Spencer Boersma reviews Frye’s The Educated Imagination here.
“After Orthodoxy?”
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Author Archives: Michael Happy
TGIF: “1/2 Hour News Hour”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjIfaMwIFxU
The ill-fated “conservative” “comedy” show, The 1/2 Hour News Hour. Even though the show had the inexhaustable resources of Fox News working for it (as well as a vast, angry and ill-informed audience), it was only good for fourteen episodes before being cancelled.
Is this really comedy or is it just hack work, an astonishingly unfunny rip-off of SNL’s classic Weekend Update, not to mention The Daily Show and The Colbert Report? Is it possible that it is unfunny because it was running an ideological agenda first and attempting comedy second? And could it be that the witless surliness of it derives from the fact that its targets — unlike SNL, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report, which take on all comers — were exclusively on what it assumed to be the “wrong” side of the political divide?
We report. You decide.
Videos of the Day: Plus ça change
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYymnxoQnf8
William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal during the 1968 Democratic convention: “Now listen you queer, stop calling me a crypto-nazi, or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face.”
In a recent post, Andrew Sullivan produced this quote and made this observation:
“Some people say I’m extreme, but they said the John Birch Society was extreme, too,” – Kelly Khuri, founder, Clark County Tea Party Patriots. And William F Buckley rolls in his grave.
But does he really? Buckley had a notorious reputation for nastiness (just a couple of examples here and here) that seems to be pretty consistent with what now passes for mainstream “conservatism,” as the infamous exchange above demonstrates. What was shocking back then is just business as usual today.
To wit:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrNl6-j9x5w
Jean-Paul Sartre
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lFLO16TRPQ&feature=related
A Sartre and de Beauvoir screener from the 1950s.
On this date in 1964 Jean-Paul Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he refused.
Frye in notebook 12 offers a qualified estimation of Sartre as the last of the “great thinkers” (elsewhere he calls him “an intellectual juvenile delinquent”):
I had the usual childish fantasies, when very young, of wanting to be a “great man” — fantasies that in our day only Churchill had realized. But Churchill’s greatness was archaic: his funeral really buried that whole conception of greatness as a goal of ambition. Then I had fantasies of wanting to be a great composer & a great novelist–both obsolete conceptions today. The novel is breaking up into other forms & is no longer central as it was in the 19th c: the great composers ended with Bartok, and Boulez & Varese & Cage are not “great composers,” they’re something else. When I settled into my real line I naturally wanted to be “great” there too: but maybe greatness is obsolete. In the 19th century one wants to read Hegel & Marx & Kierkegaard & Nietzsche; are there really any 20th c. equivalents of that kind of “great thinker”? Maybe Sartre. But something about greatness ended around 1940. We’re doing different things now. Marshall McLuhan is a typical example: a reputation as a great thinker that doesn’t think at all. (CW 9, 146)
Pictures of the Day: Oldest Galaxy, Oldest Door
Dizzy Gillespie
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg1Wl-NmzWg
“Salt Peanuts” (with Charlie Parker on sax): the tune that in 1945 blew open the bebop era with maximum bop
Today is Dizzy Gillespie‘s birthday (1917-1993).
“Forensics of a Straw Man Pharmakos in Northrop Frye’s ‘Theory of Modes'”
That’s the title of an article by Rickard Goranowski published in The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management.
You can purchase it here.
The abstract:
Jacques Derrida in 1981, in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy,’ confronted the inveterate Northrop Frye over the 1971 Critical Path as a “pharmakos” or ‘rascal traducer’: Frye’s ‘straw man’ misprision of the Sidney-Peacock-Shelley controversy belittling Peacock and Shelley was obliquely identified by Derrida, in Pharmacy’s first paragraphs, prosecuting Frye’s undue influence on university publishing and tenure management.
Quote of the Day: “Nothing was undeniably out of the window”
We’re being spammed pretty heavily these days with solicitations like these two from Poland. It’s like found poetry:
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Thank you Google Translate for your remarkable linguistic prowess. Or rather (from English to Yiddish to Hindi to Finnish to English): “Thanks to Google’s translation of their language skills are important.”
Jonathan Swift
On this date Jonathan Swift died (1667-1745).
Frye in “On Special Occasions”:
A profoundly Christian writer, Jonathan Swift, remarked that men have just enough religion to make them hate, but not enough to make them love one another. To which we may add that those who have no religion at all don’t seem to hate any less on that account. (CW 4, 324)
How Many Canadians Use American Health Care?
Every year my parents winter in Florida, and every year they are buttonholed by Americans who insist on telling them how bad Canadian health care is, and then get sniffy when assured that, no, no, it’s fine, the service is reliable and comprehensive and safe; no long waits, no preventable deaths caused by waiting. Like universal health care everywhere else in the developed world, Canadian Medicare is vastly superior to the American system when it comes to access and cost of delivery (about half what it costs the Americans). The Republicans are of course responsible for the canard that Canadian health care is all about nightmarish waiting lists, and that as a result desperate Canadian patients flood the U.S. border in search of relief (Republicans also insist on calling our system “socialized medicine,” which it is not). Over the years they’ve successfully twisted the reality to fit their propagandized version of it for cynical, self-serving reasons.
But the quantifiable reality of the situation may startle even Canadians. You can see it at a glance after the jump.