld programme. I would never have recognized it as my own voice: that nasal honking grating buzz-saw of a Middle-Western corncrake. I need a few years in England. The reading wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be, but Clyde Gilmour on movies was a hell of a lot better. (CW 8, 293)

Fox News North Update [Updated Further]

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Stephen Harper — in office by way of one in three Canadian voters — interviewed on Fox News Sunday

Here are a couple of articles to provide context for this story: Globe & Mail and Toronto Star.

For me, the elements that tell are as follows.

First, Stephen Harper and his then-press aide Kory Teneycke met secretly with Rupert Murdoch and his Fox News president Roger Ailes, a former Nixon/Reagan/Bush operative. The fact that the meeting was secret — that is, kept off the prime minister’s calendar and not freely disclosed — is disturbing, to say the least. The prime minister serves at the will of the people. Murdoch is a notorious plutocrat who in little more than a decade has laid waste to American television journalism. There was no reason for them to meet without public knowledge, unless of course the content of the meeting was intended to be kept from the public. In any event, the secrecy was deliberate, which raises legitimate concerns about the behavior and intentions of a public servant (which Harper apparently does not understand: that he is a servant of the people and serves only at their will).

Second, shortly after this meeting, Teneycke resigned his position in the prime minister’s office and joined Quebecor as the point man for the development of what conservatives themselves had been referring to as Fox News North.

Third, Quebecor was allowed to jump the line and applied for a Category 1 “must carry” cable license for which it was not qualified, and which the CRTC recently denied.

Fourth, there are indications that the Harper government has been offering inducements to CRTC chair Konrad Von Finckenstein to resign (something this prime minister has been known to do). Meanwhile the contract of the deputy chair of the CRTC — who is opposed to the application — has not been renewed.

Fifth, while the always-scowling-and-aggressively-shouting-down-his interlocutors-while-dismissing-any-opposition-as-“all-lies-from-start-to-finish” Kory Teneycke whines in public about “free speech” (as though the application for a broadcast license must be granted or be regarded as suppression of speech), Quebecor is once again being allowed to push to the head of the line and is seeking a “mandatory carry” license, which is very rarely granted and only after an extensive vetting process. Quebecor is doing this even though the most obvious option available to Sun TV now is simply to change its content to all-news and continue to broadcast while offering its product to an already available market. But Sun TV can’t turn a profit and the “mandatory carry” license would not only change that, it would also give the station broad access to a market that does not seem much interested in buying what it is selling. As John Doyle put it in the Globe & Mail the other day, Fox News North is only acceptable “if it’s being jammed down our throats.”

So why exactly should this application be granted? It’s not a free speech issue, it’s a regulatory issue. Sun TV already has a license. Why does it need another? It can simply change its content if it wishes to. The answer seems to be that it is gaming the system — evidently with the help of a sitting prime minister — in order to turn around a money-losing business while gaining deep access to the Canadian market for the sole purpose of propagating an aggressively rightward view of the world consistent with the Sun News brand. Quebecor, of course, has the right to make the application. But they have no right to expect the application will be granted just for the asking. And that is what they’re doing. They already have a broadcast license and a money-losing TV station. Why then is this our problem?

You

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We are doing so well that it exceeds expectation. We have doubled our readership since early March and it continues to rise steadily. By early spring we could expect to get 300 to 400 visits per day on a particularly good string of days. In the last month or so that has increased to 400 to 500 per day. This past week we seem to have broken very decisively through the 500 upper limit and are steadily moving toward 600 visits per day. That translates anywhere between 12,000 to 14,000 visits per month — and from all around the world too. The better news is that we are are still finding our community. These numbers can go still higher, I have no doubt.

So here’s what we’re looking for: byline correspondents who will post for us on a regular basis, whatever “regular” means to you: twice a week, once week, once every two weeks, once a month — or just anytime you’re in the mood and have reason to post. It doesn’t matter how often you post. It only matters that you post.

As you may have noticed I’ve come up with various strategies to ensure the blog portion of the site has daily content, and I (along with a solid core of devotees) try to write a number of posts per week on current events that bring Frye relevantly into play. Which suggests that all of this is engaging enough for our increasing readership. Plus more and more people are searching our more than one thousand archived posts while also delving deep into the Denham library, which is already an extraordinary resource that has only been around for nine months and will continue to grow. We have great plans for it.

The other thing we need therefore are a couple of technically proficient administrators who can work behind the scenes to care for the Denham library. And we definitely need an administrator for the site’s Facebook page to extend our outreach.

Either way, we need more content from more people, and we hope any number of you might come forward. We have a lot of readers. We’d like more of them to become contributors.

Leo Tolstoy

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XjN4DCNt6E

Excerpt from a documentary that includes extensive footage of Tolstoy in the last year of his life. Trailer for the movie “The Last Station” here.

Today is Leo Tolstoy‘s birthday (1828-1910).

Frye in “Giants in Time,” The Educated Imagination:

What produces the tolerance is the power of detachment in the imagination, where things are removed just out of reach of belief and action. Experience is nearly always commonplace; the present is not romantic in the way the past is, and ideals and great visions have a way of becoming shoddy in practical life. Literature reverses this process. When experience is removed from us a bit, as the experience of the Napoleonic war is in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, there’s a tremendous increase of dignity and exhileration. I mention Tolstoy because he’d be the last writer to try to glamorize the war itself, or pretend that its horror wasn’t horrible. There is an element of illusion even in War and Peace, but the illusion gives us a reality that isn’t in the actual experience of the war itself: the reality of proportion and perspective, of seeing what it’s all about, that only detachment can give. Literature helps to give us that detachment, and so do history and philosophy and science and everything else worth studying. But literature has something more to give peculiarly its own: something as absurd and impossible as the primitive magic it so closely resembles. (46-7)

Leni Riefenstahl

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yV28uGic5hs

From Olympia, (Riefenstahl’s documentary about the 1936 Berlin Olympics): the closing of the games.

On this date in 2003 German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl died (born 1902). Riefenstahl, of course, was the most artistically proficient of all Nazi filmmakers, providing the most memorable propaganda images of the Nazi state, and during her long life represented the problematical relationship between the artist and tyranny. (The excellent documentary, The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, here.)

Christopher Hitchens has noted that the default setting for social organization among humans seems to be fascism. To advance beyond such a state is difficult, rare and not to be taken for granted.

In the spring of 1943 Frye composed an unfinished, never published essay under the title, “The Present Condition of the World,” which includes some startling observations about the universal Fascist that remain disconcertingly relevant.

The point is all the more striking when we compare the Nazi psychology with our own. Nazi lynchings of Jews are matched by the Ku Klux Klan and the lynching of Negroes; and anti-Semitism itself has greatly increased over here since Hitler came to power, a clear indication that the Nazi persecutions of the Jews have aroused far more sneaking sympathy than contempt on this continent. German trumpetings of the superiority of Germans to all other people are obviously attempts to exorcise an inner demon of disbelief in it; to raise an earthquake and fire to roar down the still small voice of self-ridicule. The average Anglo-Saxon has an inner conviction of the superiority of his race and his institutions which is the despairing envy of the purple-faced bawling Nazi, and which the latter would give anything to possess. The American tendency to stampede under mass emotional pressure is as marked as that of the Germans. The labour record of the great German industrialists who backed Hitler can hardly be worse than that of Ford or the steel and coal capitalists here; nor is the willingness of the latter to support a would-be Fascist dictator less in evidence. The ferocity of capital and labour warfare and the prevalence of gangsterism and thuggery in politics, however bad in Germany, have significant parallels in America. In both countries there has been a very powerful but easily frightened and bamboozled middle class. The Germans have had less experience of democracy, but much of our democracy is a rationalization of oligarchy or the opportunity of the lobbyist and ward heeler. Given the right conditions, we could develop on this continent a Nazism of a fury compared to which that of the Germans would be, in American language, bush-league stuff. And if it has not occurred, and even if the danger of its occurring has perhaps passed its meridian, our escape is due to the anodyne of prosperity and to certain economic and geographical features in our favour, not to any special virtue in us, any innate love of liberty in our people, or any invincible power in our democratic institutions. With regard to the last, the general level of political education and insight is even lower here than in Germany before Hitler. American Fascists, or Defenders of American Democracy as they would doubtless call themselves, if in the first place they could achieve power, would find even less difficulty in rounding up and shooting the leaders of what organized resistance there would be than the Nazis had in Germany, where nearly half the population, in 1932, belonged to well-disciplined revolutionary parties. (CW 10, 216-17)

“Fox News North” and the “Left”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrTooDqY9pY

We received this comment this morning on the issue of the Sun TV News application for a broadcasting license:

Interesting how when it comes from the left they call it education and when it comes from the right they call it “hate propaganda speech.”

Education is disinterested. Ideology is not. That’s the distinction that matters here. While my politics lean heavily to the left, they also quickly become fluid and pragmatic when the consideration is what actually works.

My issue with “Fox News North” is not really a matter of left or right. It has to do with process, intent, and foreseeable consequences. The Harper government is gaming the system, facilitating private interests we have a right to be skeptical about and wary of, and it is clearly pushing this application along for primarily ideological reasons. Conservatives themselves have called this project “Fox News North” for some time now (although they have taken to pretending they haven’t), and, frankly, we don’t need a Fox News, there’s no significant demand for a Fox News, and our system for licensing ought not to be abused to foist a Fox News upon us. Just because Quebecor is making an application, why would it follow that it must be granted?

Kory Teneycke — former press aide to Harper and now VP for development at Quebecor — makes a regular habit of saying unpleasant things in an aggressive way, which is no small matter when you’re moneyed and have powerful interests behind you. When he called into question Margaret Atwood’s patriotism (an “issue” then taken up by the Sun chain of newspapers and others, creating the “echo chamber” effect that now drowns out discourse in the U.S.), I took it as a sign of things to come.

There is a case to be made here. And so I do. In this instance, I simply want the CRTC to be able to do its mandated job without political pressure from the Harper government or intimidation by the likes of Kory Teneycke.

Sign the Petition to Support the CRTC and Stop Fox News North! [Updated]

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Sign here to stop the Harper-Mulroney-Quebecor axis from imposing a politicized rightwing “mandatory access” news channel on cable service providers.

[Update]

CRTC Chair Konrad von Finckenstein has already refused Sun TV’s application for a “must carry” license because it didn’t meet the necessary requirements, but parent company Quebecor is still pressing a fast track application that would give it “mandatory access” status.

The Harper government is facilitating the process, and is apparently trying to drive von Finckenstein from office in order to put someone more amenable in place.

The next CRTC hearing on the matter is November 19th.

Read the Avaaz mass email in an earlier post here.

Sign the petition to “Stop Fox News North” here.

Gloriana

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38qLFOQFTB4&feature=related

Helen Mirren as Elizabeth delivering her famous speech to the troops at Tilbury as the Spanish Armada approached, 19 August 1588.

Today is the birthday of Elizabeth I of England (1533-1603).

Frye in Notebook 8 reflects on the consequences of the defining moment of the Elizabethan Age upon Elizabethan culture:

Before the Armada the best brains, Spenser and Sidney, thought in terms of a Protestant United Front, hence the Duc d’Alencon business. Spenser never really got over this stage. The Armada itself shifted the emphasis: true, it had sailed with the Pope’s blessing to destroy a heretic kingdom, but it had banked heavily on a religious revolution in England, & it must have been difficult for the Protestants who had lived through that hideous period to forget that the Catholics had turned out to fight for England & had thereby placed their religious liberties in the hands of Elizabeth. So it seems probable that the theatre represented a Catholic-Anglican truce against Puritans, the idea being that Protestantism had come not to destroy but to fulfill Catholicism by allegorizing its literalism, as in Spenser. This truce, if it existed, could hardly have lasted long after the Gunpowder Plot. Then a strong anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic middle-class nationalism comes up (Middleton, B & F [Beaumont and Fletcher]); the king-fool appears more frequently, possibly because bourgeois insistence on plain sense is breaking down the allegorical synthesis based on the King & Queen; but I think the theatre stands fundamentally for the national establishment. Cassius, the Puritan revolutionary, love not plays & hears no music. Aramado in L.L. is the Armada: the date means the word would irresistibly suggest that to an audience. (CW 20, 110)

Frye on Elizabeth, the Armada and myth in The Secular Scripture:

Myths are usually assumed to be true, stories about what really happened. But truth is not the central basis for distinguishing the mythical from the fabulous: it is a certain quality of importance or authority of the community that marks the myth, not truth as such. The anxiety of society, when it urges the authority of a myth and the necessity of believing it, seems to be less to proclaim its truth than to prevent anyone from questioning it. Thus the Christian myth of providence, after a battle, is often invoked by the winning side in a way which makes its truth or secondary importance. The storm that wrecked the Spanish Armada was a providential event to the English, but a natural event to the Spaniards. Elizabeth I issued a medal quoting the Psalms, “God breathed with his winds, and they were scattered”; Philip of Spain said to the survivors, “I sent you forth to fight with men, not with the elements.” (CW 18, 14-15)

Support the CRTC; Stop Fox News North

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Eva Kershner has forwarded to us this mass circulation email regarding the petition in support of CRTC Chair Konrad Von Finckenstein. Finckenstein is resisting pressure from the Harper government to license “Fox News North” as a “mandatory access” rightwing cable news channel.

Dear friends,

[1]
PRIME MINISTER HARPER IS TRYING TO FORCE AMERICAN-STYLE HATE MEDIA ON
CANADA. Sign the petition to support CRTC CHAIR KONRAD VON
FINCKENSTEIN (above) and encourage him to protect Canadians from a
“Fox News North” channel funded by /our own cable TV fees:/

[2]

Prime Minister HARPER IS TRYING TO PUSH AMERICAN-STYLE HATE MEDIA
ONTO OUR AIRWAVES, and make us all pay for it.

HIS PLAN IS TO CREATE A “FOX NEWS NORTH” to mimic the kind of
HATE-FILLED PROPAGANDA with which Fox News has poisoned U.S.
politics. The channel will be run by Harper’s former top aide and
will be FUNDED WITH MONEY FROM OUR CABLE TV FEES!

ONE MAN STANDS IN THE WAY OF THIS NIGHTMARE — the Chairman of
Canada’s Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission Konrad
von Finckenstein. He’s rejected the plan as a violation of CRTC
policies, so now HARPER IS TRYING TO GET HIM OUT OF THE JOB. LET’S
URGENTLY SEND A MASSIVE WAVE OF PUBLIC SUPPORT TO VON FINCKENSTEIN,
with 100,000 Canadians encouraging him to keep standing up for
Canada, and standing firm against Harper’s pressure. Sign the
petition below and forward this email to everyone — we’ll publish
FULL PAGE ADS IN CANADIAN PAPERS WHEN WE REACH 100,000:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/no_fox_news_canada/?vl[3]

HARPER HATCHED HIS SCHEME IN A SECRET LUNCH LAST YEAR WITH
MEDIA-MOGUL RUPERT MURDOCH, the owner of Fox News. Harper’s top aide
Kory Teneycke also came to the lunch, and then left the government to
head up Sun Newspapers and the new “Fox News North”.

Fox News fuels hate. While constantly claiming to be “fair” and
“balanced”, it allows hysterical anchors like Glenn Beck to
compare Obama to “Lucifer” and “Hitler”. Bill O’Reilly, another
anchor, has threatened to boycott Canada, and ANNE COULTER SAYS
CANADA IS “LUCKY THE US ALLOWS IT TO EXIST ON THE SAME
CONTINENT.” The network has calculatingly spawned the tea party
movement in the US, a mobilisation of the fringe right which
threatens violence upon its opponents and wears guns to political
rallies.

This is a fight for the soul of Canadian democracy. Our media is not
perfect, but a ‘news’ network that slavishly serves a political
agenda through mass manipulation and fear threatens the fabric of our
democratic society.

THE CRTC IS PART OF OUR DEMOCRACY — it was made an independent
commission precisely in order to protect against this kind of
government manipulation of the media. HARPER KNOWS THAT HE MUST BULLY
HIS WAY THROUGH THIS INSTITUTION in order to create “Fox News North”.
And there are dark rumours in Ottawa that if von Finckenstein will
not leave his job, Harper will simply force him to give in. KONRAD
VON FINCKENSTEIN IS UPHOLDING THE BEST TRADITION OF CANADIAN
DEMOCRACY and civil service in the face of a full scale attack on
that tradition. LET’S SHOW HIM, AND HARPER, THAT CANADA STANDS WITH
HIM.

http://www.avaaz.org/en/no_fox_news_canada/?vl[4]

“Fox News North” is Harper’s long term strategy to make radical
conservatism the political centre in Canada, tearing down the country
we love to make us look like the U.S. Thankfully, Konrad von
Finckenstein and the CRTC are standing in his way — let’s stand with
them.

With hope,

Ricken, Emma, Iain, Laryn and the rest of the Avaaz team

Sources:

Globe and Mail, “Is Harper set to move against the CRTC?”:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/lawrence-martin/is-stephen-harper-set-to-move-against-the-crtc/article1677632/[5]

CBC, “The absolute last thing this country needs”:

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/06/10/f-vp-newman.html#socialcomments#ixzz0r6MC4p46[6]

Globe and Mail, CRTC refuses Sun TV’s bid for preferred status on
dial:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/crtc-refuses-sun-tvs-bid-for-preferred-status-on-dial/article1641654/[7]

The Star, “Harper’s foxy luncheon”:

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/851510–mcquaig-harper-s-foxy-luncheon[8]

Mediaite, “Canada and Ann Coulter: a volatile relationship”:
http://www.mediaite.com/online/canada-ann-coulter-colleges/[9]

Media Matters, “Glenn Beck compares Obama to Lucifer”:
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201008040051[10]

Media Matters, “Glenn Beck smears Obama’s 11 year old
daughter”:
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201005280025[11]

The Examiner: “Bill O’Reilly again confuses facts about Canadian
health care system”:

http://www.examiner.com/political-buzz-in-national/video-bill-o-reilly-again-confuses-facts-about-canadian-health-care-system[12]

SUPPORT THE AVAAZ COMMUNITY! We’re entirely funded by donations and
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