Author Archives: Michael Happy

Bloom, Frye and Value Judgments

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“That was my basic quarrel with my former mentor Northrop Frye. He thinks that evaluation has nothing to do with literary criticism. I would tell him, no, it is not true.” — Harold Bloom in an interview published over the weekend perpetuates his agon with Frye upon which he seems to have staked his reputation and legacy.

Here’s Frye in Anatomy addressing the issue of value judgments in a way that uncannily predicts where Bloom’s own criticism would eventually end up:

The first step in developing a genuine poetics is to recognize and get rid of meaningless criticism, or talking about literature in a way that cannot help to build up a systematic structure of knowledge. This includes all the sonorous nonsense that we so often find in critical generalities, reflective comments, ideological perorations, and other consequences of taking a long view of an unorganized subject. It includes all lists of the “best” novels or poems or writers, whether their particular virtue is exclusiveness or inclusiveness. It includes all casual, sentimental, and prejudiced value judgments, and all the literary chit-chat which makes the reputations of poets boom and crash in an imaginary stock exchange. (CW 22, 19)

Previous posts on Bloom here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. That’s a lot of posts, it turns out. We’ll set up a Harold Bloom category to make it easier.

Zoso

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOKDVXu-wYo

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the release of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, commonly known as Led Zeppelin IV, but more cultishly referred to as “Zoso,” after the stylized runic characters that appeared on the inside jacket of the vinyl release.

The most famous and (over)played song on the album is also the one most identified with the band, “Stairway to Heaven.” I can no longer listen to it: thousands of continuous radio-play exposures over the years are enough. The song I am posting therefore is the album’s opening track, “Black Dog.” Two things in particular make this song. First, the fact that it is so obviously derived from Delta blues, which was always the great engine that drives the band’s music; in this case the song’s call-and-response structure, especially the guitar riff that makes up the response. The second is the way that John Bonham drags the beat in the lead-up to the chorus. How? Why? It doesn’t make any sense other than in some unforeseeable way it works.

Rolling Stone‘s original review of the album here.

TransCanada Under Investigation by U.S. State Department

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The Athabasca river winds through tar sands production facilities at Fort McMurray. Fresh water in one end, toxic sludge out the other. (Photo: AP)

The Inspector General of the U.S. State Department has been asked to investigate improprieties in the promotion of the Keystone XL pipeline. The sponsor of the project, TransCanada of Calgary, faces the prospect that the State Department investigation will expose the details of its questionable conduct in assessing the environmental impact of the pipeline. The investigation will likely only encourage the steadily growing protests against Keystone XL. At the same time, the final decision about the project may be delayed by the Obama administration as the investigation continues. This will probably not sit well with the crony capitalists of the Alberta oil industry or their Conservative agents in Parliament.

The other day the Conservative house organ, the tabloid Toronto Sun — always working to whip up unending resentment and paranoia about events that have minimal importance as news — whined on its front page that delay of construction of the pipeline will cost TransCanada $1 million a day. This may turn out to be the least of TransCanada’s worries as a fuller understanding of its handling of the Keystone XL proposal emerges.

In tangentially related news, payback is a bitch.

From Think Progress:

INSPECTOR GENERAL LAUNCHES INVESTIGATION INTO KEYSTONE XL APPROVAL PROCESS | In response to a congressional request, the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General has launched a review of the Keystone XL pipeline approval process. The State Department is tasked with conducting the environmental review of TransCanada’s proposed tar sands pipeline from Canada to Texas for a Presidential Permit decision. Beginning with the Bush administration, the process has been largely outsourced to a contractor chosen and paid for by TransCanada, with only a single staffer overseeing the work. Meanwhile, lobbyists with close ties to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have aggressively pushed for approval on behalf of the foreign oil company. The request for an investigation was made by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), and eleven Democratic members of the House of Representatives.

Frye on Blake and Money: “The cohesive principle of fallen society”

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Blake’s “To Annihilate the Self-hood of Deceit,” 1804-1808

I’ve posted this before, but it is worth looking at again. Frye in Fearful Symmetry takes on the money economy from a prophetic perspective:

Money to Blake is the cement or cohesive principle of fallen society, and as society consists of tyrants exploiting victims, money can only exist in the two forms of riches and poverty; too much for a few and not enough for the rest. La proprieté, c’est le vol, may be a good epigram, but it is no better than Blake’s definition of money as “the life’s blood of Poor Families,” or his remark that “God made man happy & Rich, but the Subtil made the innocent, Poor.” A money economy is a continuous partial murder of the victim, as poverty keeps many imaginative needs out of reach. Money for those who have it, on the other hand, can belong only to the Selfhood, as it assumes the possibility of happiness through possession, which we have seen is impossible, and hence of being passively or externally stimulated into imagination. An equal distribution, even if practicable, would therefore not affect its status as the root of a evil. Corresponding to the consensus of mediocrities assumed by law and Lockean philosophy, money assumes a dead level of “necessities” (notice the word) as its basis. Art on this theory is high up among the nonessentials; pleasure, in society, tends to collapse very quickly into luxury and affection. (CW 14, 82)

Quote of the Day: Why Nobel Laureate Economist Joseph Stiglitz Supports OWS

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6Na9xHN_SQ

Joseph Stiglitz in Slate explains why he supports Occupy Wall Street. An excerpt:

Research in recent years has shown how important and ingrained notions of fairness are. Spain’s protesters, and those in other countries, are right to be indignant: Here is a system in which the bankers got bailed out, while those whom they preyed upon have been left to fend for themselves. Worse, the bankers are now back at their desks, earning bonuses that amount to more than most workers hope to earn in a lifetime, while young people who studied hard and played by the rules see no prospects for fulfilling employment.

The rise in inequality is the product of a vicious spiral: The rich rent-seekers use their wealth to shape legislation in order to protect and increase their wealth—and their influence. The U.S. Supreme Court, in its notorious Citizens United decision, has given corporations free rein to use their money to influence politics. But, while the wealthy can use their money to amplify their views, back on the street, police wouldn’t allow me to address the OWS protesters through a megaphone. The contrast between overregulated democracy and unregulated bankers did not go unnoticed. But the protesters are ingenious: They echoed what I said through the crowd, so that all could hear.

The protesters are right that something is wrong about our “system.” Around the world, we have underutilized resources—people who want to work, machines that lie idle, buildings that are empty—and huge unmet needs: fighting poverty, promoting development, and retrofitting the economy for global warming, to name just a few. In America, after more than 7 million home foreclosures in recent years, we have empty homes and homeless people.

*

Stiglitz in the May 2011 issue of Vanity Fair outlines the growing economic inequality of the last thirty years. An excerpt:

It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.

Quote of the Day: “No better than a chimp flipping a coin”

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George Monbiot in the Guardian dispels the illusion of merit. The thing the richest in our society are best at is destroying wealth on an historical scale. An excerpt:

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren’t responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.

The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. “The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill.” Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.

Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers throughout Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin. When Kahneman tried to point this out, they blanked him. “The illusion of skill … is deeply ingrained in their culture.”

The “Charm” of William F. Buckley

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEIrZO069Kg&feature=player_embedded

Buckley on Firing Line in 1969 cheerfully offers to “punch” Noam Chomsky “in the goddamn face.” What makes this clip especially interesting is that, Buckley’s quip aside, Chomsky’s opinion on the Vietnam War and its effects on American society turned out to be the right one. Buckley isn’t even in the game on the issue.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYymnxoQnf8&feature=player_embedded

Buckley, not cheerful at all, threatens Gore Vidal at the 1968 Democratic convention, ““Now listen you queer, stop calling me a crypto-nazi, or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face.” This may have been shocking behavior in 1968, but it’s pretty much the way it’s done now, Buckley’s example having been picked up and fully exploited by people like Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity, and O’Reilly.

Andrew Sullivan is the only conservative I trust on a daily basis because he is intelligent, scrupulous in his opinions, and possesses real journalistic talent. He is pragmatic in a way that is progressive in outlook if not in policy.

However, there is one thing about Sullivan that is baffling: his surprisingly conventional estimation of William F. Buckley’s legacy. In a post today Sullivan, citing Terry Teachout, entertains the notion that it is due to his “charm.” I understand that in conservative circles Buckley, since his death three years ago, is regarded as St. Patrick driving slithering entities like the John Birch Society away from any position of influence in the post-Goldwater conservative revival. But “charming”? He was nasty, always: any random clip from Firing Line (like the one with Noam Chomsky above) will confirm as much. Buckley set the standard for supercilious contempt for opposition, with displays of a divine right to verbal violence, which is currently about the only way conservatives in the public eye seem to communicate.

Putting hero-worship aside, here’s an article from Spy magazine published in July 1989. It makes clear that by the 1980s, during the Reagan ascendancy when his influence should have been at its peak, Buckley was a fading cult figure whose diminishing influence was sustained mostly by his belligerent self-regard and the slowing momentum of his glory years in the 1950s and 60s.

This paragraph from “The Boys Who Would Be Buckley” has always stayed with me. It captures the fraying noblesse oblige of Buckley’s National Review, whose offices, on author Bob Mack’s account, seemed to emit the geriatric odor of whiskey and gingivitis:

Still, [new editor John] O’Sullivan faces a daunting task: the deadwood. . .is thick; the atmosphere is musty, quaint and lazy, and a tone of genteel racism endures. This attitude is usually expressed in a third-floor conference room, at the bi-weekly editorial meetings and the usual end-of-the-day cocktail hours that are held there. “There’s this insularity,” says one former NR editorial assistant about the events that occurred in that room, “where you feel among friends who all think the same way you do. You can even express your true feelings about something that, in another situation, you would be more guarded about. This was especially true when Bill was away.” On which subjects have true feelings been expressed? Well, senior editors Sobran and Jeffery Hart have swapped jokes about crematoriums and gas chambers. Race relations is also a popular subject. In November 1986 NR ran a cover story, “Blacks and the GOP: Just Called to Say I Love You,” that outlined possible GOP strategies for attracting black voters. Presiding over the traditional post-issue recap, Buckley quipped, “Maybe it should have been titled, ‘Just Called to Say I Love You, Niggah.'” During another editorial meeting, Jeffery Hart reflected wistfully that “under a real government, Bishop [Desmond] Tutu would be a cake of soap.”

Charming.

Occupy London and the Church of England

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A report on the conflict between the Occupy movement and the business interests of the Church of England.

Frye in “The Church: Its Relation to Society”:

The society of power is always a close and searching parody of the society of love. So close and searching, in fact, that without revelation it is hardly possible for man to separate the latent heaven from the latent hell in his own society or in his social thinking. In the kingdom of God there is no place for Caesar as Caesar, for there is no respect of persons there; in the kingdom of Caesar there is nothing but the respect of persons, and hence no place for God as God. In such a society Caesar has to become God. (CW 4, 255-6)

Frye in “The Analogy of Democracy”:

People attached to churches often speak of political issues as though the church were withdrawn from the world, waiting for the world to offer it various theories of government and then inspecting them in order to decide whether they are comparable with Christianity or not. No such remoteness exists. Members of the church are in the world from the start: their secular passions and prejudices inform and shape their conceptions of religion at every point: to be persistently wrong about the contemporary world is a theological error. We have reached the stage in democratic development at which we can roundly say that if any twentieth-century Christian sincerely repudiates what democracy stands for, there is something radically the matter with his Christianity. . .

The church can mediate between the Gospel and the law only when they have been clearly separated. Failure to separate them is Pharisaism, the legalized bastard gospel. When we look at the way the church uses its social energy and influence . . . we can hardly be reassured about the courage, wisdom, or effectiveness of the church’s approach to society. (CW 4, 274-5)