httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7VxqAtgZF0
Neil Young, “Ohio”
Today is the 40th anniversary of the Kent State shootings.
“Four Dead in Ohio”
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Category Archives: Anniversaries
Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXjY6w1KQMo
On this date in 1749 Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks was first performed in London.
The performance here is on period instruments. Part 2 after the jump.
E. J. Pratt
Pratt in 1944
On this date E. J. Pratt died (1882 – 1964).
Frye in “Ned Pratt: The Personal Legend,” published in the summer 1964 issue of Canadian Literature to commemorate Pratt’s death:
In my fourth year as an undergraduate I was editor of the college magazine, and had to administer a prize of ten dollars for the best poem contributed. The poems came in, and I took them to Ned. Ned didn’t recommend an award. What he did was put his finger on one poem and say, “Now this one — it has some feeling, some sensitivity, some sense of structure. But — well, damn it, it isn’t worth money.” I have never found a profounder insight into literary values, and I was lucky to have it so early. As a graduate student I was his assistant when he became the first editor of Canadian Poetry Magazine. I am not saying that what was printed in those opening issues was imperishable, but it was certainly the best of what we got. What impressed me was the number of people (it was the Depression, and the magazine paid a dollar or two) who tried to get themselves or their friends in by assuming Ned was a soft touch. In some ways he was, but he was not compromising the standards of poetry to be so: poetry was something he took too seriously. And, as I realized more clearly later, friendship was also something he took too seriously to compromise. People who thought him a soft touch were never his friends. He could be impulsively, even quixotically, generous to bums and down-and-outs, and I think I understand why. His good will was not benevolence, not a matter of being a sixty-year-old smiling public man. It was rather an enthusiasm that one was alive, rooted in a sense of childlike wonder at human existence and the variety of personality. This feeling was so genuine and so deep in him that I think he felt rather guilty when approached by someone towards whom he was actually indifferent. (CW 21, 327-28)
Earth Day
Today is the 40th annual Earth Day. Official site here.
CBC News report, “Canada as Climate Villain” here.
CBC News report, “How Green Are We?” here.
Neither of these reports offers much depth, but do provide an accurate sense of how these issues tend to be framed in the mainstream media for mass consumption.
John Ford
On this date playwright John Ford (1586 – 1640) was baptized.
In Notebook 9 Frye makes some telling comparisons between Shakespeare and the Jacobean playwrights, particularly Ford, Webster, Tourneur, and Dekker.
As compared with his contemporaries, Shakespeare’s sense of tragedy is much more firmly rooted in history, and he lacks the moralizing tendency that makes Tourneur call his characters by such names as Lussurioso & Ambitioso. Hence he does illustrate my point about tragedy being closer to a reality-principle than comedy. Outside him, I’m not sure that that’s true: there’s just as much fantasy & manipulation in Tourneur or Ford as there is in Shakespearean romance. Shakespeare’s tragic vision also has something to do with his adherence to popular theatre: he has a public sense of dramatic action, not a ruminative psychologizing one…
In Ford’s TPSW [‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore] an amiable & harmless old woman who has connived at the heroine’s incest first of all has her eyes put out, & then, as an applauded act of justice, is led out to be burned at the stake. That really is brutality. And Hamlet’s excuse about Claudius’ murder until he’s sure to go to hell is nothing compared to what the viallains in Tourneur & Webster do. We expect a very high standard of sensitivity from Shakespeare, even the senstivity of readers who on the whole don’t live in tragic worlds. We understand, but don’t realize, Dekker’s remark: “There is a hell named in our creed, and a heaven, and the hell comes before; if we look not into the first, we shall never live in the last.” Several tragic dramatists, especially Webster, pick up M’s [Marlowe’s] remark in Faustus…
A manipulated tragic situation is often one where providence or Heaven or some power overreaching Nature takes a hand in the action, & functions as the eiron. Many dramatists put up “Danger: God at Work” signs: there’s a good example in Ford’s TPSW [‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore]. (CW 20, 256-7)
A trailer for a recent San Fransisco production of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore after the jump.
Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary
On this date in 1755 Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language was published.
Frye in Anatomy on Johnson’s “bumbling” but still “colloquial and conversational” style:
Students in English are often urged, in Romantic fashion, to use as many short words of native origin as possible, on the ground that they make one’s vocabulary concrete, but a style founded on simple native words can be the most artificial of all styles. Samuel Johnson at his most bumbling is still colloquial and conversational compared to a William Morris romance. Standard educated English speech today, with its many long abstract and technical words and the heavy accent on its short ones, is a polysyllabic clatter which is much easier to fit to prose than to verse. (AC 270)
Handel’s Messiah
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6_nJ11BgTE
London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Colin Davis, Halelujah Chorus
On this date in 1742 Handel’s Messiah premiered in Dublin.
Frye on Handel in his remarkable student essay on Romanticism:
The rhythm force of music is incarnated and symbolized in the dance. Hence, men like Bach, Handel, Mozart were all dance composers. The suite or selection of dances in one key was a standard artform, and later, when the sonata sublimated the dance rhythm of the suite into a stricter form, the minuet, in many ways the typical dance, was often retrained. (CW 3, 54)
Wynton Kelly
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4TbrgIdm0E
On this date in 1971 jazz pianist Wynton Kelly died at age 39 of a seizure.
Here he is with Miles Davis and John Coltrane performing “So What”.
A. Y. Jackson
Wilderness, Deese Bay
On this date in 1974 A. Y. Jackson died.
Frye in “Culture and the National Will” (regarding the way in which artists — literary ones included — create the national landscape):
If you look at Mr. Jackson’s paintings, you will see a most impressive pictorial survey of Canada: pictures of Georgian Bay and Lake Superior, pictures of the Quebec Laurentians, pictures of Great Bear Lake and the Mackenzie River. What you will not see is a typically Canadian landscape: no such place exists. (CW, 12, 275)
Vintage CBC report on the Group of Seven and the Rheostatics after the jump.
John Donne
The portrait commissioned by Donne in his shroud during his last months
On this date in 1631 John Donne died at age 59.
Holy Sonnet X
Death be not proud, though some have callèd thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better than thy stroake; why swell’st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more, death thou shalt die.
Frye on Donne in Words with Power:
In The Great Code I used the word “interpenetration” (167-8/189) tp describe this fluidity of personality in its complete form. The word “love” means perhaps too many things in English and for many has an oversentimental sound, but it seems impossible to dissociate the conceptions of spiritual authority of love. The capacity to merge with another person’s being without violating it seems to be at the centre of love, just as the will to dominate one conscious soul-will externally by another is the centre of all tyranny and hatred. John Donne uses a beautiful figure in this connection based on the metaphor of an individual life as a book. The spiritual world, he says, is a library “where all books lie open together.” (CW, 26, 117-18)
Emma Thompson and Holy Sonnet X in Mike Nichols’s film adaptation of Wit after the jump.