http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXlfEagkB-4
“These guys on Wall Street are not winning – they’re cheating.” — Matt Taibbi in a scalding post reacts to the proliferating meme that the OWS protesters are “sore losers,” and provides a dizzying account of the double standard at work in the banking industry: “too big to fail” effectively means that banks have no market value and are completely dependent upon handouts and bailouts, while also stripping “sore losers” to the bone.
One of the things the blogger at thingsiwannashowmygirlfriend is the Frye-Kemp correspondence. This paragraph from one of the letters from Frye to Helen in 1932 caught his attention:
Denied the supreme satisfaction of the bed-sheets, he sublimates himself in letter-sheets. I carried on this literary flirtation with you some years ago, in the first summer I was home and we corresponded. But since I have grown to love you so immeasurably more than I did then, or could then, the ideal lady at the other end of the postal service has become a part of myself, and when I write I am painfully conscious only of your absence. Hence these awkward, stammering, whining, almost illiterate letters.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PsiRxZ39eE
Zuccotti Park yesterday. This is well-assembled footage and provides a real sense of what is happening on the ground. I hope you’ll check out a minute or two of it.
Michael Greenberg in the New York Review of Books has an in-depth report on Occupy Wall Street from the scene. There is no on-the-ground report like this anywhere else. A sample:
At 7:30 PM, near the People’s Library, the General Assembly convened. There were about five hundred of us and, as far as I could tell, we were all members for as long as we hung around. From their perch atop the wall on the northeast section of the park, two young women moderated the meeting. “Mike check!” one of the women cried, and with a unison roar the crowd repeated her words. This was “the people’s mike,” used in lieu of bullhorns, megaphones, or other amplification devices that were prohibited because the protesters had no permit. When the crowd has to repeat every word, it shows; for example, during a speech by the Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz, things slowed down. But in the large crowd the repetition created a kind of euphoria of camaraderie. It also put you in the oddly disturbing position at times of shouting at full voice something you neither agreed with nor would ever have thought on your own.
On the agenda was the march to Foley Square the next day, but first the moderators wanted to know “if there are any concerns about our process.” For newcomers, the process was patiently explained, each phrase shouted back at the speaker as if to cheer her on. Anyone can submit a proposal to the General Assembly. To pass it must have 90 percent support judged by a show of hands, at which point it may be published online or in The Occupied Wall Street Journal. We were coached in the hand gestures that are the silent coded language of the protest. If you raised your hands over your head and wiggled your fingers like a partygoer in a group dance, it meant you agreed with what had just been said. Other gestures conveyed ambivalence, disagreement, and finally the blocking signal—a severe locking of forearms that, we were instructed, should be used only if you had “serious ethical concerns” with what was being proposed.
*
Anne-Marie Slaughter, the well-known Princeton professor of international affairs, writing in The New York Times, points out that from the first days of Occupy Wall Street news outlets in the Middle East paid close attention. Referring to the Tunisian vendor whose self-immolation set off the Arab Spring, she writes:
Go to the Web site “We Are the 99 percent” and you will see the Mohamed Bouazizs of the United States, page after page of testimonials from members of the middle class who took out mortgages to pay for education, took out mortgages to buy their houses…worked hard at the jobs they could find, and ended up…on the precipice of financial and social ruin.
The protesters in Zuccotti Park seem to have heralded the membership of a significant portion of our population in a new form of Third World, a development that our media and government appear to have been the last to absorb.
Berkeley physicist, Richard Muller, until last week was the darling of the denialist community. However, after conducting his own study, funded in part by the Koch brothers, he recanted his skepticism and acknowledged that global warming is a scientifically proven fact. Needless to say, the right now angrily shuns him.
The Economist has a full report here.
All of the articles in our journal are now formatted in downloadable, searchable, cut-and-paste-capable PDF.
Margaret Atwood in extended conversation at Emory University last year where she delivered the Ellmann Lecture, “Science Fiction and Human Imagination.”
The Globe and Mail and The Star have articles on Margaret Atwood’s new collection, In Other Worlds, that make reference to her relationship to Frye. The Telegraph fills in a little more detail.
A previous post on Frye and Atwood here.
Goddamned hippies in Austin, Texas
Andrew Sullivan in The Daily Beast:
The revolts in the West require nothing of the courage displayed by Egyptians or Syrians or Tunisians standing up to tanks and bullets and torture. But they have a similar dynamic. They have occupied public spaces in the center of cities, as if to reclaim ownership of a society they feel has been privatized into nonexistence. This is not Protest Wall Street; it is Occupy It. It does not march through; it stops and sits and waits—as if the genie of Tahrir Square could not be kept bottled up in Egypt for very long. The very act is empowering, a form of theater as well as politics. But the theater works only when it reflects underlying truths—truths that cut through cultural divides. Because this is not the 1960s. These are not the children of the affluent acting out for sexual and personal liberation. They are the children of the golden years of hyped-up, unregulated, lightly taxed capitalism—now facing the same unemployment and austerity as the rest of the world.
And that’s why polls have shown unusual support for the basic complaints of the hippies. The Occupy movement has, according to recent polling, significantly more general support than the Tea Party, and its specific demands are highly popular. Huge majorities agree that corporate special interests have too much clout in Washington, that inequality has gotten out of control, that taxes can and should be raised on the successful, that the gamblers of Wall Street deserve some direct comeuppance for the wreckage they have bestowed on the rest of us. Polling data do not show a salient cultural split between blue-collar whites and the countercultural drum circles in dozens of cities around America. And the facts are behind the majority position. Social and economic inequality is higher than it has been since the 1920s, and is showing no signs of declining.
Wolf’s account of her illegal arrest and detention here.
Frye on police power in a free society:
But in an atmosphere of real fear and real suspicion the police must become both more efficient and more tolerant if they are to be of any use in defending democracy. Otherwise, they will be not only unjust to individuals, but dangerous to their own community. (Canadian Forum 29, no. 346 [November 1949]: 170)
I posted on riot grrrl a couple of weeks ago, so I don’t want to push my luck, but I only heard this week that Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex died of cancer in April at the age of 53. Poly was one of the few women who were part of the English punk offensive when it hit North America in the mid-1970s like a blast of hot, sour air from an unventilated pub.
Above is an excellent segment about Poly from the British documentary, The Punk Years. If you don’t know her, it is a pleasant and insightful four minutes of video.
After the jump is a do-it-yourself, live-in-someone’s-basement performance of “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!” from 1977, when Poly was 19. (This single was followed a year later by the band’s debut album with the inspired title, Germ Free Adolescents, the best cut from which, “The Day the World Turned Day-Glo,” is also after the jump.) Poly had a classical vocal training, but she used her voice to be noisily and cheerfully insolent about a world of mindless consumption and the human and environmental waste it produces.
(Executing a lateral move in pertinence, here’s Joe Fasler in The Atlantic on the horizontal transfer between “high” and “low” culture.)
Bob with his wife, Rachel
Today is Bob Denham’s birthday.
We do not have to say much about Bob’s extensive work as a scholar because anyone who knows him knows about it. However, we do have much to say about Bob’s contribution here. Bob, more than anyone else, has made this website what it is. It was easy enough to set it up in its present form: a daily blog, a library of resources, and a journal of articles about Frye. But all of these would have been shells without Bob’s extraordinarily generous contribution. This generosity is worth detailing.
Bob has so far submitted more than 200 posts to the daily blog portion of the site in the two years since we first went online, which is a remarkable effort in itself. The blog is put together daily on the fly, and Bob’s posts provide the best that can be accomplished on such short notice; and they are, not surprisingly, the most widely read. As a very modest birthday present to him, we have designated a new Bob Denham category, which means that anyone wanting to search out and read his archived posts can now do so without having to scroll through the daily entries looking for them.
Bob has also kindly archived six articles in our journal, including papers he delivered at three Frye Festivals in Moncton.
His greatest contribution, however, that makes this site a significant scholarly resource, is his patronage of the library we established under his name, and which currently holds more than 100 items, virtually every one of them bequeathed to us by Bob. These include:
* An archive of all ten volumes of Bob’s Northrop Frye Newsletter, which he published between 1988 and 2007.
* Several “Previously Unpublished” items, including two notebooks, and a number of letters, among other treasures.
* Ten sets of class notes, as well as some exams, from a number of Frye’s courses between 1947 and 1955. This is a singular resource to provide insights to Frye as a teacher.
* All nine of the introductions to the editions of the Collected Works Bob has edited, which make up a third of the Collected Works as a whole.
* Four lectures.
* A large sampling of reviews of a number of Frye’s works.
* Thirteen “Miscellaneous Compilations” on various subjects, including chess, Islam and the Koran, and movies Frye had seen and refers to throughout the Collected Works.
If it ended here, this would constitute an exceptional contribution to the Frye scholarship to be found here. But it does not, of course, end here. Bob has also allowed us to post in their entirety two books: his first comprehensive study, Northrop Frye and Critical Method, as well as his latest collection, Essays on Northrop Frye, which includes seven new essays on Frye’s relation to a number of thinkers and writers, from Aristotle to Lewis Carroll.
It is not just a courtesy to say that without him this site would not be much more than a hobby shop of Frye enthusiasm. We therefore offer our warmest thanks, and wish him a very happy birthday.