httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5qalNX5G94
Elaine in the episode of Seinfeld where she hates The English Patient but must see it multiple times.
In case you missed it, here’s the National Post’s ten most overrated Canadian authors (yes, Michael Ondaatje is in there).
For entertainment purposes only.
To be fair, Michael Ondaatje’s lovely poem, “The Cinnamon Peeler” (with video), after the jump.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhUZlokAURQ
Fireworks. Because every birthday ought to end in fireworks.
So thanks to Bob Denham, thanks (most especially) to Jonathan Cox, and thanks to John Fink for getting Northrop Frye and Critical Method up and running for this first anniversary. And, of course, many many warm thanks to all of our contributors over the past year. We hope to see much more of you in our second year. As well as, of course, as many more new contributors who’d like to join us.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qOaZ4CQqKI
Ricky Gervais and Louis C.K. — together at last. (Video not embedded: click on the image and then hit the YouTube link)My previous posts on “Andy Warhol” and on “Frye and Obscenity” are good preparation for this master class in the liberatingly obscene element in comedy: Ricky Gervais here makes an appearance on Louis C.K‘s new show on HBO. (Ricky’s father was a Canadian veteran of the Second World War, if an appeal to patriotism might help.)
And, of course, I come armed with a relevant quote from Frye:
Comedy is moral insofar as it expands the range of response; obscenity, for instance, is profoundly moral. (CW 15, 28)
“Obscenity is profoundly moral.” So that’s that, then.
After the jump, a clip from Ricky’s show, Extras, in which Kate Winslet, playing herself playing a nun, provides some sound advice on playing with oneself during phone sex.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSEYXWmEse8
The 100 Greatest Insults in the Movies.
Anyone who knows Frye well knows that he had no trouble with obscenity and in fact regarded it as creative. I was fortunate enough to hear Kingsley Joblin, Frye’s first year roommate at Burwash, tell the story of how the 17 year old Frye, with his wild mane of yellow hair, had to pass through a gauntlet of swells and bullies on his way to meals each day to taunts of “Buttercup!” One day, Joblin reported, Frye’d had enough, turned on his tormentors, and unleashed (as Joblin put it) “an Elizabethan torrent of obscenities.” The taunting ceased forthwith. It’d be nice to think that the seed of Frye’s quickly established reputation for genius was planted that day.
Frye himself refers to the story of how one of his favorite writers, Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, liked to go down to the London docks to listen to the sailors swear. It isn’t obscenity Frye would object to. It is mindless profanity, the kind of verbal reflex that only communicates the absence of wit or thought:
Obscenity in language is an ornament except when it becomes routine, & in the latter event it approaches mere idiocy. The most horrid example of passivity & inertia of mind I know is Woodside’s story of the soldier who gazed into a shell hole at the bottom of which a dead mule was lying, and said: “Well, that fuckin’ fucker’s fucked.” (What sort of person is it, incidentally, whose feelings would be spared by printing the above as “that ____in’ _____er’s ____ed,” or “that obscene obscenity’s obscenitied”?) (CW 8, 10)
Fuckin’ right. And what sort of person is it exactly who could come across this phrase — “obscenity in language is an ornament” — and not feel challenged about complacent moral reflexes and the unexamined assumptions that lay behind them?
Thanks to Bob Denham’s Northrop Frye Unbuttoned, I gained quick access to this entry on “excremental vision” culled from the late notebooks. The stanza Frye refers to is from Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (which he also refers to in the same context in Words with Power, HBJ, 263-4):
Thus finishing his grand Survey,
Disgusted Strephon stole away
Repeating in his amorous Fits,
Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!
Here’s Frye:
Swift’s notorious poem on a woman’s dressing room is usually cited as simply Swift himself being obsessed by the fact that women shit: “insanity,” says Lawrence, “excremental vision,” says Norman Brown. Well, it’s that, all right: if you haven’t got an excremental vision you have no business setting up as a major satirist. But “Celia shits” isn’t Swift screaming: it’s Celia’s lover Strephon, whose love for Celia is of the insipidly idealistic kind that hasn’t taken in the fact that women, mutatis mutandis, have the same physical basis to their lives that men have. Besides, if, like the hero of Berkeley Square, one of us were to wake up in the middle of eighteenth-century London, assailed by all those unfamiliar stinks, wouldn’t we be just as nauseated? That’s the mark of the great writer: who sees his own time, but with a detachment that makes him communicable to other ages. (85)
So we might say that the obscene element in comedy and satire is derived from the universal fact that we defecate and fornicate; a humbling but, in the right context, hilarious corrective for an all too human vanity fraught with fear, shame, and resentment when it comes to perfectly natural (not to mention wholly necessary) bodily functions. As Frye notes in Anatomy, it is important that satire remind us that powerful men and beautiful women have excretory functions and sexual relations as well. It is a great equalizer: “Obscenity [is] a bodily democracy, also a danse macabre” (CW 8, 19). In the two clips in our regular TGIF post to follow shortly, for example, it is male sexuality that is the target in the first; and, in the second, anxiety about the still semi-taboo but totally mundane practice of masturbation (again, perhaps more of a male-anxiety problem: as Martin Amis notes, most men think they ought to have outgrown masturbation, but most men also discover they haven’t).
In short, nothing to be ashamed of. But plenty to laugh about.
Thanks for this post on Sinatra, Mike. Frye’s erudite knowledge of classical music is well known, but the one essay he wrote on Frank Sinatra is a little known fact. It just goes to show Frye’s incredible range, like ol’ blue eyes himself. The essay remained unpublished; Sinatra threatened to sue, or worse–and you know what that means.
Below are some excerpts from the essay, “The Fearful Symmetry of Frank Sinatra,” which opens with a statement by the singer about his legendary sense of wardrobe and style, “I am a symmetrical man, almost to a fault,” a thinly veiled allusion to both Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience” and Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus
The excerpts start in fact with a brilliant gloss on Sinatra’s version of Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got you Under my Skin” (great choice for the post, Mike!), worth quoting as it puts to to rest all the lame accusations that Frye was somehow weak on texture:
“In ‘I’ve Got you Under My Skin,’ [Nelson] Riddle starts with a comfortable, loping rhythm that he called ‘the heartbeat rhythm’–‘Sinatra’s tempo is the tempo of the heartbeat,’ he said–and then created a marvelous instrumental tension around Sinatra’s voice. Riddle always found little licks–certain spicy, nearly out-of-key notes–that would tease the key, and added the glue of ‘sustaining strings’ almost subliminally to the rhythm and woodwind sections. At the instrumental breaks in the songs, Riddle gave solo voices to oboes, muted trumpets, piccolos, bassoons; in ‘I’ve Got you Under My Skin,’ it was Milt Bernhart’s trombone, which is whipped up the excitement and Sinatra joined the song again and brought it back to the heartbeat rhythm where it had begun. Sinatra had wanted an extended crescendo; Riddle provided one that was longer than had ever been heard in an organized arrangement.”
And for you cultural studies types:
“What Sinatra evokes is not strictly urban. It is a very particular American loneliness–that of the soul adrift in its pursuit of the destiny of ‘me,’ and thrown back onto the solitude of its own restless heart.”
“The cocked hat, the open collar, the backward glance with the raincoat slung over the shoulder, the body leaning back with arms wide open in song–these images of perfect individualism dominated the albums of the fifties.”
And finally, in the context of ritual and dream, opsis and melos:
“In time, Sinatra seized more than power; he infiltrated the Western world’s dream life.”
Frye never stops amazing his readers. Who’d have thunk it? Not even Bob Denham. As one critic of Frye has justly remarked, “in whatever direction you happen to be going, you always meet Frye on the way back.”
And Sinatra. Just don’t get in his way.
. . . by the great Bob Denham.
I woke up early this morning to the following email (whose subject is “Delirious”) addressed to me and Michael Dolzani.
I fell for it. Completely. Unreservedly. With thrilled anticipation! Well played, Master.
Getting involved in this blog has meant that I’ve had to retrieve my Frye files from my garage, where I’d mothballed them. Well, looking through some files today I discovered what looks to be a corrected typescript for the “Third Book.” It’s more or less what Norrie projected, as best this can be determined from the “Third Book” Notebooks. It appears to have been typed by Jane. In any case it’s not one of Norrie’s typical marginless typescripts. I thought I had a pretty good handle on what I’d copied from the files in Vic, and how this one got lost in the cracks rather baffles me. At the top of the first page Norrie wrote in pencil “The Symbolic Universe.” I’ve written Alvin to see if he’s up to having still another volume in the CW. I’m currently scanning it to disk (it’s 327 pp. in its current form). The book has (guess what) eight chapters, two each devoted to Eros, Adonis, Thanatos, and Logos. I’m naturally ecstatic. Guess this will require some revisions to all those statements we’ve put out there about the never completed Third Book. Anyway, I wanted the Michaels to be the first to know. I’ve attached some sample pages.
Yrs,
Bob
[Attachment: SymbolicUniverse.doc]
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIF6f3tFxBw
You’ll get your share of pranks today. We’re content to offer you Rufus Wainwright‘s delightful “April Fool” to start your day.
And you will believe in love / And all it’s supposed to be
Another song inspired by Frye’s “Verticals of Adam” can be found here.