Monthly Archives: January 2011

Fabian Society

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On this date in 1884 the Fabian Society was founded.

Frye on the influence of the Fabian Society on G. B. Shaw in “The Writer as Prophet”:

At first, of course, Shaw was handicapped by his lack of knowledge of life: when he started in, he really didn’t know anything except the fact that he wanted to write.  He educated himself, partly by reading in the British Museum, partly by going out in the evenings to all sorts of debating societies and discussion groups.  In the course of this he decided that the only way to get any concrete knowledge of the world he lived in was to study economics.  He read Karl Marx and became a socialist, though never a Marxist.  In May 1884, he dropped in on a tiny discussion group, five months old, called the Fabian Society, which proposed to bring socialism to England by constitutional means.  The minutes for that evening record that the meeting was made memorable by the first appearance of Mr. Bernard Shaw.  The note is in Shaw’s handwriting.  Shaw liked the Fabian Society, because its members didn’t take themselves quite as seriously as some of the others, and he persuaded a young friend of his named Sidney Webb to join it.  Sidney Webb brought in others, including the brilliant woman who became Beatrice Webb, and the Fabian Society started one of the greatest political movements of modern times, a movement which has already changed the history of the world and is by no means finished yet.  It was through the working of the Fabian Society that Shaw learned enough about modern life to become a great dramatist.  For years he slugged away writing pamphlets and making speeches, serving on vestry boards and municipal councils; and when he began to write plays about the conditions of life in Victorian society, he knew what he was talking about.  (CW 10, 177)

Apple

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkv6VwWEZyg

The death of HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

On this date in 1977 Apple Computers was incorporated.

Frye in Notes 54.2:

I’ve been reading a book about computers, full of very muddled arguments about whether a machine can be said to think or have intelligence.  The difference between a mechanism and an organism is not one of intelligence but of will.  An automobile can run faster than a human being can, but in itself has no will to do so: it will sit rusting in a garage indefinitely without the slightest sign of impatience.  There’s no reason why man should not develop machines that can reproduce every activity of the human brain on a vastly higher level of speed and efficiency.  But nobody has yet come up with a computer that wanted to do these things on its own: as will, so far, every machine is an expression of the will of its makers.  In the Clarke-Kubrick movie 2001, the computer Hal suddenly develops an autonomous will, a power of using its intelligence for its own ends.  That makes Hal a nightmare, of course, but it also makes him a fellow-creature: he’s now a he and not an it, and the depiction of his gradual destruction had a genuine pathos.  (CW 6, 682)

Isaac Asimov

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsaHz1rvaGw

Asimov’s “Science and Beauty,” first published in the Washington Post in 1979

Today is Isaac Asimov‘s birthday (1920-1992).

Frye in “Introduction to Design for Learning“:

Mathematics is often said to be the language of science, but it is a secondary language: all elementary understanding is verbal, and most of the understanding of it at any level continues to be so.  The verbal understanding of science, at least on the elementary level, is quite as much imaginative, quite as dependent on metaphor and analogy, as it is descriptive.  Here is a passage from The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science, by Isaac Asimov, which illustrates how metaphorical a writer must become when he has to explain science to scientific illiterates: “Cosmic rays bombarding atoms in the earth’s upper atmosphere knock out neutrons when they shatter the atoms; some of these neutrons bounce out of the atmosphere into space; they then decay into protons, and the charged protons are trapped by magnetic lines of force of the earth.”  This functional use of metaphor is one of the many reasons why no programme of study in English, however utilitarian its aims, can ever lose contact with English as literature.  (CW 7, 134)

January 1st 1949: “Overeating and underthinking”

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On New Year’s Eve 1948 Frye started his first new diary since 1942 because he felt he was “not working hard enough” and a diary, as he puts it in an extensive statement of purpose, would provide “more machinery” to get him working harder — which proves just how relative “working hard” really is.  That afternoon he went to see Laurence Oliver’s Hamlet, which, he says, suffers from a typical “subjective fallacy” to which this play is particularly prone, including “slash[ing] the soliloquies to pieces” and cutting Ophelia’s role to make her “just the ‘anima’ of Hamlet,” to the extent that “her mature intensity of feeling & her sharp sly humor” are no longer apparent.

On New Year’s Day, a Saturday, he makes this observation about the holiday itself: “New Year’s is a dull holiday: Christmas provides a definite ritual of things to do, but New Year’s is just a day to dither & dawdle through, overeating and underthinking.”  Given the ambitions Frye laid out for that year — including becoming more fluent in German, Italian and Latin — it must have been an especially dull day.