Category Archives: Anniversaries

October Crisis

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXRE_7HzLEQ&p=F099808DD2571B77&playnext=1&index=15

An NFB documentary about the October Crisis

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the October Crisis, which began with the kidnapping of British Trade Commisioner James Cross by the FLQ, or the Front de Liberation du Quebec.

Frye in the Preface to The Bush Garden:

Quebec in particular has gone through an exhilerating and, for the most part, emancipating social revolution.  Separatism is the reactionary side of this revolution: what it really aims at is a return to the introverted malaise in which it began, when Quebec’s motto was je me souviens and its symbols were those of the habitant rooted to his land with his mother church over his head, and all the rest of the blood-and-soil bit.  One cannot go back to the past historically, but the squalid neo-Fascism of the FLQ terrorists indicates that one can always do so psychologically.  (CW 12, 415)

Matthew Bible

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On this date in 1537 the first complete English-language Bible based upon Greek and Hebrew sources, the Matthew Bible, was published, with translations by William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale.

Frye in Symbolism in the Bible:

Already in the Middle Ages, the question had arisen of translating the Bible into the vernacular (or modern) languages.  It was resisted by authorities of the Church establishment, partly because the issue very soon got involved with reform movements within the Church.  One of these reform movements was led in England by John Wyclif, a contemporary of Chaucer in the fourteenth century.  His disciples, working mainly after his death, produced an English translation of the entire Bible, which was of course a translation of the Vulgate Latin text, not of the Greek and Hebrew.  Nevertheless, the Wycliffe Bible became the basis for all future English translations.  In the sixteenth century, the Protestant Reformation broke out in Germany under Luther, and one of Luther’s major efforts to consolidate his position was to make a complete German translation of the Bible, which became among other things the cornerstone of modern German literature.

Similar efforts were made in England.  Henry VIII, you remember, declared himself to be head of the Church, but didn’t want to make any alteration to Church doctrine, so he amused himself in his later years by executing Protestants for heresy and Catholics for denying his claim to be head of the Church.  Thus, William Tyndale, the first person to work on the translation of the Bible into English from Greek and Hebrew sources, was a refugee and had to work on the Continent.  Eventually he was caught by Henry’s goon squad and transported back to England where he was burned at the stake along with copies of his Bible.  Henry VIII, with that versatility of intention which is often found in people who have tertiary syphilis, had begun his reign by being called “Defender of the Faith” by the Pope, because he had written a pamphlet attacking Martin Luther–that is to say, his minister Sir Thomas More had written it but Henry had signed it.  However, as “Defender of the Faith,” he changed his mind about what faith he was going to defend, and in the last years of his reign the English Bible in the hands of various other translators, including Miles Coverdale, had become established as the official Bible for the Church of England for which he was now the head.  (CW 13, 420)

Janis Joplin

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjD4eWEUgMM

Joplin singing “Cry Baby” at Varsity Stadium, University of Toronto, June 1970, barely three months before her death.  A beautiful, heartbreaking performance: heartbreaking because you can see her unravelling around the edges and hear that mighty voice threatening to break here and there, and she’s only 26 years old. The sound is excellent, and the cameraman gets it right — he stays focused on that remarkably expressive face for most of the performance.

Today is the fortieth anniversary of Janis Joplin‘s death (born 1943).

Edgar Allan Poe

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wj1DRQs9AQ

“The Raven” read by Christopher Walken

On this date in 1848  Edgar Allan Poe was found delirious in a gutter in Baltimore, Maryland under mysterious circumstances; it was the last time he was seen in public before his death.

Frye in “The Survival of Eros in Poetry”:

Occasionally one discovers a writer who is not satisfied to inhabit his world unconsciously, or by instinct, or whatever the right term is.  Thus Poe’s Eureka is an essay on speculative cosmology which sounds as though it were using scientific or philosophical language, but which Poe himself says at the beginning he wishes to be considered as a poetic product.  Paul Valery’s note on Eureka remarks that cosmology is primarily a literary art: it is based, not on scientific or philosophical ideas of its time, but on metaphorical  analogies to them that appeal to poets.  The purpose of such cosmologies is to give us some notion of the kind of context within which literature is operating, the imaginative counterpart of the worlds explored by intellect and sensation.  Since then a good many such speculative cosmologies have emerged, some disguised as historical or scientific treatises, and eventually, one hopes, we shall have a clearer notion of what kind of world our creative writers are living in. (CW 18, 266)

Nuremburg

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcudlm6tPa0&feature=related

Footage of the sentencing of the Nazi leadership

On this date in 1946 the surviving Nazi leaders were sentenced at the Nuremburg Trials.

Frye in “The Knowledge of Good and Evil”:

The Nuremberg and other Nazi trials even raised the question whether a (necessarily hopeless) resistance to the demands of a perverted social order was not only morally but legally binding, and whether one who did not make such a resistance could be considered a criminal. It was feared at the time, no doubt correctly, that the nations who prosecuted these trials would not show enough moral courage to respect this principle where their own interests were involved. In contrast, the more powerful the social structure, the more apt one’s loyalty to it is  modulated from concern to concerned indifference.  The enemy become not people to be defeated, but embodiments to be exterminated.  (Stubborn Structure, 28-9)

Henry IV

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

The closing moments of Shakespeare’s Richard II: the death of Richard and rebellion against the new king, Henry IV

On this date in 1399 Henry Bolingbroke became Henry IV of England after deposing Richard II.

Frye on Shakespeare’s Richard II and 1 Henry IV:

Richard II was, we said, written entirely in verse, the reason being that the action is centred on what is practically a ritual, or inverted ritual: the deposing of a lawful king and the crowning of the successor who has forced him out.  At the beginning of Henry IV, the hangover has set in.  Bolingbroke, realizing that there is nothing worse for a country than a civil war, has determined at the outset to get started on a crusade.  The idea, we said, was partly that God would forgive anyone anything, even the deposing of an anointed kind, if he went on a crusade.  But even more, an external enemy unites a country instead of dividing it.  Shortly before his death, Henry IV tells Prince Henry that when he becomes king he should make every effort to get a foreign war started, so that the nobles will be interested in killing foreigners instead of intriguing against each other and the king — advice Prince Henry is not slow to act on.  But at this point the new king’s authority is not well enough established for a foreign war, much less a crusade.  Henry finds that there are revolts against him in Scotland and Wales, and that many of the lords who backed him against Richard II are conspiring against him now.  So Henry IV contains a great deal of prose, because this play is taking a much broader survey of English society, and showing the general slump in morale of a country whose chain of command has so many weak links.  Falstaff speaks very early of “old father antic the law,” and both the Eastcheap group and the carriers and ostlers in the curious scene at the beginning of the second act illustrate that conspiracy, at all levels, is now in fashion.  (On Shakespeare, 69-70)

Toronto

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Richmond Street Methodist Church, Toronto, 1867

On this date in 1867 Toronto became the capital of Ontario.

I haven’t found the source yet, but I know for sure Frye once dryly observed of “Toronto the Good” during the 1930s: “A good place to mind your own damn business.”

On the other hand, Toronto at its best seems, for Frye, to be a touchstone for the cosmopolitan society Canada appears determined to become.  From “Canadian Culture Today”:

When I first came to Toronto, in 1929, it was a homogeneous Scotch-Irish town, dominated by the Orange Order, and greatly derided by the rest of Canada for its smugness, its snobbery, and its sterility.  The public food in restaurants and hotels was of very indifferent quality, as it is in all right-thinking Anglo-Saxon communities.  After the war, Toronto took in immigrants to the extent of nearly a quarter of its population, and large Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Central European, West Indian communities grew up within it.  The public food improved dramatically.  More important, these communities all seemed to find their own place in the larger community with a minimum of violence and tension, preserving in their own cultures and yet taking part in  the total one.  It has seemed to me that this very relaxed absorption of minorities, where there is no concerted effort at a “melting pot,” has something to do with what the Queen symbolizes, the separation of the head of state from the head of government.  Because Canada was founded by two peoples, nobody could ever know what a hundred per cent Canadian was, and hence the decentralizing rhythm that is so essential to culture had room to expand.  (CW 12, 518)

Mohammed

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Mohammed’s Call to Prophecy and the First Revelation; leaf from a copy of the Majmac al-tawarikhTimurid. From Herat, Afghanistan. In The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ca. 1425

On this date in 622 Mohammed completed his hijra from Mecca to Medina.

Frye in notebook 11f:

Still with the Koran: it’s a perfect example of my concern and imagination thesis.  Mohammed was a very great inspired poet, but he found that this quality was precisely what made him distrusted.  So he insisted that he wasn’t a poet but a prophet, & started brainwashing his followers with interminable repetitions of the just-you-wait type.  Islamic culture, Sufi mysticism, geometrical art, mathematics & the like, descend from the suppressed poet; Islamic fanaticism descends from the paranoid prophet.  Yet, human nature being what it is, there would never have been any Islamic culture without the brainwashing paranoia.  Ugh.  But I think we’re finding the moral equivalent of war [para. 78, p. 87] and the next thing to find is the moral equivalent of concerned paranoia.  One element of this is counter-prophecy, of the sort Blake describes in his Watson-Paine notes.  A prophecy that, without being facile or “optimistic,” points out the positive opportunities in each situation. (CW 13, 88)

Ben Jonson

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On this date in 1598 Ben Jonson was indicted for manslaughter.  In the same year he also produced his first major success, Every Man in His Humour.

Frye in A Natural Perspective:

With Every Man in His Humour Jonson began a new type of comedy, of which Ibsen and Chekhov (Ibsen at least in his middle or “problem” period) are the inheritors.  The contrast between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson is hackneyed, but like many hackneyed subjects, not exhausted.  One seventeenth-century play that we know failed to please was Ben Jonson’s The New Inn: we know this because its failure was highly publicized by Jonson himself.  Jonson wrote on the occasion a poem in which he scolds the public for not appreciating it and for preferring “some mouldy tale like Pericles” instead.  A critical issue is involved here that it might be fruitful to examine.  The New Inn is not first-rate Jonson; but neither is Pericles first-rate Shakespeare.  Yet Pericles was not only popular in its own time, but has been revived with success in ours, and I doubt that any dramatic company in its right mind would attempt to revive The New Inn, though I should hope to be wrong on this point.  Jonson’s critical principle was obviously true to him that he honestly could not understand why his audience preferred Pericles, and in trying to explain why it did we may get some insight into the rationale of Shakespeare’s technique. (14-15)

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.)