“Spence’s Republic”
The NFB has always displayed a typically self-deprecating Canadian sense of humor. American history is world-shaping stuff and is to be rendered chin up. Canadian history, not so much. This is one of a handful of historical vignettes that sardonically reminds us that, for all our good fortune, we didn’t have to work all that hard for it and we’d be wrong to romantisize it too much.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7lgXteZ4g0
BBC Radio 4 panel discussion on Marx
It seems to be a discernible trend: since the collapse of the financial market three years ago, Karl Marx is increasingly being cited once again as the prophet of capitalism’s self-destruction. From the BBC:
As a side-effect of the financial crisis, more and more people are starting to think Karl Marx was right. The great 19th Century German philosopher, economist and revolutionary believed that capitalism was radically unstable.
It had a built-in tendency to produce ever larger booms and busts, and over the longer term it was bound to destroy itself.
Marx welcomed capitalism’s self-destruction. He was confident that a popular revolution would occur and bring a communist system into being that would be more productive and far more humane.
Marx was wrong about communism. Where he was prophetically right was in his grasp of the revolution of capitalism. It’s not just capitalism’s endemic instability that he understood, though in this regard he was far more perceptive than most economists in his day and ours.
More profoundly, Marx understood how capitalism destroys its own social base – the middle-class way of life. The Marxist terminology of bourgeois and proletarian has an archaic ring.
But when he argued that capitalism would plunge the middle classes into something like the precarious existence of the hard-pressed workers of his time, Marx anticipated a change in the way we live that we’re only now struggling to cope with.
The whole article here.
If Greece defaults, if the euro collapses, if the world spins into a second deep recession in just three years, these kinds of charts ought to be kept in mind.
We have posted others here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
The poor and the middle class have been screwed to an almost unimaginable degree. Virtually every penny of profit across thirty years of increased productivity has gone to the top 10%, most especially the top 1%. These include the people who oversaw the crash of the financial market three years ago, destroying tens of millions of jobs and wiping out tens of trillions dollars of wealth. They then required a few trillion more in taxpayer-funded bailouts to keep the world’s financial system viable. Having secured that, they were very quickly once again giving themselves billions of dollars in bonuses and making record profits.
But where are the new jobs? There are none because they evidently aren’t needed anymore, not in North America, and not at a decent working wage. The jobs at much lower wages have gone to places like India and China.
Frye on memory from the notebooks, courtesy of Bob Denham’s Northrop Frye Unbuttoned:
The memory selects, rejects, rearranges, condenses and displaces. In short it mythicizes our history. (LN, 1:38)
But perhaps this is what memory is for, to bring to life past moments. If so, the memory, like the sensory apparatus, is selective & exclusive. Screen memory is the only memory. Nietsczhe says that when memory says “I did that” & pride says, “I didn’t,” the memory gives way. . . But memory is the key to identity. And perhaps (as Coleridge once suggested) the key to resurrection too. (NB 11f.158)
My memory of past experiences becomes more intense all the time, yet much of it never happened, happened otherwise in a different sequence, or with a very different emotional harmonization. (It’s this last that makes the present so much less real than the past: as in art, an imaginative recreation lifts them clear of the dithering of time.) I think the real memory is the habit-energy that is, perhaps, our real selves, that is, perhaps the only thing we could take into another world. (NB 21.605)
(Photo: Rob Howard)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rFZ2C-k8ZQ
At last, some online Frye footage. We hope to see more of that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90SIuISIVB8&feature=related
“The Big Snit” may be the most famous animated short by the NFB’s Richard Condie. It was nominated for an Academy Award in 1985, one of the last NFB animated shorts to draw enough attention to be widely seen. It remains a favorite among animators.
In 1980’s “Across the River and Out of the Trees,” Frye considers the effects of mass media upon Canadian broadcasting culture. It is a remarkably optimistic outlook all told, even though the cost to Canadian institutions like the NFB has been high.
But there were difficulties that the coming of television made painfully obvious. These three new media, film, radio, and television, are mass media, and consequently follow the centrifugal and imperial rhythms of politics and economics more readily than the regionalizing rhythms of culture. This was not too crucial a problem for CBC radio, though it was certainly there, but the NFB had to struggle with problems of distribution created by the fact that movie houses had been monopolized by American syndicates. I remember a Spring Thaw skit which was a takeoff of an NFB film, ending with the line “on view in your local Sunday-School basement.” (CW 12, 561)
Bob Denham’s post yesterday on Marshall McLuhan’s belief that Frye was part of a Masonic conspiracy against him, in part because of his esoteric reading list, raises the issue of Frye’s interest in what he called “kook books.” Here are a couple of examples from the notebooks.
For years I have been collecting and reading pop-science & semi-occult books, merely because I find them interesting. I now wonder if I couldn’t collect enough ideas from them for an essay on neo-natural theology. Some are very serious books I haven’t the mathematics (or the science) to follow: some are kook-books with their hair-raising insights or suggestions (CW 6, 713)
There’s a lot of semi-occult fascination with Atlantis in the last two centuries: one very fine book (despite its obvious weaknesses and lapses) is Merezhkovsky’s Atlantis/Europe, which tries to go all out for the historicity of Atlantis and doesn’t mention Thera, but is really based on an ascending ladder diagram in which we go up to the future, unless we get caught in the same cycle again, while Atlantis is our buried or forgotten past. He links the Timaeus and the Book of Enoch in some curious ways, coming close to a lot of the von Daniken mythology, but he’s better than that: an example of how yesterday’s kook book becomes tomorrow’s standard text. (CW 6, 495)
Bob Denham provides some context in his introduction to the Late Notebooks volumes:
Some of Frye’s reading is, if not altogether odd, at least surprising—books such as Merezhkovsky’s Atlantis/Europe and Maureen Duffy’s Erotic World of Faerie. Frye admits that Merezhkovsky comes “close to a lot of von Daniken mythology,” but then adds, “yesterday’s kook book becomes tomorrow’s standard text.” There are in the notebooks, as one might expect, a number of Frye’s old chestnuts—books such as Graves’s The White Goddess, Frances Yates’s studies in hermeticism, the mythical speculations of Gertrude Rachel Levy, Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy, Carroll’s Alice books, the novels of Bulwer-Lytton and Rider Haggard. But some readers will no doubt think it strange that Frye would even be curious about such books as Michael Baignet’s The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Robert Anton Wilson’s The Cosmic Trigger, Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy, Itzhak Bentov’s Stalking the Wild Pendulum, and A.E. Wait’s Quest of the Golden Stairs, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, and The Holy Grail—“kook books” all. It would be difficult to imagine Frye citing such esoterica in Words with Power, but he does justify his interest in such writers as Waite, who is only “superficially off-putting”:
I’ve been reading Loomis and A.E. Waite on the Grail. Loomis often seem to me an erudite ass: he keeps applying standards of coherence and consistency to twelfth-century poets that might apply to Anthony Trolloppe. Waite seems equally erudite and not an ass. But I imagine Grail scholars would find Loomis useful and Waite expendable, because Waite isn’t looking for anything that would interest them. It’s quite possible that what Waite is looking for doesn’t exist—secret traditions, words of power, an esoteric authority higher than that of the Catholic Church—and yet the kind of thing he’s looking for is so infinitely more important than Loomis’ trivial games of descent from Irish sources where things get buggered up because the poets couldn’t distinguish cors meaning body from cors meaning horn. Things like this show me that I have a real function as a critic, pointing out that what Loomis does has been done and is dead, whereas what Waite does, even when mistaken, has hardly begun and is very much alive. (CW 5, xxxv-xxvi)
Michael Dolzani picks up the thread in the introduction to the “Third Book” Notebooks:
The notebooks are also more uninhibited than Frye’s published work, both intellectually and rhetorically. Frye’s speculations are much more open, more daring, sometimes breathtakingly so, and he is more willing to risk venturing upon works which professional prudence restrained him from making extended public comments upon, even if they had greatly influenced him. These include, on the one hand, works whose language or culture was not native to him; on the other, books of ill-repute with whom respectable scholars feel they cannot afford to be caught in public, what he called the “kook books” of unreserved mythopoeic speculation, from Jacob Boehme to Hamlet’s Mill, whose vision has affinities with his own project and which thus form part of its secret imaginative background even when their methods are flawed and their authors half-psychotic. (CW 9, xxii-xxiii)
See our Kook Books category, which includes more from Denham and Dolzani.
Here’s “Special Delivery” from the National Film Board of Canada. It won an Academy Award in 1978, which NFB shorts regularly did. Seeing this is like getting a glimpse of a Canada that has just about disappeared over the horizon. The NFB is a shadow of its former self, overtaken by events and the critical mass of mass culture. This cartoon short is a reminder that, at least until recently, we were readily able to tap into the whimsically sly element in our national character. Not that we ever made a big deal about it.
Our quote of the day doesn’t refer to what was said but what was not. A recently published interview with Harold Bloom under the title, “Harold Bloom on Literary Criticism,” in which he reviews twentieth century criticism but makes no reference to Frye.
Post-structuralist t-shirts available here
“My guess is that [literary] theorists are motivated partly by a desperate realization that, in the process of deconstructing the profession, we in the literature business have shot ourselves not in the foot, but in the head. At a time of contracting education budgets, the public is no longer willing to pay for courses titled ‘Bat[woman] and Cat[man]: Queering the Canonical Comix.'” — Scott Herring in The Chronicle of Higher Education