Author Archives: Michael Happy

Leonard Cohen

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

The 1965 NFB documentary Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Leonard Cohen

Today is Leonard Cohen‘s birthday (born 1934).

An excerpt from Frye’s 1957 review of Cohen’s first collection of poetry, Let us Compare Mythologies:

The poems are of very unequal merit, but the book as a whole is a remarkable production.  The erotic poems follow the usual convention of stacking up thighs like a Rockette chorus line, and for them Mr. Cohen’s own phrase, “obligations, the formalities of passion,” is comment enough.  But it is an excess of energy rather than a deficiency of it that is his main technical obstacle.  Sometimes moods and images get tangled up with each other and fail to come through to the reader, or allusions to books or paintings distract the attention and muffle the climax, as in Jingle.  In short, this book has the normal characteristics of a good first volume. (CW 12, 165)

A 1979 television performance of “Famous Blue Raincoat” after the jump.

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The Stewart-Colbert Conspiracy

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You really have to ask yourself — with Fox News amping up the lies and the hysteria on a daily basis, with the “mainstream” of the Republican party now so demented that even Karl Rove is muttering nervously about it, and the Teabaggers endorsing a string of totally unqualified (and, one hopes, totally unelectable) candidates for the upcoming midterm elections — would we really have reason enough not to despair without Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert?

Watch Jon announcing his “Rally to Restore Sanity” here.

Watch Stephen announcing his “March to Keep Fear Alive” here.

They will, of course, be held on the same day, and in all likelihood be incorporated into a single event with the finesse that only Jon and Stephen seem capable of.

It’s at crucial moments like this that the masterly eirons in our midst remind us that no bully is too big not to brought down with a well-aimed blow.  (Yes, Glenn, we’re looking at you.)

Magellan

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On this date in 1519 Ferdinand Magellan set sail from Sanlúcar de Barrameda with about 270 men on his expedition to circumnavigate the globe.

Frye in “The Times of the Signs” in Spiritus Mundi:

[W]ith the voyages of Columbus, de Gama and Magellan, humanity as a whole began to realize that the earth was round, and to order their lives on that assumption.  Up till then, the centre of the world had been, as the word itself makes obvious, the Mediterranean, and the people who sat like frogs around a pool, in Plato’s phrase, on the shores of the sea in the middle of the earth.  But after 1492 the nations of the Atlantic sea-board began to realize that it was they who were now in the middle of the world. (66-7)

It’s Witchcraft

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqHpN4SbqVI

Bill Maher on newly designated Delaware Republican senate candidate Christine O’Donnell and her “dabbling into witchcraft.”

One of those odd moments of synchronicity — suddenly the subject of witchcraft is a current event.  Andrew Sullivan’s take on it here.

On a personal note, I watched two horror movies last night, the evening of September 18th: Drag Me to Hell and Paranormal Activity. The star of Drag Me to Hell is Alison Lohman, whose birthday is September 18th (yes, I Wiki’d the movie and then hit her link), and the events of Paranormal Activity commence on. . .September 18th!  What the? Next I’ll be working my way through the Saw series and I’m seriously hoping there’ll be no further “coincidences.”

Salem Witch Trials

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The ugly absurdity and mass hysteria in this kind of thinking is nicely satirized in this famous sequence from Monty Python and the Holy Grail

On this date in 1692 Giles Corey was pressed to death after refusing to plead in the Salem witch trials.

Frye on “witch-finding” in Denham’s Northop Frye Unbuttoned:

Reading Margaret Murray’s book on witchcraft, one can’t believe any part of her argument that assumes an actual religious organization, but that some subconscious demonic parody of Christianity was extracted from all those poor creatures under torture is quite obvious, and its consistency doesn’t surprise me: it’s the same kind of thing primitive tribes produce, often by self-administered torture.  The witch-finder himself was a psychopath, or soon became one by sticking pins all over naked women, and so they were linked in a communal dream. (311)

Saturday Night Video: Brits, 90s

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After the 90s the English influence on North American music goes into an unmistakable decline.  Here are some tunes that were part of the last hurrah.  See “Brits, 80s” here.  Frye’s observations on rock ‘n’ roll here, here, and here.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvkK0mO7fXg&feature=related

My Bloody Valentine, “Soon”

This remarkable band is one of a kind but had a tragically short career that never allowed it to rise above the cult status it still retains.  Rumor has it that the readers of NME in Britain voted Loveless the best album of the decade, but that the editorial staff intervened and replaced it with Radiohead’s OK Computer; a great album to be sure, but maybe they should have left well enough alone.  By the way, the lyrics are supposed to be unintelligible and merely part of the dense of weave of sound that is the band’s hallmark.

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Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

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On this date in 1942 the CBC was authorized.

Frye in “Across the River and out of the Trees”:

I have no space or expertise to tell the story of the golden age of the N[ational] F[ilm] B[oard] and CBC radio in the forties and early fifties.  That has been done before, and it is generally recognized that film and radio are the media of much the best work produced in Canadian culture.  The benefits extended into literature, through radio plays and such programs as “Anthology,” and Andrew Allan and Robert Weaver are names of the same kind of significance in Canadian writing that publishers like Briggs had in the nineteenth century.  Radio has also influenced, I think, the development of a more orally based poetry, more closely related to recitation and a listening audience, and popular in the way that poetry had not been for many centuries.  (CW 12, 560-1)

From the CBC Television archives, “Impressions of Northrop Frye,” first broadcast, September 2, 1973.  (As far as I can tell, this video clip is playable only in Internet Explorer.)

TGIF: “30 Rock”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMKrAR6YBDI

30 Rock season one compilation: “I have been sexually rejected by not one but two guys who later went to clown college”; “I’m not one of those girls who does weird stuff in bed because they think they have to”; “Standing up?  What?  How does that even work?”

More Tina Fey (the woman who conceived the reality series MILF Island: “Twenty-five superhot moms, fifty 8th grade boys, no rules”).  30 Rock season four DVD release September 21.  Season five premiere September 23.

After the jump, a couple of brief but wonderful clips of Liz Lemon dancing.

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United States Constitution

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On this date in 1787 the U.S. Constitution was signed in Philadelphia.

Frye in The Secular Scripture:

America has a genuine social mythology in which beliefs in personal liberty, democracy, and equality before law have a central place.  Every major American writer will be found to have stuck his roots deeply into this serious social mythology, even if he advocates civil disobedience or makes speeches in a country with which America is at war.  Genuine social mythology, whether religious or secular, is also to be transcended, but transcendence here does not mean repudiating or getting rid of it, except in special cases.  It means rather an individual recreation of the mythology, a transforming of it from accepted social values into the axioms of one’s own activity.  (CW 18, 111)

Henry V

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dh0PUihuYUg&feature=related

The hanging of Bardolph in Shakespeare’s Henry V

Yes, there has been a recent post about Henry V, but today is his birthday (1387-1422).

Frye in “A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres” on Shakespeare’s Henry V and the distinction between comedy and tragedy via irony:

There seems to be a far less direct connection between history and comedy: the comic scenes in the histories are, so to speak, subversive.  Henry V ends in triumph and marriage, but an action that kills Falstaff, hangs Bardolph, and debases Pistol is not related to comedy in the way that Richard II is related to tragedy.

But tragic myths are significant in shape as well as social function, as tragedy selects only myths that end in catastrophe, or near it.  Tragedy derives from the auto [mythical Eucharist] of its central heroic figure, but the association of heroism with downfall is due to the presence of another element, an element which, when we isolate it, we call irony.  The nearer tragedy is to the heroic play, the more we feel the incongruous wrongness of it.  These two attitudes are complacency: the feeling of rightness produces terror and the feeling or wrongness pity. The nearer the tragedy is to auto, the closer associated the hero is with divinity; the nearer to irony, the more human the hero is, and the more the catastrophe appears to be a social rather than a cosmological event. Elizabethan tragedy shows a historical development from Marlowe’s demigods in a social ether to Webster’s analysis of a sick society; but Greek tragedy, which never broke completely from the auto, never developed a social form, though there are tendencies to it in Euripides. (CW 21, 108)