Author Archives: Michael Happy

Moby Dick

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryIK9TLAoAs

The finale of the film adaptation of the novel.  Pardon the occasionally laughable special effects: it was 1956.

On this date in 1851 Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was first published.

Frye makes a fair number of references to the novel, but this one in Anatomy is particularly resonant because it relates the archetype to its entire mythical family and suggests what this might mean both to the reader and to the writer who engages it:

If we do not accept the archetypal or conventional element in the imagery that links one poem to another, it is impossible to get any systematic mental training out of the reading of literature alone.  But if we add to our desire to know literature a desire to know how we know it, we shall find that expanding images into conventional archetypes of literature is a process that takes place unconsciously in all our reading.  A symbol of the sea or heath cannot remain within Conrad or Hardy: it is bound to expand over many works into an archetypal symbol of literature as a whole.  Moby Dick cannot remain in Melville’s novel: he is absorbed into our imaginative experience of leviathans and dragons of the deep from the Old Testament onward.  And what is true for the reader is a fortiori true of the poet, who learns very quickly that there is no singing school for his soul except the study of the monuments of its own magnificent.  (CW 22, 93)

Sun TV News: Done

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Sorry to be a little late to the party

It’s quite a come down. From in-your-face arrogance to a total retreat in a matter of a few months, the big money behind Quebecor’s determination to set up a Fox news North is now looking pretty humble.

There’s no doubt that part of this is overreach on the part of Pierre Karl Peladeau and his junkyard-dog front man Kory Teneycke.  But mostly it is a huge victory for every Canadian who took time to write, email, phone or other wise protest this grotesque plan to move Canadian political culture to the far right. And a victory in particular for Avaaz the on-line social movement that flushed Teneycke and his bully tactics into the open.

We should all celebrate – maybe by donating to your favourite on-line journal.

Teneycke got a tad ahead of himself having come so recently from the PMO where he was accustomed to having virtually dictatorial powers to use government auhtority in Harper’s interests.

It turns out that the ability to bully a nation as a private corporate citizen isn’t quite so easy.

Teneycke is now still licking his wounds and is hiding from public view hoping that people – including those who might otherwise have employed him – will forget what an idiot he was and what a liability he would be to any public project in the future.

As for Peladeau his enormous wealth – he is a billionaire – hasn’t prevented him from being humbled by citizen action against his plan. Of course he can’t hide his arrogance.  He told reporters outside the Canadian Club in Ottawa that his company, Sun Media would now withdraw a request for a special license that would force cable companies to offer his station (now barely on the radar of any audience) in at least some of their packages.

“We’ve decided to go with the policies of the CRTC,” said a Quebecor spokesman..

Big of them – as if obeying the law of the land was optional for Daddy Big Bucks.

His statement indicated that they will simply ask for the ordinary license which means cable companies can take his TV network or leave it.

It put the lie to Peladeau’s previous alarmist declaration by which he attempted to pressure the CRTC. In August, he declared that failing to get his favoured status would be a disaster: “This would be fatal to our business case … and would likely result in the cancellation of the Sun TV News project.”

It’s a sweet victory. Savour it.

Quotes of the Day: Wilde on Art

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If with the literate I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.
Dorothy Parker

Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Oscar Wilde

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Today  is Oscar Wilde‘s birthday (1854-1900).

Frye was a great admirer of Wilde (see especially Creation and Recreation), and there are any number of quotes that could be cited today, but this one from The Secular Scripture will do:

The beginning of a new kind of criticism is marked by Oscar Wilde’s The Decay of Lying, which explains very lucidly that, as life has no shape and literature has, literature is throwing away its one distinctive quality when it tries to imitate life.  It follows for Wilde that what is called realism does not create but can only record things at a subcreative level:

“M. Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire.  Who cares for the Second Empire now?  It is out of date.  Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of life.”

Wilde was clearly the herald of a new age in literature, which would take another century or so to penetrate the awareness of critics.  He was looking forward to a culture which would use mythical and romantic formulas in its literature with great explicitness, making once more the essential discovery about the human imagination, that it is always a form of “lying,” that is, turning away from the descriptive use of language and the correspondence form of truth.  (45-6)

TGIF: “What Happens When You Slow Down a Justin Bieber Song by 800%?”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2ozuCXpVJY

From Gawker:

Justin Bieber is very popular. Lots of people love her songs! One of Bieber’s most popular tunes is called “U Smile.” But what happens when one slows it down by 800%? Well, it becomes a haunting, 36-minute Enya-like thingy. Seriously.

“Her songs.”  Funny.  But the audio is, as unlikely as it sounds, the best stoner music probably since Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” — you know, side two (as it was then) of Meddle.  The magic can be heard here.

The actual song above.

An earlier post, “Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber,” here.

Virgil

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Today is Virgil‘s birthday (70 BCE-19 BCE).

Frye in The Secular Scripture:

This attitude [of identification between authors] has recently revived as a form of existential criticism.  Its method is brilliantly satirized in Borges’ story of Pierre Menard, whose life’s work it was to rewrite a couple of chapters of Don Quixote, not by copying them, but by total identification with Cervantes.  Borges quotes a passage from Cervantes and a passage from Menard which is identical with it to the letter, and urges us to see how much more historical resonance there is in the Menard copy.  The satire shows us clearly that nothing will get around the fact that writer and reader are different entities in time and space, that whenever we read anything, even a letter from a friend, we are translating it into something else.  Dante tells us that he could never have gone through hell and purgatory without the instruction of Virgil.  Virgil, many centuries later, when interviewed by Anatole France in Elysium, complained that Dante had totally misunderstood him.  Without going in quite the same direction that some critics have done, I think it is true that this is how the recreating of the literary tradition often has to proceed: through a process of absorption followed by misunderstanding, that is, establishing a new context.  Thus an alleged misunderstanding of Ovid produced a major development in medieval poetry, and some later romance is bound up with such phrases as “Gothic revival” and “Celtic twilight,” misunderstandings of earlier ages that never existed.  (162-3)

Battle of Hastings

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Death of Harold (centre), Bayeux Tapestry

On this date in 1066 William the Conqueror defeated Harold II in the Battle of Hastings to become King of England.

Okay, yes, it’s a stretch — and the reference is only incidental — but I’ll use any excuse to cite Frye where he is most accessible on the unique authority of literature.  And it’s remarkable, isn’t it, how often we come across extraordinarily lucid passages like this one from The Educated Imagination:

We can understand though how the poet got his reputation as a kind of licensed liar.  The word poet itself means liar in some languages, and the words we use in literary criticism, fable, fiction, myth, have all come to mean something we can’t believe.  Some parents in Victorian times wouldn’t let their children read novels because they weren’t “true.”  But not many reasonable people today would deny that the poet is entitled to change whatever he likes when he uses a theme from history or real life.  The reason why was explained long ago by Aristotle.  The historian makes specific and particular statements as: “The battle of Hastings was fought in 1066.”  Consequently he’s judged by the truth or falsehood of what he says — either there was such a battle or there wasn’t, and if there was he’s got the date either right or wrong.  But the poet, Aristotle says, never makes any real statements at all, certainly no particular or specific ones.  The poet’s job is not to tell you what happened, but what happens: not what did take place, but the kind of thing that always takes place.  (35)