Author Archives: Michael Happy

Quote of the Day

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Matt Taibbi applies a welcome smackdown to Ross Douthat of The New York Times. Here he is putting a sleeper hold on Douthat’s new-found pacifism:

Look, people are entitled to have changes of heart. They are also entitled to learn from experience. And most importantly, people are entitled to be wrong. We all are, from time to time. And if people like Ross Douthat emerge from the experience of observing the Iraq and Afghanistan fiascoes finally understanding “the bluntness of war as an instrument of state” and the “difficulty of predicting” any war’s “long-term consequences,” that’s great. I applaud it.

But I don’t buy it. What happened back in ’02 and ’03 can’t be summarized as simply as a policy disagreement that Douthat, through the folly of inexperience, happened to be on the wrong side of. The mere fact that the Douthats of the world supported the war wasn’t what made them so obnoxious.

Much more important was the shameless witch-hunting of antiwar voices, and the impugning of the patriotism of people who advocated the very sort of caution Douthat now claims to endorse. Douthat, remember, contributed to the National Review’s obnoxiously-titled “Kumbaya Watch,” pitched as “the latest in anti-American commentary from the left.” In that column he hounded critics of the president and/or those who didn’t advocate immediate war against the Muslims, and wondered aloud about the political bias of organizations like ABC News (they wouldn’t let their reporters wear American flag lapel pins!).

Call for Papers, Frye Centenary Conference, October 2012

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A call for papers via Neil ten Kortenaar

CFP: Educating the Imagination: A Conference in Honour of Northrop Frye on the Centenary of His Birth.

October 4,5,6, 2012, Victoria University in the University of Toronto

Twenty years after his death, Northrop Frye, the author of Fearful Symmetry and Anatomy of Criticism, continues to be one of the most read and the most quoted of literary critics.  His attention to form, specifically to genre and mode, and his understanding of literature as a totality have directly influenced two later generations of critics, including Hayden White  Fredric Jameson, and Franco Moretti.  In order to celebrate this ongoing legacy, the Department of English and the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, Frye’s home throughout his career, have organized a three-day symposium in his honour.

Keynote speakers:

Ian Balfour, York University, author of Northrop Frye (1988), The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (2002)

Robert Bringhurst, poet, author of A Story As Sharp As a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (1999) and Selected Poetry (2009)

J. Edward Chamberlin, University of Toronto, author of Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies (1993) and If This Is Your Land, Where  Are Your Stories? (2003)

Michael Dolzani, Baldwin-Wallace College, editor of Frye’s Notebooks

W.J.T. Mitchell, University of Chicago, editor of Critical Inquiry and author of What Do Pictures Want? (2005) and Picture Theory (1994)

Gordon Teskey, Harvard University, author of Delirious Milton (2006); Allegory and Violence (1996)

There will be panels devoted to Frye’s specific legacy, which we are now in a better position to appreciate because of the completed publication of the Collected Works in thirty volumes.  But we also invite speakers to take inspiration from Frye and to consider literary and cultural topics such as:

1. Educating the Imagination when the Humanities are under threat

Frye and Comparative Literature

2. The place of Western Literature and theory in a global context.

The spread and the provincialization of Europe.

The limits of the Great Code

3. Contemporary manifestations of traditional literary modes:

The popular romance

Contemporary tragedy

Irony after postmodernism

4. Creative responses to the Bible in an era of fundamentalism and secularism

5. The survival of the literary imagination in a digital age

6. Canadian literature in a postnational age

7. The Great Code and Islam

8. History as Narrative

9. Nature in an era of environmental crisis

10.  Local literature, local forms

Proposals for papers or panels of papers are welcome. Abstracts of 200 words (for papers) are due January 31, 2012. Please send them by e-mail to frye.2012@utoronto.ca

Organizers: Alan Bewell, Chair, Department of English (a.bewell@utoronto.ca)

Neil ten Kortenaar, Director, Centre for Comparative Literature (neil.kortenaar@utoronto.ca), Germaine Warkentin

Major Site Tech Upgrade (Whoo hoo!)

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We can now embed videos from various sources (this one, for example, from Vevo). That means video that is more current and more eclectic

We have just undergone a welcome upgrade.

First, every post on the entire website — that is, daily blog postings, articles in the journal, and all of the documents in the library — can now be downloaded in PDF format. Simply hit the link to the post you’d like to go to, like, say, Michael Dolzani’s article in the journal, “Desert Paradise: A Polemical Re-Introduction to Northrop Frye.” Just beneath the title you’ll see a live “Make a PDF” link; hit that, and you’ll get a printable version of the text; hit the PDF icon at the top of the page, and you’ll get a downloadable PDF version of the article. Better yet, it will be both paginated and searchable. This is a big leap forward for us and a boon for people who want more practical access to this material.

We are also now able to embed video from a number of sites, including:

This too is an exciting development. It means we can get more video to you directly that you can watch on site, rather than simply providing a remote link to it.

We expect there will be more innovations as the summer progresses. We’ll keep you apprised. And, of course, we are always looking for your input and suggestions.

Quote of the Day

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBvg3PkI-PU&feature=related

Ayn Rand dating website video profile

“If you’ve seen the meatbot, the walking automaton, the pod-people, the dense, glazy-eyed substrate through which living organisms such as myself must escape to reach air and sunlight.” — The Randian ubermensch from the previous post who describes himself as “short, stark, and mansome,” which probably means fat, rude, and body odor.

TGIF: “Swanson Pyramid of Greatness”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIZ4ckmd9-I

The stoutly libertarian Ron Swanson of Parks and Recreation (played by Nick Offerman) seems to have become an audience favorite. Here’s where I think it began: with his unveiling of the “Swanson Pyramid of Greatness.”

For Randians: “Capitalism: God’s way of determining who is smart and who is poor.”

As a bonus, the Ayn Rand dating site here. A selection of personal profiles from the site here.

A sample:

[I am] short, stark, and mansome.

You should contact me if you are a skinny woman. If your words are a meaningful progression of concepts rather than a series of vocalizations induced by your spinal cord for the purpose of complementing my tone of voice. If you’ve seen the meatbot, the walking automaton, the pod-people, the dense, glazy-eyed substrate through which living organisms such as myself must escape to reach air and sunlight. If you’ve realized that if speech is to be regarded as a cognitive function, technically they aren’t speaking, and you don’t have to listen.

“The Fable of the Bees”

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Further to our previous post, here’s “The Moral” of Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees. The complete text of the poem can be found here.

Then leave Complaints: Fools only strive
To make a Great an honest Hive.
T’ enjoy the World’s Conveniencies,
Befamed in War, yet live in Ease
Without great Vices, is a vain
Eutopia seated in the Brain.
Fraud, Luxury, and Pride must live;
Whilst we the Benefits receive.
Hunger’s a dreadful Plague, no doubt,
Yet who digests or thrives without?
Do we not owe the Growth of Wine
To the dry, crooked, shabby Vine?
Which, whilst its Shutes neglected stood,
Choak’d other Plants, and ran to Wood;
But blest us with its Noble Fruit;
As soon as it was tied, and cut:
So Vice is benefcial found,
When it’s by Justice lopt, and bound;
Nay, where the People would be great,
As necessary to the State,
As Hunger is to make ’em eat.
Bare Vertue can’t make Nations live
In Splendour; they, that would revive A Golden Age, must be as free,
For Acorns, as for Honesty.

Society, Individualism, Laissez-Faire, and Eighteenth Century Sensibility

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As we’ve been following the laissez-faire thread for some time, it’s nice to end up seeing it as part of a larger social and literary pattern.

From “Varieties of Eighteenth Century Sensibility”:

The feeling of an intensely social view of literature within the Augustan trend has to be qualified by an interpenetration of social and individual factors that were there from the beginning. The base of operations in Locke’s Essay is the individual human being, not the socially constructed human being: Locke’s hero stands detached from history, collecting sense impressions and clear and distinct ideas. Nobody could be less solipsistic than Locke, but we may notice the overtures in Spectator 413, referring to “that Great Modern Discovery . . . that Light and Colours . . . are only Ideas in the Mind.” The author is speaking of Locke on secondary qualities. All Berkeley had to do with this modern discovery was to deny the distinction between primary and secondary qualities to arrive at this purely subjective idealist position of esse est percipi, “to be is to be perceived.” If we feel convinced, as Johnson was, that things still have a being apart from our perception of them, that, for Berkeley, is because they are ideas in the mind of God. It is fortunate both the permanence of the world and for Berkeley’s argument that God, according to the Psalmist, neither slumbers not sleeps [Psalm 21:4]. But Berkeley indicates clearly the isolated individual at the centre of Augustan society who interpenetrates with that society.

The same sense of interpenetration comes into economic contexts. In the intensely laissez-faire climate of eighteenth-century capitalism there is little emphasis on what the anarchist Kropotkin called mutual aid: even more than the nineteenth century, this was the age of the work ethic, the industrious apprentice, and the entrepreneur: the age, in other words, of Benjamin Franklin. A laissez-faire economy is essentially an amoral one: this fact is the basis of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, with its axiom of “Private Vices, Publick Benefits.” The howls of outrage that greeted Mandeville’s book are a little surprising: it looks as though the age was committed to the ethos of capitalism, but had not realized the intensity of its commitment. (CW 17, 29-30)

Quote of the Day

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Andrew Sullivan today on why the GOP are not conservatives:

As I studied political philosophy more deeply, the core argument for conservatism was indeed that it was truer to humankind’s crooked timber; that it was more closely tethered to earth rather  than heaven; that it accepted the nature of fallen man and did not try to permanently correct it, but to mitigate our worst instincts and encourage the best, with as light a touch as possible. Religion was for bishops, not presidents. Utopias were for liberals; progress was not inevitable; history did not lead in one obvious direction; we are all limited by epistemological failure and cultural bias.

So on taxes today, a conservative would ask: what have we learned about the impact of lower rates over the last two decades – now the lowest as a percentage of GDP since the 1950s? In healthcare, what have we learned about the largely private system the GOP wants to preserve? A conservative would look at home and abroad for empirical answers, acknowledging no ultimate solution but the need for constant reform because society is always changing. On gay rights, a classic social change, he’d ask what a society should do in integrating the emergence of so many openly gay people, couples and families. On foreign policy, he’d move on a case by case basis, not by way of a “doctrine.”

On these terms, today’s GOP could not be less conservative. I’d insist it’s less conservative than Obama. It does not present reality-based reform for emergent problems. It simply reiterates dogma and ruthlessly polices dissent or debate.

So no tax increases are allowed, period. Why? Because they “kill jobs”. So why do we have record unemployment after a period of unprecedentedly low taxation? No answer. If lower taxes have led to stagnation, the answer must always be: lower taxes some more. Why not end them all together?

(Cartoon from Jesus’ General: “An 11 on the manly scale of absolute gender.”)

Bloomsday

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It’s Bloomsday.

Radio Bloomsday will be reading the text all day. You can listen to it here.

From Frye’s review of New Directions in Prose and Poetry in Canadian Forum (December 1942):

Pendulum theories of art don’t work. Poems and pictures are real things; “tradition” and “experiment” are abstract nouns. To judge a concrete thing in terms of one abstract quality is to study it in one of many possible aspects. Which may well be worth doing. But to look at all art as split down the middle into an antithesis of abstract qualities hamstrings all criticism and insults all masterpieces; for the better the work of art, the more rewarding it will be to study it from opposing points of view. Thus, one could write an interesting essay on Ulysses as an experimental novel, and an equally interesting one on Ulysses as a traditional novel. But Ulysses is not “essentially” either; it is not “essentially” anything but a novel. (CW 29, 21)