On this date in 1888, one of the first phonograph recordings ever made, Sir Arthur Sullivan‘s “The Lost Chord,” was revealed to the press in London.
You can hear it here. It starts out a little rough but gets better: it’s a really remarkable experience to listen to a 122 year old recording.
Frye notes of the “lost chord” in “Music and the Visual Arts,” “Like Sullivan, [Mendelsohn] thought the diminished seventh was the lost chord.”
Diminished seventh on C here.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUdghSMTXsU
Orson Welles in conversation with H. G. Wells
On this day in 1946 H. G. Wells (born 1866) died.
Frye in “Varieties of Literary Utopias”:
The implication seems clear that the ideal state to More, as to Plato, is not a future ideal but a hypothetical one, an informing power and not a goal of action. For More, as for Plato, Utopia is the kind of model of justice and common sense, which, once established in the mind, clarifies its standards and values. It does not lead to a desire to abolish sixteenth-century Europe and replace it with Utopia, but it enables one to see Europe, and to work within it, more clearly. As H. G. Wells says of his Utopia, it is a good discipline to enter it occasionally. (CW 27, 202)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqUHh9poo6M
Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, act II, scene 2. Enobarbus’ famous speech (“The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne, burned on the water”) begins at 7.30
On this date in 30 B.C. Cleopatra, the last Pharaoh of Egypt, committed suicide.
Frye on Shakespeare’s Cleopatra in The Return of Eden:
Cleopatra in Shakespeare is all the things that the critics of Milton say Eve is. She is vain and frivolous and light-minded and capricious and extravagant and irresponsible and a very bad influence on Antony, who ought to be out chasing Parthians instead of wasting his time with her. She is morally a most despicable character, yet there is something about her which is good: we cannot feel that Cleopatra is evil in the way that Goneril and Regan are evil. For one thing, Cleopatra can always be unpredictable, and as long as she can be that she is human. Goneril and Regan are much closer to what is meant in religion by lost souls, and what that means dramatically is that they can no longer be predictable . . . At the same time Cleopatra is part of something far more sinister than herself: this comes out in the imagery attached to Egypt, if not in the characterization attached to her. Putting the two together, what we see is the human contained by the demonic, a fascinating creature of infinite variety who is still, from another point of view, sprung from the equivocal generation of the Nile. (CW 16, 52)
On this date in 1890 Cardinal John Henry Newman (born 1801) died.
Frye in The Secular Scripture:
As with Plato, the Christian has to pass through this doctrinal system before he can understand the myths of the Bible. In the nineteenth century Cardinal Newman remarked that the function of scripture was not to teach doctrine but to prove it: this axiom shows how completely the structure of the Bible had been translated into a conceptual system which both replaced and enclosed it. Even the fact that the original data were for the most part stories, as far as their structure is concerned, often came to be resented or even denied. Whatever resisted the translating operation had to be bracketed as a mystery of faith, into which it was as well not to look too closely. (20)
At sunset, Ramadan, the holiest month in the Islamic calendar, begins.
Frye on the rhetoric of “charm” in the Quran in “Charms and Riddles”:
If we pick up the Koran, for instance, and try to read it as we would any other book, we may well find its repetitiveness intolerable: surely, we feel, the God who inspired this book was not only monotheistic but monomaniacal. And even this response comes only from a translation: the original is so dependent upon the interlocking sound-patterns of Arabic that in practice the Arabic language has had to go everywhere the Islamic religion has gone. Yet, for anyone brought up in the religion of Islam, hearing the Koran from infancy, and memorizing great parts of it consciously and unconsciously, the Koran does precisely what it is set up to do. The conception of the human will assumed is that of a puppy on a leash: it plunges about in every direction except the right one, and has to be brought back and back and back to the same controlling power. (Spirtus Mundi, 135)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46wWs2Yth0o
Gandhi in London, 1931: “There is an undefinable mysterious power that pervades everything, I feel it though I do not see it.”
On this date in 1942 the British arrested Ghandi (1869-1948), sparking the Quit India Movement.
Frye’s closing words in The Educated Imagination:
What the myth tells us is that the Tower of Babel is a work of human imagination, that its main elements are words, and that what will make it collapse is a confusion of tongues. All had originally one language, the myth says. That language is not English or Russian or Chinese or any common ancestor, if there was one. It is the language of human nature, the language that makes both Shakespeare and Pushkin authentic poets, that gives a social vision to both Lincoln and Gandhi. It never speaks unless we take the time to listen in leisure, and it speaks only in a voice too quiet for panic to hear. And then all it has to tell us, when we look over the edge of our leaning tower, is that we are not getting any nearer heaven, and that it is time for us to return to the earth. (CW 21, 494)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHFn0vHF6-c
“Jive Samba” (1963)
Today in 1975 jazz alto saxophonist “Cannonball” Adderley (born 1928) died.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOkyZWQ2bmQ
Dame Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth in the sleepwalking scene
Today in 1606 is the first recorded performance of Macbeth.
Macbeth is the most concentrated study of tyranny as a force within an individual soul, which has to be cast out of that as well as out of society. The tyrant exists because the victims are tyrants to themselves. (CW 15, 243)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBjqMMN6D5E
The first nine minutes of Warhol’s “Blow Job” (1964). As I outlined in a post yesterday, this is the first in a series of posts today exploring “obscenity” in the arts. We’ll be citing Frye extensively in the posts that follow.
Today is Andy Warhol‘s birthday (1928 – 1987).
Here’s Frye in “Foreward to English Studies in Toronto“. As with the reference to Warhol from Words with Power cited in an earlier post (“Andy Warhol Eats a Hamburger”), what is interesting about it is that Frye invokes Warhol to illustrate a bigger point. In this case, it is the contextualizing experience of art and the role of scholarship in understanding it:
At every step in the liberalizing of the curriculum, some academics will say: “Why should we set up courses and examinations in that? Shouldn’t students be reading that on their own? We’ve got a library, haven’t we?” In one generation Edmund Blunden’s colleague would have applied this to the whole of English literature; in the next it would have applied to contemporary literature; in the next to the study of films, television and pop culture. In my experience such objectors do not read that sort of thing on their own, but apart from that, there are two very important facts left out of their assumptions. One is the immense psychological difference between cultivating a leisure-time activity and studying the same material within the context of a university course. It is a little like, though considerably subtler than, the difference between looking at a row of soup cans and looking at them in Andy Warhol. The other is the schizophrenia set up in the teacher’s mind. Two of my teachers at Victoria were Pelham Edgar and John Robins, both interested in the modern novel and Canadian literature. But all reference to such subjects in lectures devoted to Shakespeare and The Rape of the Lock, had to be bootlegged, so to speak, and lectures got very digressive as a result. It was very important to our education as students to be told about the short stories of Hemingway and the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott — it was difficult for us to read these authors “on our own” when we did not yet know they existed. Edgar, Pratt and Robins at Victoria, and Woodhouse and Brown at least at University College, did very important work in Canadian studies many decades before they got into the curriculum. (CW 7, 597-8)
After the jump, a superior PBS American Masters documentary about Warhol. Must-see, if only for the wonderful contemporary footage and extended excerpts from his movies. (Please note, however, that the entire documentary is comprised of two 90 minute episodes, and only the first part of the first episode is offered here, so Warhol’s early years and early successes aren’t included. However, the second episode dealing with Warhol at the peak of his success until his death is posted in its entirety. This really is worth the investment of your time, and I hope you’ll watch it.)
On this date in 1583 Sir Humphrey Gilbert established the first English colony in North America in what is now St John’s, Newfoundland.
Frye citing a folk song, which he describes as “a delightful bit that could only have come from one place in the world, southeastern Newfoundland”:
“Oh mother dear, I wants a sack
With beads and buttons down the back. . .
Me boot is broke, me frock is tore,
But Georgie Snooks I do adore. . .
Oh, fish is low and flour is high,
So Georgie Snooks he can’t have I” (CW 12, 241-2)