Monthly Archives: November 2010

Quote of the Day II: Rush Limbaugh, Dessert, and Liberal Lies

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To insanity and beyond.  This used to be an SNL skit.  Now it’s real life.  Rush Limbaugh advises his listeners:

What have I told you about diet and exercise?  Exercise is irrelevant…. “How do you know all this?”  One of the reasons I know what I know is that I know liberals, and I know liberals lie, and if Michelle Obama’s gonna be out there ripping into “food desserts” and saying, “This is why people are fat,” I know it’s not true.  “Rush, do you really believe that? It’s that simple to you, liberals lie?”  Yes, it is, folks.  Once you learn that, once you come to grips with that, once you accept that, the rest is easy.  Very, very simple.  Now, my doctor has never told me to restrict any intake of salt, but if he did, I wouldn’t.  I’d just spend more time in the steam or the sauna sweating it out.

(Via the Daily Dish)

Quote of the Day: “The Big Lie”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC6whPX4s7s

Extra!  Extra!  Read all about it!  Barack Obama’s trip to India is costing 200 million dollars a day!!

Libertarian conservative Andrew Sullivan in a post today characterizes the last two years as the “era of the Big Lie.”  It’s no secret who’s to blame.

Money quote:

It seems to me that the last year or so in America’s political culture has represented the triumph of untruth. And the untruth was propagated by a deliberate, simple and systemic campaign to kill Obama’s presidency in its crib. Emergency measures in a near-unprecedented economic collapse – the bank bailout, the auto-bailout, the stimulus – were described by the right as ideological moves of choice, when they were, in fact, pragmatic moves of necessity. The increasingly effective isolation of Iran’s regime – and destruction of its legitimacy from within – was portrayed as a function of Obama’s weakness, rather than his strength. The health insurance reform – almost identical to Romney’s, to the right of the Clintons in 1993, costed to reduce the deficit, without a public option, and with millions more customers for the insurance and drug companies – was turned into a socialist government take-over.

Every one of these moves could be criticized in many ways. What cannot be done honestly, in my view, is to create a narrative from all of them to describe Obama as an anti-American hyper-leftist, spending the US into oblivion. But since this seems to be the only shred of thinking left on the right (exacerbated by the justified flight of the educated classes from a party that is now openly contemptuous of learning), it became a familiar refrain – pummeled into our heads day and night by talk radio and Fox. If you think I’m exaggerating, try the following thought experiment.

If a black Republican president had come in, helped turn around the banking and auto industries (at a small profit!), insured millions through the private sector while cutting Medicare, overseen a sharp decline in illegal immigration, ramped up the war in Afghanistan, reinstituted pay-as-you go in the Congress, set up a debt commission to offer hard choices for future debt reduction, and seen private sector job growth outstrip the public sector’s in a slow but dogged recovery, somehow I don’t think that Republican would be regarded as a socialist.

Joseph Goebbels infamously observed, “The bigger the lie, the more likely it will be believed.”  The RNC/FNC conglomerate seems to be betting on that.

Frye on fascism and oligarchy:

Fascism is an oligarchic conspiracy against the open-class system, deriving its real power from the big oligarchs and its mass support from would-be oligarchs, the “independent” (i.e. unsuccessful) entrepreneurs.  (CW 11, 252)

This is apparently how free people become eager accomplices in their own enslavement.

An earlier post, “Mendocracy,” here.

Ivan Turgenev

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Today is Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev‘s birthday (1818-1880).

Frye on Russian literary language in an interview with Matthew Fraser, “Northrop Frye: Signifying Everything”:

Fraser: The language of literature is often very different from the common spoken language of a country.  For example in Russia, because of the strong influence of Pushkin, the literary language is divorced from spoken Russian.  In North America, however, the literary language is virtually the same as our spoken language.  Why do you think that in some countries there is such a gap between literary and spoken language, and in other countries there is no difference at all?

Frye: I think that with Russia it has something to do with the rather late development of their literature.  And of course there are other countries like Norway where the literary language is almost an invented language.  I think that the gap between literary language and ordinary spoke language is a very unhealthy thing, especially in fiction where the dialogue, at any rate, has to capture the spoken word.  I don’t know how countries get along if there is too great a gap between literary language and the colloquial language, but certainly in North America that battle was fought out as early as Huckleberry Finn, where it was clear that the language spoken by the people is the literary language as well.

Teaching with “The Secular Scripture”

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Many readers of Frye have admitted they have a “preferred” book, or one that influenced them more than any other.  If I recall correctly, Michael Dolzani was most influenced by Fearful Symmetry; Bob Denham by Anatomy of Criticism; Michael Happy by The Educated Imagination; Joe Adamson by The Secular Scripture; and Eva Kushner by The Critical Path.  Indeed, we all appear to have that one moment in reading Frye when suddenly it all made sense.  In my own case, I had always thought it was Anatomy of Criticism, but recently I have been thinking more and more about The Secular Scripture.

Over this past term I have had the great pleasure of teaching with Frye’s The Secular Scripture, and my students have, for the most part I think, enjoyed engaging with it.  However, we have also taken Frye out of his comfort zone.  The course I teach considers “Race and Ethnicity in Latin American Narrative” (this is the official course title).  But I tailored the course to address one of my own preferred area of study, romance novels.  Frye, not surprisingly, seems most comfortable when dealing with romance in its European context, but Latin American romance novels appear to be beyond his purview.

When I began to speak about romance, I went for the obvious question: How many of you have read Twilight or Harlequin romances? — which, of course, many of them had.  I then got them to read theoretical writings on the romance, particularly The Secular Scripture, which became our guide to romance.  They also read articles or chapters by other theorists writing on romance, including writing on Latin America: Pamela Regis, Lois Parkinson Zamora, Doris Sommer, Jean Franco, and others (all of whom, interestingly enough, engage with Frye).

Doris Sommer, for instance, remarked in her book Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America, that:

The Latin American elite wanted to modernize and to prosper, yes; but it wanted at the same time to retain the practically feudal privilege it had inherited from colonial times. Logically, a functioning aristocracy by any name might prefer to represent itself in the incorruptibly ideal terms that Northrop Frye finds characteristic of romance, ‘the structural core of all fiction.’ In Latin America’s newly won bourgeois excess, Frye’s heroic heroes, villainous villains, and beautiful heroines of romance are dislodged, unfixed. They cross class, gender, and racial stereotypes in ways unspeakable for European romance. Yet Frye’s observations about masculine and feminine ideals here are to the point; they point backward to medieval quest-romances where victory meant restored fertility, the union of male and female heroes. (48-49)

I will admit here that I spent many pages of a now-discarded dissertation arguing against Doris Sommer’s understanding of Frye.  It is my belief that we can still work with Frye’s theories of romance, and this is precisely what I have endeavoured to show in the course I am teaching.  Frye did not read Latin American romances, but his theory if applicable to the study of world literature should translate to any given context.

My students and I will have worked through four novels in our course when we conclude at the end of the month.  We have found that Frye’s archetypes do fit well into the study of romance in its canonical and popular senses.  Could Frye have predicted some of the specifics of Latin American romance?  No, he couldn’t, not any more than he could address the latest manifestations of the genre in the twenty-first century.  But, his model still holds true for the bulk of these romances.

Frye’s The Secular Scripture is, as with most of his books, very teachable and very user-friendly to the student of genre.  My students are now preparing to write term papers, which must attend to The Secular Scripture, and I eagarly wait to read their ideas and their approaches to the Latin American Romance with the assistance of Frye.

Duns Scotus

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On this date in 1308, the scholastic theologian and philosopher Duns Scotus died.

In October 1936, Frye, newly ensconced at Merton College, Oxford, wrote Helen about the college legend that the ghost of Duns Scotus haunted his room:

Apparently the tradition I think I mentioned, that the ghost of Duns Scotus haunts this room and the one above it as well as the library (which is really an extension of my staircase) is quite well-known and of some standing.  He has a long and cold way to come, as he’s buried in Cologne, but I can see where the legend of his haunting the library would originate: Merton had the best library in England during the Middle Ages and all of Scotus would be here, being the greatest English scholastic and a Merton man.  Then the Reformation came, this library was plundered, the manuscripts torn to pieces and thrown into the quad, and of all authors the one singled out for especial destruction was Scotus.  I asked my scout if he had ever sensed a ghost on this staircase, and he said no, but various people have put on surplices and awakened people by putting cold hands on them.

Quote of the Day: “Mendocracy”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3hMODMyed8

In just 38 seconds you can witness the way Fox News cuts and pastes its lies together

Rick Perlstein explains how a mendocracy works:

Political scientists are going crazy crunching the numbers to uncover the skeleton key to understanding the Republican victory last Tuesday.

But the only number that matters is the one demonstrating that by a two-to-one margin likely voters thought their taxes had gone up, when, for almost all of them, they had actually gone down. Republican politicians, and conservative commentators, told them Barack Obama was a tax-mad lunatic. They lied. The mainstream media did not do their job and correct them. The White House was too polite—”civil,” just like Obama promised—to say much. So people believed the lie. From this all else follows.

Frye cites Orwell on the social degradation of language in “The Primary Necessities of Existence”:

Then there are various epidemics sweeping over society which use unintelligibility as a weapon to preserve the present power structure.  By making things as unintelligible as possible, to as many people as possible, you can hold the present power structure together.  Understanding and articulateness lead to its destruction.  This is the kind of thing George Orwell was talking about, not just in 1984, but in all his work on language.  The kernel of everything reactionary and tyrannical in society is the impoverishment of the means of verbal communication.  The vast majority of things that we hear today are prejudices and cliches, simply verbal formulas that have no thought behind them but are put up as a pretence of thinking.  It is not until we realize these things conceal meaning, rather than reveal it, that we can begin to develop our own powers of articulateness. (CW 12, 747)

Joni Mitchell

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCM–DWLfRk

“Car on the Hill” from Court and Spark

Today is Joni Mitchell‘s birthday (b. 1943)

Sometimes you forget just how good she is.  But you remember soon enough.  Yes, she’s a Canadian girl from the prairies, and she never seems to lose sight of that, but she also helped to perfect the lush California sound of the 1970s with Court and Spark.

After the jump a live BBC performance of “All I Want” from her album Blue.

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