httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whLPK3mKazg
Joe and I were fortunate enough to have dinner tonight with Clayton Chrusch and his husband, Mike. We were even more fortunate to be able to convince Clayton — who has been a regular contributer here almost from the first day — to become our latest byline correspondent. However, there was just one condition. So, here, as promised, Clayton, are the fireworks. Almost ten minutes worth. Enjoy!
We are very pleased to announce that Jan Gorak of the University of Denver will be joining us as our latest byline correspondent. If you’re keeping score at home, Glenna Sloan, Ed Lemond, Michael Dolzani and Jonathan Allan have all joined us since Christmas, and we’ve still got a few more prospects in the works.
If any of you out there are interested in doing the same, please drop us a line. We’re delighted to have you.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz1TM9y8vN8
Rounding out our handful of Chaplin masterpieces, 1925’s The Gold Rush. Part 1 above; the rest of the movie after the jump.
Eleanor Cook, wishing us a happy new year, draws our attention to the online biography of Frye she recently published in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography / Dictionnaire biographique du Canada. It is available in both English and French.
My dear colleague Joe Adamson will resume blogging next week and we have at least one new confirmed byline correspondent, Glenna Sloan, whom we look forward to joining us. We fully expect to confirm another handful of byliners very soon.
Our first four and a half months have been about as good as we could have hoped, thanks primarily to our benefactor, Bob Denham, whose generosity, despite years of exposure to it, continues to surprise and delight Joe and me both. Bob is about as good a person as anyone could hope to encounter, and he’s brilliant and funny besides. I have been fitfully blogging on his book, Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World, and so my first new year’s resolution is also the easiest to keep, and that is to continue to post on it as I make my way through it. I’m a fast talker but a very slow reader, and the better the book, the slower the progress. Bob’s book, being as good as it is — and I told him in all honesty recently that it so outclasses me that I’m simply hanging on for dear life, and I’m only on chapter two — will no doubt require all of my non-teaching attention through the winter. This is also exactly the right time to thank our other correspondents as warmly as possible, Russell Perkin and Peter Yan, not to mention our regular guest bloggers. You know who you are. Thanks so much for everything you’ve done and everything you will continue to do.
My second resolution is to expand the purview of this site. It began as a side project to the journal (which originally was to be an independent entity using another platform at another McMaster-hosted website), but took on a life of its own until it absorbed the journal altogether and spontaneously generated the Robert D. Denham Library, which, once again, thanks to our kindly benefactor, is now the most remarkable thing about it. We are currently the most happening Northrop Frye-related social networking site in the known universe. Yeah, I said it. Happening. Frye. Here. If you don’t like it, then call us out. Or simply drop us a line at fryeblog@gmail.com
My third resolution is to at least try to stop blaming Bush/Cheney and all they represent for everything that is wrong with this world — even though they are and even though I won’t.
Fourth resolution: diet and exercise.
As for you, we ask only that you resolve to post here on any Frye-related thoughts that pass through your beautiful minds.
We’re here for you.
24/7.
And I promised myself I wasn’t going to cry . . .
A happy, healthy and prosperous 2010 to you all.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS9RPyznAPg
Just taking a break from the VH1 “Top 100 One Hit Wonders of the 80s” marathon to wish you a happy new year and to announce our latest additions to the Denham Library.
But, first, for the record, Flock of Seagulls were not one hit wonders. Everyone remembers their megahit “I Ran” but tend to forget that they charted again with “Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You)”, the Pachelbel’s Canon of New Wave pop tunes. Besides, even if they really were just one hit wonders, they’d still be revered and remembered because nothing, absolutely nothing, says 1982 like Mike Score’s waterfall haircut. It captures the time, like Beatle boots.
Okay, so happy new year.
Also check out our newest acquisitions at the Denham Library, two sets of class notes from the mid-1950s: Nineteenth Century Thought and Modern Poetry.
After the jump, Pachelbel’s Canon, the Flock of Seagulls’s “Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You)” of Baroque music.
Courtesy of Bob Denham: You never know where Frye will turn up. Here is a PowerPoint presentation on his Theory of Archetypes posted at docstoc.com. Note that the author uses a video game, “God of War,” to illustrate the theory of tragedy.
We are very pleased to announce that Glenna Sloan is joining us as a byline correspondent. Glenna teaches at Queens College, CUNY. She is the author of (among other works) The Child as Critic: Developing Literacy Through Literature, K-8. Check out her website here. You can read her paper, “Northrop Frye in the Elementary Classroom,” here.
Our latest addition to the Robert D. Denham Library (live link in the upper right of the Menu column) is a set of previously unpublished notes on miscellaneous subjects, including Jung, Jung and Blake, Shakespeare, Milton, the Providence of God, The Great Code, and William Morris. (These notes can be found in the Previously Unpublished Material section.)
We are still getting a handle on working our new library wing. There are some minor formatting issues to resolve which we will address first thing in the new year once our tech adviser is available. For example, the unpublished letters of Elizabeth Fraser to Northrop Frye should soon include her original drawings that appear in them. We’ll keep you updated. But, in the meantime, everything posted is readable, so browse away. There is already an extraordinary wealth of previously obscure material in there that any Frye scholar will want to see.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmuSeyLjI5Y
If you’re following events in Iran, you know that what may soon be referred to as the Ashura Revolution is underway throughout the country and particularly in Tehran, with crowds of protesters out in the streets daily in numbers that haven’t been seen since June and July. Young people especially continue to be targeted for beatings, rape and murder by regime thugs, the basij militia. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei is now openly reviled. There is talk of a general strike, beginning as early as Monday. This illegitimate regime may finally be losing its grip. One telling sign is that the fraudulent “president” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is nowhere to be seen and is not mentioned even in state media.
The video above features a nightly phenomenon: people at their windows or on their rooftops shouting “Allah akbar” en masse. Andrew Sullivan calls it the “cry of freedom,” and it is, as Frye would say, as primary as it is primal. Sullivan’s site is easily the best raw news source anywhere at the moment — his Iranian contacts are pouring in reports hourly, and he’s blogging around the clock on developments. If you want to know what’s happening in Iran in real time, then Sullivan’s Daily Dish is the place to go. Be warned, some of the video he posts is disturbing. As Sullivan himself has put it, this revolution may not be televised, but it will be YouTubed. Welcome to the new world of New Media. It’s why CNN is withering on the vine and newspapers are hemorrhaging readers.