Author Archives: Michael Happy

Video of the Day: Rocking the Vote

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mc9eHI3ieQk

The Young Socialists of Catalonia in Spain have produced this video to encourage people to vote in upcoming regional elections.  It’s caused a bit of a stir, but most people (politicians excluded) don’t seem to have much trouble with it.

According to Frye, sex is of course a primary concern, and the right to vote is the peak experience of citizenship, so it seems natural enough that they come together at some point.  Maybe this is it.  Frye in conversation with David Cayley:

Then you get the other account [of creation] in chapter 2 [of Genesis], which begins with a garden and deals with animals as domestic pets.  The imagery is oasis imagery.  It’s all gardens and rivers.  And the emphasis is heavily on the distinctness of the human order.  First you get Adam, then you get Eve as the climax of that account of creation.  Obviously, that describes a state of being in which man and his environment are in complete harmony.  Then comes the fall, which is first of all self-consciousness about sex, or what D.H. Lawrence calls “sex in the head.”  That really pollutes the whole conception of sexuality and thereby pollutes in the same way the relation of the human mind to its environment.  (CW 24, 1023)

Not to be a total jag about this, but there is something deeply satisfying about seeing a woman depicted as having an orgasm while voting: it eagerly embraces both liberated female sexuality and gender equality.  As Frye notes, if, according to Judeo-Christian myth, humanity fell by way of a woman, then it will rise again as one.  Why shouldn’t something like this be winkingly suggestive of that?  Traditionally, nothing about sex is more threatening than female sexuality, which has always been about sexual shame generally and female subordination specifically.  This sort of thing fully exposes the fact that some people (including young socialists) are well past that.  Woman is after all, Frye suggests, the climax of creation.

Sir Wilfrid Laurier

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Today is the birthday of Canada’s seventh prime minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier (1841-1919).

Frye in “National Consciousness in Canadian Culture”:

The Canadian sense of the future tends to be apocalyptic: Laurier’s dictum that the twentieth century would belong to Canada was even then implying a most improbable and discontinuous future.  The past in Canada, on the other hand, is, like the past of a psychiatric patient, something of a problem to be resolved: it is rather like what the past would be in the United States if it had started with the Civil War instead of the Revolutionary War.  (CW 12, 500)

(Note that there is a brief bit of film footage of Laurier giving a speech on the campaign trail in 1911, the first moving image ever taken of a Canadian prime minister.  However, I’ve been unable to find it.  If anyone knows of a source, please let me know where it is and I’ll post it.)

TGIF: Stephen Colbert Roasts Bush — and the Beltway Media

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSE_saVX_2A

Now that George Bush is out shilling for his “memoir,” it’s a good time to look again at Stephen Colbert’s keynote speech with Bush in attendance at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.

Colbert was said by the rightward portion of the punditocracy to have “bombed” — and the increasingly stunned silence of the audience seems to confirm that.  But it’s pretty clear in retrospect that he got it right.  (For example, this is where he introduced the phrase “Reality has a well-known liberal bias” into common parlance.)  The speech is scathingly funny and is a gutsy instance of speaking truth to power in the presence of a press corps that is supposed to do so, but doesn’t.

In any event, Colbert’s appearance so shook things up that the next year the keynote speaker was Rich Little.  Rich Little.  The comedic equivalent of white bread and tap water.

Gettysburg Address

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The only known photo of Lincoln after giving the Gettysburg address.  The speech was so brief that it caught the photographer unawares.

On this date in 1863 Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address.

Frye in The Educated Imagination:

I often think of a passage in Lincoln’s Gettysburg address: “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”  The Gettysburg address is a great poem, and poets have been saying ever since Homer’s time that they were just following after the great deeds of the heroes, and that it was the deeds which were important and not what they said about them.  So it was right, in a way, it was traditional, and tradition is very important in literature, for Lincoln to say what he did.  And yet it really isn’t true.  Nobody can remember the names and dates of battles unless they make some appeal to the imagination: that is, unless there is some literary reason for doing so.  Everything that happens in time vanishes in time: it’s only the imagination that, like Proust, whom I quoted earlier, can see men as “giants in time.”  (CW 21, 482)

G. B. Shaw

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On this date in 1926 George Bernard Shaw refused to accept the money for his Nobel Prize, saying, “I can forgive Alfred Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.”

Frye cites another famous Shaw quote in conversation with David Cayley:

Cayley: Have you ever wondered whether education is wasted on the young?

Frye: It’s like Bernard Shaw says, “Youth is too valuable to be wasted on the young.”  You’re rather stuck with it.  I think that students at university have many obstacles thrown in their way by the pedantry and misunderstandings of their teachers and so forth, but those are human conflicts.  We all have those.

Video of the Day: “I am going to grad school in English”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obTNwPJvOI8&feature=autofb

There is not much to add to this wry and wintry little video.  It expresses a truth that can just barely be rendered as satire, and a lot of people may find themselves squirming uncomfortably.  The Humanities are under siege like never before.  Not “relevant,” certainly not career stream, and, frankly, priced out the market.  Who is going to run up a debt of tens of thousands of dollars to get a degree in a subject few people care about, and, it needs to be said, is taught in a way that hardly recognizes the subject is in fact literature?

But it wasn’t always so and certainly does not need to be so now.  Here is Frye in a 1979 interview talking about the enduring imaginative value of literature in its social context.  In the background you can unmistakably hear the post-modernist tide rising and beginning to flow under the door:

My own interests have always been centred upon literature itself, upon what might be call the social context of literature, its real function in society.  I was educated in the authentic philistine tradition: literature was something you only concerned yourself with after the day’s work, that is, after you’d earned your living and had success.  Literature was a luxury article, a thing one could easily do without, an amusement to be cultivated only after the real problems had been resolved.  However, when I started to study a truly primitive culture, for example, the culture of the Inuit, a culture in which their problems of survival of food, and of shelter, are very serious and direct, I noted that both poetry and the poetic tradition were for them of vital importance.  The more primitive the society, the more important poetry is for its survival.  In more contemporary societies, complex and sophisticated as they are, literature and life are suffocated under a vast weight of false priorities.

So I decided to study the original functions of literature in order to discover what literature can still do for us today.  In fact, I think an individual participates in society principally through his or her imagination.  In the last hundred years there has been a fracture between appearance and reality, between language and reality.  In the Middle Ages, this division — or fracture — did not exist: symbol and reality, language and reality, were one and the same.  You just have to think of the “realism” of Thomas Aquinas.  However, from Rousseau, Marx, and Freud, we have learned not to trust appearances: we’ve learned to look for the reality which is hidden behind the facade of society and of language.  We have learned to refuse to believe the myths imposed by the authorities because they are patently false and absurd.  The collapse of the myths which make society and authority cohesive has, in turn, provoked a collapse of commitment and faith.  Now it seems to me that literature can help us to disover, behind and beyond the various facades offered by society, the real sources and structures of our personal and collective imagination, and thus of commitment and faith.

So literature itself has always been at the centre of my interests, and that makes me somewhat rare among contemporary literary critics.  Much interesting progress in recent literary criticism, in fact, has come from nonliterary fields, from sectors such as linguistics, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and so on.  Critics such as Roland Barthes, who adopt the conceptual instruments from these sectors, often stray from literature and from criticism — in the narrow sense of the word — towards those other parallel fields.  But I have remained centred on literature–on its role in the creation and transmission of our personal and collective imagination.  (CW 24, 455-6)

(Thanks to the superlative Amanda Etches-Johnson for the tip on the video.)

Video of the Day: “Quantitative Easing Explained”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTUY16CkS-k

Need to know: Quantitative easing.

Matt Taibbi elaborates on the explanation.

A sample:

This video went up on Zero Hedge yesterday, I believe. In the first minute you will want to throw both of these little bears in a sack and drown them, but by the end they win you over. There are so many things about QE that are crazy, but there’s one thing that I’d like to point out in particular. Yes, this is a huge money-printing program with potentially disastrous inflationary consequences. And yes, the influx of all this money could easily distort markets and prices far beyond the extreme distortions we’ve already been dealing with (commodities prices shot through the roof after this latest QE round was announced). But the thing I want to focus on is the subsidy aspect of QE, pointed out in the video. QE is designed to buy Treasuries and other assets, but the Fed does not simply go out and buy Treasuries itself; it does it through its primary dealers, who include of course banks like Goldman, Sachs. The Fed all but announces when it’s going to be doing this buying and in what quantity, which allows the banks to buy up this stuff at lower prices ahead of time and then sell it to the Fed at inflated cost.

Even forgetting about the obvious insider trading aspect to all of this, the official middleman status of the banks is a direct government subsidy and it is little remarked upon, even by the Tea Party crowd, which is otherwise so opposed to “welfare.” But these sorts of subsidies exist all throughout the financial services industry.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohD-WUrMsjE

The famous scene in Crime and Punishment in which Raskolnikov is questioned by detective Porfiry Petrovich.  (From the excellent 2002 BBC adaptation of the novel.)

On this date in 1849 a Russian court sentenced Fyodor Dostoevsky to death for anti-government activities linked to a radical intellectual group; his sentence was later commuted to hard labor.

Frye puts Dostoevsky in very good company in this illuminating moment from Creation and Recreation:

Recently a collection of early reviews of mine was published, and on looking over it I was amused to see how preoccupied I had been then with two writers, Spengler and Frazer, who haunted me contantly, though I was well aware all the time I was studying them that they were rather stupid men and often slovenly scholars.  But I found them, or rather their central visions, unforgettable, while there are hundreds of books by more intelligent and scrupulous people which I have forgotten having read.  Some of them are people who have utterly refuted the claims of Spengler and Frazer to be taken seriously.  But the thinker who was annihilated on Tuesday has to be annihilated all over again on Wednesday: the fortress of thought is a Valhalla, not an abattoir.

This is not merely my own perversity: we all find that it is not only, perhaps not even primarily, the balanced and judicious people that we turn to for insight.  It is also such people as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Holderlin, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, all of them liars in Wilde’s sense of the word, as Wilde was himself.  They were people whose lives got smashed up in various ways, but who rescued fragments from the smash of an intensity that the steady-state people seldom get to hear about.  Their vision is penetrating because it is partial and distorted: it is truthful because it is falsified.  To the Old Testament’s question, “Where shall wisdom be found?’ [Job 28-12] there is often only the New Testament’s answer: “Well, not among the wise, at any rate” [cf. 1 Corinthians 1:19-20].  (CW 4, 39-40)

Quote of the Day: “Nobody to blame, except everybody”

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Thinking about the recent horrors of runaway laissez-faire capitalism and what its alternative might be has brought me around to this entry in one of Frye’s “Third Book” notebooks:

Elie Wiesel, Legends for our Time.  The last chapter, “A Plea for the Dead,” describes how nobody made any real fuss when six million Jews were murdered in Germany.  Nobody to blame, except everybody.  This is the kind of thing that makes it impossible for me to be a Buddhist, to accept ignorance and enlightenment as ultimate categories.  The terrible burden of guilt simply has to be accepted: we can’t cast it off even on Christ.

What we can do about it involves organization — moral organization.  Communism cannot produce this: it’s only the other side of capitalism, and accepts all its economic-man stereotypes.  Teaching people one by one to be more sympathetic is futile.  Western organization is the key, though no Western society has it.  Our fumblings for “participatory democracy” really have as their goal a society in which one almighty yell can go up, almost automatically, when East Pakistan or black Rhodesia or whatever gets out of line with our moral sense.  We don’t really lack moral feelings; what we lack is a social structure in which to embody them.  (CW 9, 321)

In the absence of such a moral social structure we get the Tea Party, which is itself a creation and a tool of a deeply entrenched and self-serving oligarchy.  (That is, the top 1% of the population that owns 38% of the wealth and takes in 25% of the income — and still demands tax cuts.)