httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_uzs9jK-f4
Elizabeth Taylor died yesterday, and it’s Tennessee Williams’s centenary Saturday. Above is a scene from Suddenly, Last Summer.
Taylor/Williams
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Monthly Archives: March 2011
Quote of the Day: “They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits”
It looks like the government will be defeated this week on a budget vote and an election called.
We are running a $40 billion deficit this year. This will be cited at some unspecified time to necessitate cuts in social spending. That’s playbook stuff. But the problem is that the Harper government is pushing for a further $6 billion in corporate tax cuts, even though Canada already has one of the lowest corporate tax rates in the OECD.
Moreover, the Harper government also intends to purchase $30 billion worth of F-35 jet interceptors, even though they are not suited to either our foreign or domestic military needs. It isn’t, of course, an increasingly besieged public that will benefit by these policies. The Harper government has decided it somehow can’t afford substantial longterm increases in spending for education and health care, but that it can afford tens of billions of dollars worth of corporate welfare for Lockheed-Martin, while also further reducing already low corporate tax rates.
Here are a couple of representative observations from the patron saint of laissez-faire capitalists, Adam Smith, that might surprise some who consider themselves Smith-schooled laissez-faire capitalists:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.
For the record, Smith was for high wages, supported the right of labor to organize, and, as the quotes above suggest, understood very well the plutocratic disposition of unrestrained commercial interests. Corporate tax cuts are not among the laws of nature. They do not even necessarily make for sound economic policy.
As promised in an earlier post, we will be citing Frye extensively on Canadian history, culture and political traditions as the election unfolds.
(Chart from The Ottawa Citizen)
Stendhal
Today is Stendhal‘s birthday (1783-1842).
From “Towards a Theory of Cultural History”:
The chief difference between the comedy of the Renaissance and the realistic period is that the resolution of the latter more frequently involves a social promotion, and, like pathos, tends to be an individual achievement. More sophisticated writers of low mimetic comedy often present the same success story with the moral ambiguities that we have found in Aristophanes. In Balzac or Stendhal a clever and ruthless scoundrel may achieve the same kind of success as the virtuous heroes of Samuel Smiles and Horatio Alger. Thus the comic counterpart of the alazon seems to be the clever, likable, unprincipled picaro of the picaresque novel. (CW 21, 161)
New Article: “Northrop Frye and Soren Kierkegaard”
Here is a gem from our own Bob Denham, a remarkable piece on “Northrop Frye and Soren Kierkegaard.” It is the latest piece of peer reviewed scholarship we have posted in the journal. I am sure readers will find it of the greatest interest. Two main pivots of Frye’s complex thinking about the metaliterary – creative repetition and primary concern – are beautifully teased out and developed here. As only he can do, Bob shows in detail the development of these concepts from their very first appearance in Frye’s writings, including of course his notebooks and diaries, to their fullest fruition at the end of his career. The article bears more than one reading to appreciate the full effect. I am delighted to say that there is more to come from Bob on Frye and his relationship to other thinkers. It occurred to me today what a good job I have here: I get to read papers about Northrop Frye written by Bob Denham.
We expect Bob’s next paper to be “Northrop Frye and Aristotle,” and hope to have it posted soon.
We also wish to thank Clayton Chrusch for his time and effort to format the charts that appear in the paper. It takes a fair amount of work to get them looking so good. He is always unfailingly our good friend and generous colleague.
Frye Festival Newsletter
You can read March’s Frye Festival Newsletter here.
Johann Sebastian Bach
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5Mv3T3ANjY
Glenn Gould playing Fugue of Praeludium No.22 in B flat minor (BWV 891) from “The Well-Tempered Clavier”
Today is Bach‘s birthday (1685-1750).
Frye in “The Teacher’s Source of Authority”:
It is only when we get to the point of having some sense of having the total subject in our minds that we begin to recognize a source of authority beyond that, of the poet or the creative artist whose work we are studying. If we are listening to music, let us say, on the level of Bach or Mozart, the response keeps shifting from the personal to the impersonal. On the one hand we feel this is Bach, that it couldn’t possibly be anyone else. On the other hand, there are moments when Bach disappears, and what we feel is; this is the voice of music itself; this is what music was created to say. At that level, we are not so much hearing the music as recognizing it. (CW 7, 503)
Bob Denham’s “Frye and…” Series
We are pleased to announce that our journal will be publishing a series of essays by Bob Denham on Frye and some of the great thinkers whose influence on his work has not yet been fully surveyed.
Bob’s first essay is “Northrop Frye and Soren Kiekegard,” which will be posted tomorrow with an introduction by Joe Adamson.
To follow are “Northrop Frye and Aristotle,” “Northrop Frye and Longinus,” and “Northrop Frye and Giordano Bruno.” You can be sure that we’ll let you know when they go up.
Here is the opening paragraph of “Frye and Kierkegaard”:
The roots of Frye’s expansive vision of culture have often been remarked. Blake and the Bible are obviously central to the development of his ideas, and much has been written about Frye’s debts to both. Much has been written as well about other significant influences on Frye: Nella Cotrupi’s book on Frye and Vico, Glen Gill’s study of Frye and twentieth‑century mythographers (Eliade, Jung, and others), Ford Russell’s account of the influence of Spengler, Frazer, and Cassirer on Frye, and Sára Tóth on Frye and Buber. No one, however, has considered the ways that Kierkegaard influenced Frye’s thought. As the impact of Kierkegaard on Frye is relatively substantial, the purpose of this essay is to examine Frye’s use of Kierkegaard.[1] Direct influence is sometimes difficult to demonstrate, but parallels between and similar ideas held by the two can be instructive. Kierkegaard helps to define, illustrate, and develop Frye’s thought. Along the way, we will also glance at Frye’s critique of certain Kierkegaardian ideas.
Ovid
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnOzDfCOXFc
From the BBC, Act V of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring the artfully butchered rendition of Ovid’s “Pyramus and Thisbe.” (The conclusion after the jump.)
Today is Ovid‘s birthday (43 BC – 17 AD).
Frye in The Double Vision picks up on the divergence of Classical mythology and Christian mythology at the dawn of the Christian age:
Later centuries were fascinated by the contrast between the temporal ruler of the world, Augustus Caesar, and its spiritual ruler, Jesus, who was born during Augustus’ reign. Contemporary with Jesus we have the whole mythological side of Classical culture summed up by two great masterworks, Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ovid provides a kind of encyclopedia of mythology in which the central theme is metamorphosis, the incessant dissolving and reshaping of forms of life. Toward the end of his long poem, he brings in the philosopher Pythagoras to expound a gloomy philosophy based on the same theme. The Metamorphoses starts with creation and deluge myths, and Pythagoras sees at the end of time a running down of the world into a kind of entropy, or chaos come again. But there are also eulogies of the Caesars, particularly Julius, as the only symbols of what can transcend metamorphosis. In Virgil, similarly, the myth of Rome was founded by Trojan refugees expands into a vision of history in which the Roman Empire represents a kind of goal or telos of the historical process. (CW 4, 216-17)
Frye at the Movies: Buster Keaton
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02NDopFGnvQ
Buster Keaton in Cops, from 1922 (complete movie)
Frye in “Canada and Culture”:
I remember seeing a movie, colored and talking, which was a comedy, and being bored by it: but at the beginning there was a reference to the early knockabout silent comedies of the pie-throwing kind, with a brief illustration, and I laughed until I nearly fell out of my seat. (CW 25, 197)
The movie he refers to may be 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain, a musical set at the dawn of the age of the talkies that opens with a spoof of the silent movies being replaced by the new technology.
Frye makes passing reference to Buster Keaton — as well as to Larry Semon, Harold Lloyd and Mack Sennett — whose movies he would have seen as a child. The Keaton two-reeler above was very likely one of them.
“A second-rate socialist country”
Rick Salutin in his column yesterday recalls that Stephen Harper as Leader of the Opposition called Canada a “second-rate socialist country.”
Canada isn’t second-rate or socialist. The comment only reveals how second-rate are Harper’s own political reflexes and how ignorant he is of Canadian political history. It also tellingly betrays his rolling-boil resentment of everything east of his imagination’s westerly orientation: when he says “second-rate,” or “socialist,” or “country” for that matter, he is obviously not thinking of Calgary or Fort McMurray.
It’s hard to believe that Harper has anything valuable to teach us about what it means to be Canadian. His government has more citations for contempt of parliament than any previous government in the last one hundred and forty-four years. This is not sitting well with older voters who have a respect for this country’s institutions that he does not share.
Frye, on the other hand, is in a position to teach Harper about conservatism and what it means in the Canadian tradition. In the Preface to The Bush Garden, for example, he observes that our “national emphasis is a conservative one, in the lower-case sense of preserving the continuity of political existence.” In this sense, Harper is not really a conservative in any meaningful way: like the Republicans, whose political operatives he hires and consults, he is a radical partisan who wishes to break our longstanding social contract of mutual support and replace it with commercial values. And, like the Republicans and others who pass themselves off as conservatives, Harper behaves as though the already advantaged can never have enough, while everybody else already has too much. Too much, that is, of what only a genuinely conservative commitment to citizenship can provide, such as education and health care, as well as institutions intended to operate independently of a hostile political environment, such as the CRTC and the CBC — and, of course, parliament itself. When Harper attempts to rebrand the Canadian government as the “Harper government,” he exposes who he is and what he wants. He shows little desire to preserve “the continuity of political existence” beyond personal political ambitions that always display a strangely aggressive contempt for any opposition. He appears not to understand that the permanent institution of Canadian government isn’t the same thing as the temporary presence of a “Harper government,” or that they should never be confused. That — more than Michael Ignatieff’s twenty-year-old-taken-out-of-context-private-citizen’s-opinion on the design of the Canadian flag — may be the measure of whether or not he ought to be prime minister.