Author Archives: Michael Happy

This Week in Climate Change Denial

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtMmB5_MkIo

Real Time with Bill Maher: Ignorance as both social and environmental blight

Frye in a 1978 interview conducted shortly after his installation as Chancellor of Victoria University.  The interviewer asks him:

You talked in your Installation Address of the importance of the study of the social use of science [WE, 520].  How do you feel that might be better explored?

Frye responds:

I was thinking there of things like the ecology movement, the sense of the growing energy crisis, the preservation of the environment, the preservation of buildings in the city, and so forth.  These all add up to a very widespread social concern with the environment.  The old notion that Canada is a land of unlimited natural resources, and that all we have to do is keep mining the coal and cutting down the trees, is a very sinister and a very dangerous philosophy now–but it’s not reflected in our curriculum.  Presumably we have people in Forestry trained in the importance of the conservation of forests, but society’s use of science and technology is really an aspect of humanistic study.  I think that will become a part of our curriculum in the very near future.  It would be best taught  in the college structure because it’s a humanistic thing more than a matter of laboratories.  (CW 24, 437)

Saturday Night Video: Music of the Third Wave

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liz

Tina Fey as Liz Lemon drunk dialing while singing “You Oughta Know”

On a recent episode of 30 Rock, Tina Fey‘s sitcom that brings the celebration of geek girl ascendancy into the mainstream, the ring tone on Liz Lemon’s cell phone is revealed to be “Fuck the Pain Away” by Canadian electropunk performance artist Peaches.  It’s such an excellent inside joke that this is probably a good time to remind ourselves why everyone should get it.

Third Wave feminism might not have had the broad cultural impact it has without the wide open music scene of the 90s.  And it arguably was helped along in the previous decade by Madonna, who made sure everybody understood that her sexuality was a source of power, not a cause of subordination.  The music of the Third Wave — with its riot grrrl, queercore, and lo-fi, DIY ethic — has done much to make permeable the barriers on female identity.

After the jump, some milestones in the music that has provided the variables for XX.

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10,000 Visitors in May

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We’re coming up on our first anniversary in a couple of months, and we seem to be doing pretty well.  We’ve just surpassed 700 posts, and, much more tellingly, we drew more than 10,000 visitors during the month of May alone.

So we’d like to extend an open invitation to those visitors: we are always looking for Guest Bloggers.  If you’d like to submit a post, just drop us a line at fryeblog@gmail.com  Remember also that we’ve got a journal, so if you have a paper that hasn’t yet found a home, let us know.  We publish both peer-reviewed scholarship and articles of interest.

Frye and Apocalyptic Feminism

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH_r6-JpO9Q

On this date in 1913, militant suffragette Emily Davison was struck by King George V’s horse at the Epsom Derby.  She died four days later.  She ran out onto the track (as you can see from the footage above) with a suffragette flag, which she evidently intended to attach to the king’s horse.

One of Frye’s entries in notebook 44 consists of this single sentence: “I don’t think it’s coincidence or accident that feminism and ecology should become central issues at the same time” (CW 5, 206).

A modified version of the phrase appears again in chapter six of Words with Power, “Second Variation: The Garden”:

Here we are concerned with the oasis-paradise of gardens and fountains that derives from the Biblical Eden and the Song of Songs.  It may be an impossibly idealized vision of a very tame aspect of nature, especially when in Isaiah it extends to a world in which the lion lies down with the lamb (11:6 ff.).  But it is the beginning of a sense that exploiting nature nature is quite as evil as exploiting other human beings.  Admittedly, the Bible itself has done a good deal to promote the conception of nature as something to be dominated by human arrogance, for historical reasons we have glanced at.  Contact with some allegedly primitive societies in more modern times, with their intense care for the earth that sustains them, has helped to give us some notion of how skewed many aspects of our traditional ideology are on this point.  But even in the Bible the bride-garden metaphor works in the opposite direction by associating nature and love, and I doubt if it is an accident that feminism and ecology have moved into the foreground of social issues at roughly the same time.  (WP 225)

As a matter of myth manifesting primary concern, the equalization of the sexes is implicit in biblical typology.  As a social and historical development, of course, it is all too often an ugly business typical of issues pertaining to power.  But the equalization of the sexes also has an apocalyptic dimension, as Frye’s rendering it in chapter six of Words with Power suggests.

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Quote of the Day (2): “Yeah, we waterboarded”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LPubUCJv58

“Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.  I’d do it again to save lives.”  George W. Bush to the Economic Club of Grand Rapids, Michigan, June 2nd, 2010.

Now both the former president and vice-president of the United States are unequivocally self-confessed war criminals.

Above, a demonstration of waterboarding upon a willing volunteer: and still very, very shocking because the uncontrollable animal fear is instantaneous.

Quote of the Day: “Drill, Baby, Drill”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WEl6TK4VsI

Here’s Sarah Palin’s tweet of two days ago:

She is of course lying.  Watch Chris Matthews’s report above.