Author Archives: Michael Happy

Bernardo Bertolucci

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX_4A6d_Q-U

The actual last tango from Last Tango in Paris (Video not embedded; click on the above image and hit the YouTube link)

Today is Bernardo Bertolucci‘s birthday (born 1940).

Frye on violence and sexuality in Secular Scripture:

In romance violence and sexuality are used as rocket propulsions, so to speak, in an ascending movement. Violence becomes melodrama, the separating of heroes from violence, angels of light from giants of the dark.  Sexuality becomes a driving force with a great deal of sublimation in it. In the traditional romance, where the heroine is so often a virgin reaching her first sexual contact on the last page, the erotic feeling is sublimated for the action of the story. (CW 18, 120)

Verbal Poltergeists

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Our earlier post on runaway autocorrect functions suggests that they are slapstick parodies of the observations below. We are our own poltergeists.

“Do we use language or are we used by it?” (CW 6, 595)

“Nobody is capable of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to be learned and worked at.” (The Educated Imagination, 64)

Ides of March

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FvgP5hO99o&feature=related

The assassination of Julius Caesar in HBO’s Rome — ugly, the way these things always are

Frye in one of the notebooks on Renaissance literature:

The liberal who sits & hopes that somebody will assassinate Hitler of McCarthy or Huey Long is Brutus without Brutus’ courage & responsibility. He thinks of such people as destroying human relations by engrossing power. That is, essential social relations to him are the personal ones: he has no tragic conception of society. Antony, with his ruthlessness, his use of others (Lepidus) as “property,” his contemptible rhetorical tricks & his exploiting of Caesar’s will is still able to consolidate a society. He never makes a human contact: his loyalty to Caesar is the exception that proves the rule. . . Caesar does make personal contacts, & makes himself impersonal by an effort of will: as is said, the way to flatter him is to tell him he can’t be flattered. (CW 20, 268-9)

The Mikado

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP2qJXT3olM

The closing sequence of Mike Leigh’s masterpiece, Topsy-Turvy, about the writing, development and first performance of The Mikado, including the beautiful “The Sun Whose Rays Are All Ablaze”

Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado premiered on this date in 1885.

Frye in one of those extraordinary lucid moments that send a shiver up the spine:

The element of play is the barrier that separates art from savagery, and playing at human sacrifice seems to be an important theme of ironic comedy.  Even in laughter itself some kind of deliverance from the unpleasant, even the horrible, seems to be important.  We notice this particularly in all forms of art in which a large number of auditors are simultaneously present, as in drama and, still more obviously, in games.  We notice too that playing at sacrifice has nothing to do with any historical descent from sacrificial ritual, such as been suggested for Old Comedy.  All the features of such ritual, the king’s son, the mimic death, the executioner, the substituted victim, are far more explicit in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado than they are in Aristophanes. (CW 21, 162)

“Three Little Maids from School” after the jump.

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“Obama Owns the Treatment of Manning Now”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtKx6J7er84

MSNBC report on the resignation of State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley for his criticism of the military’s treatment of Bradley Manning. The fact that the resignation was required and accepted is a disgrace

This is heartbreaking, but Sullivan’s assessment is the right one.

Money quote:

It is not necessary to have had a father as a prisoner of war to see the evil of prisoner abuse, and the stain it places on everyone enforcing it. And in the military, as with Bush, so with Obama. As commander-in-chief, Obama is directly responsible for the inhumane treatment of an American citizen. And Crowley’s firing will make it even less likely in the future that decent public servants will speak out against such needless sadism.

W.O. Mitchell

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUn57cq7Lms

Donald Sutherland reads an excerpt from Who Has Seen the Wind?, which nicely illustrates Frye’s observation below

Today is W.O. Mitchell‘s birthday (1914-1998).

From the “Conclusion to the First Edition of Literary History of Canada“:

The sense of probing into the distance, of fixing the eyes on the skyline, is something that Canadian sensibility has inherited from the voyageurs. It comes into Canadian painting a good deal, in Thomson whose focus is often furthest back in the picture, where a river or a gorge in the hills twists elusively out of sight, in Emily Carr whose vision is always, in the title of a compatriot’s book of poems, “deeper into the forest.”  Even in the Maritimes, where the feeling of linear distance is less urgent, Roberts complements the Tantramar marshes in the same way, the refrain of “miles and miles” having clearly some incantatory power for him.  It would be interesting to know how many Canadian novels associate nobility of character with a faraway look, or base their perorations on a long-range perspective.  This might only be a cliche, except that it is often found in sharply observed and distinctively written books.  Here, as a random example, is the last sentence of W.O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind: “The wind turns in silent frenzy upon itself, whirling into a smoking funnel, breathing up top soil and tumbleweed skeletons to carry them on its spinning way over the prairie, out and out to the far line of the sky.” (CW 12, 348)

Saturday Night at the Movies: “Conspiracy”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq5D9iLmrLs

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the liquidation of the Jewish Ghetto in Krakow, Poland, sending about 8,000 Jews to work to the Plaszow labor camp. Those deemed unfit for work were either killed or sent to die at Auschwitz.  Tonight’s movie is Conspiracy, the BBC Films recreation of the Wannsee Conference convened on January 20, 1942, which formally set in motion the Final Solution.  (The entire movie runs at the single link above.)