Author Archives: Michael Happy

Frye Alert

Leave a reply

complitbanner

Below is a post today at BlogTO:

News Flash

Amalgamation causes unrest at University of Toronto

Posted by Robyn Urback / July 27, 2010

Get this–uproar at a university that actually has something to do with the university!

Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto has proposed sweeping changes to U of T’s largest faculty, which will see six humanities programs consolidated into one school.

The new School of Languages and Literatures is being considered as a way to offset the faculty’s $55 million of debt. The new school, or SLLUT (School of Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto, as to it is so affectionately referred on dissenting online forums), will merge the existing Italian, German, East Asian Studies, Spanish and Portuguese, and Slavic languages departments, as well as the Centre for Comparative Literature, which was founded by Northrop Frye.

Many students, as well as faculty at the University of Toronto, are opposed to the amalgamation, anticipating an intellectual “step backwards.”

“U of T used to have a reputation for being very conservative, and it’s about to have that reputation again,” said Linda Hucheon, professor at the Centre for Comparative Literature. “We will try to make a case for not getting rid of a major discipline within the university. “We’re not going down without a bit of a fight.”

Students have set up petitions, websites, and a Facebook group opposing the changes. Final approval for the new school will be sought in the fall.

Johann Sebastian Bach

Leave a reply

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnyXgcoQl-A

From the Matthaeus Passion

On this date J.S. Bach died (1685-1750).

Frye on the Matthaeus Passion:

In the twenty years I’ve been listening to the Passion, I’ve changed my mind about it.  I used to feel that the narration was something to sit through, & one waited for the arias and the choruses.  Now I feel that the work is primarily narration, as the arias & choruses, with greater familiarity, fall into the background as commentaries.  This, of course, brings out its real tragic structure, as it’s like Greek tragedy, not only in its use of chorus, but in its reporting of events.  Even Christ, even though he does his own singing, is contained within the narration.  (Cited in Robert Denham, Frye Unbuttoned, 18-19)

Gertrude Stein

Leave a reply

picasso-gertrude stein

Picasso’s famous portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1905-6.  When someone noted that the portrait did not look like her, Picasso reportedly replied, “Yes, but it will.”

On this date Gertude Stein died (1874-1946).

Frye in one of the “Third Book” notebooks:

Ultimately there is a moral conflict between the art that shocks & outrages us & the mass media that tries to accustomize us & desensitize us.  I’ve often spoken of Gertrude Stein as a practitioner of an associative style, but there’s every difference between that & the Dick & Jane readers with their phony pumped-up excitement (“Run, Jim, Run”) which educate for the reading of advertising, with its exclamatory exhortations.  The slogan is the demonic opposite of the koan or text, or formulaic pattern.  (CW 9, 120)

Frye Alert: Who is Professor Mondo?!

Leave a reply

path

The little we know is intriguing.  He is, in his own words, a “dad, husband, mostly free individual, medievalist, writer, and drummer.”  He very reassuringly quotes Chaucer: “Gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.”   Even more reassuringly, he’s a fan of Frye.  His blog’s banner rather enigmatically features this quote from the superior 80’s teen comedy Better off Dead: “Once a champion, now a study of moppishness.”  Like the movie’s protagonist, played by John Cusack, the professor may be a quasi-tragic figure, who by necessity moves furtively and unappreciated through the hushed halls of academe. Most of this, of course, is irresponsible speculation.

You can find the good professor here.  His lead post today is “How Twigs Get Bent: Northrop Frye,” which talks about his growing interest in Frye both as a medievalist and as a fan of detective fiction.  He also mentions discovering our website.  I’ve bookmarked him and intend to read him daily.  I hope you’ll do the same.

Carl Jung

Leave a reply

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOxlZm2AU4o

Today is Carl Jung‘s birthday (1875-1961).

Frye in conversation with David Cayley:

Cayley: How does your use of the term archetype relate to the way, say, Carl Jung uses it?

Frye: I used the term archetype because it was a traditional term in criticism, though not many people had run across it.  But I didn’t realize at the time that Jung had monopolized the term and that everyone would think I was a Jungian critic because I used it.  I’m dealing with a world that is intermediate between the subjective psychological world and the social world, the objective or natural world.  That is, I don’t think in terms of subject contemplating an object.  I think of a world of metaphor, where the subject and object have fused, the world of myth and metaphor.  The old-fashioned term for it was beauty.  It’s the world where emotion is relevant, where the categories of beauty and ugliness are relevant, where you don’t look for objective truth and you don’t look for subjective turmoil.  What I don’t want to do is to reduce criticism to something subjective and psychological.  Jung’s archetypes are powerful within the soul, and they have very intimate and very fascinating analogies to some of the conventional characters of literature, but Jung’s treatment of literature, I think, is barbaric, and most of the Jungians don’t seem to be much better.  (77)

Video of the Day: Andy Warhol Eats a Hamburger

Leave a reply

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaf6zF-FJBk

But is it art?

Yes.

And if you have any doubt about that, go to YouTube and have a look at the outraged comments of some of the viewers.  If they’re this angry over something so innocuous and mundane — and a number of them are very angry — then something meaningfully disturbing is happening here.  A sample: “I mean WTF?!?” and “This is the ugliest thing I have ever seen” (which is not, of course, beside the point).

Frye makes just a couple of references to Andy Warhol, and they are made, interestingly enough, to illustrate a larger and more important point he is trying to get across to his readers.

Here he is in Words with Power, for example, with reference to ecstatic metaphor:

This is an intensification of the imagery that imitates the descriptive mode, an emphasis on the “thingness” of the objective world, which we find in, for example, Beckett’s Watt and Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes, and in William Carlos Williams’s insistence on “not ideas about things but the thing itself,” also the title of a poem by Wallace Stevens.  In various forms of painting, such as the pop art of Andy Warhol and in the popularity of Zen Buddhism, with its technique of training one to see, not another world but the same world with a new intensity, there are parallel developments.

And with that in mind, here’s one more comment from a viewer at YouTube:

Honestly, sometimes I think these artistic so-called geniuses just do whatever the fuck passes through their heads and then try to pass it off as hip and edgy. But at the end of the day, kids, it’s just a guy eating a hamburger.

Well, the “end of the day” could also just be the darkness before the dawn, if we insist upon resorting to those kinds of cliches.  For example, after the jump you’ll find six minutes of Warhol’s eight hour film Empire.  (And, by a remarkable coincidence, tonight is the 46th anniversary of its filming.)

Continue reading →

Samuel Coleridge

Leave a reply

coleridge_st_02

On this date Samuel Coleridge died (1772-1834).

Frye in “Rencontre: the General Editor’s Introduction”

Coleridge took over from Spinoza the distinction between natura naturata, nature as structure or system, and natura naturans, nature as creative process, and all his philosophy turns on the superiority and priority of the latter.  The importance of this for literature is mainly in the new status given to the poet, or the artist or creative person generally, as a result.  As long as it is assumed, in Sir Thomas Browne’s phrase, “Nature is the art of God,” the poet cannot be more than an imitator of nature at one remove, and of God at two removes.  Man’s creative power is at best a faint shadow of the power that made the realities of the world.  But for Coleridge, and increasingly for Romantic writers, man’s creative power does not imitate a structure of things out there, but participates in the organic structure of nature.  The poet creates, first, because he is alive and participates in the being of God (primary imagination), and second, because creation is the highest effort of conscious life. (CW , 121) L&S

Saturday Night Video: New York Underground

Leave a reply

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

Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs “Maps”

New York, if it hasn’t always been the home of alternative music, seems always to have been home base — the place you’ve got to get to if you want to score.  Los Angeles has reliably turned out commercially viable music for decades.  But New York has just as reliably been the proving ground for the artistically adventurous but commercially tenuous: from the Velvet Underground to Patti Smith to Talking Heads to The Strokes and the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs.  And, oh yes, a tatty little punk band from Queens — the borderline-unlistenable Ramones — famously began their tour of Britain on July 4th, 1976 and ignited the culture-shifting punk movement there: almost as though the American Revolution had returned to its roots and left in its wake an entire subculture.

What has always defined the New York underground is the notoriously indefinable attribute of cool, an elusive combination of something and something-or-other.  It is tough and street smart, but has a surprisingly nostalgic streak manifested by poignant tunes with inviting sing-a-long choruses (see, for example, Karen O in the video above, apparently swallowing her grief throughout before spontaneously releasing one lone tear late in the song).  How?  Why?  It’s evidently life in the big city — you take it as it comes, but invariably take it home with you.  The key to it is irony, which, as Frye says, is the point at which we rather unexpectedly return to myth.

It would have made sense to present these songs in chronological order, but in this case it seemed more appropriate to begin in the present and move back to origins, if only to remind ourselves just how clever and variable and consistent the New York underground has always been.

If I may plug just one of these videos, it is Talking Heads’ “And She Was.”  As art school nerds, Talking Heads were as much interested in the visual as the musical, so their videos are always superior.  This particular video is 25 years old, but you’d never know that to see it.  It perfectly captures the whimsy of a song about a suburban housewife who possesses an unexplained ability to fly.

Continue reading →