Someone suggested recently that we have a “Recent Comments” in our Widgets Menu to the right, so that’s what we’ve done. It’ll help people get an idea of how the discussion thread in various posts is developing. For example, Robert Wade Kenny has just added a long Comment on Interdisclinary Connections, which was first posted back on September 25th.
Several years back Glen R. Gill, author of Northorp Frye and the Phenomenology of Myth, emailed me (and I think others) to ask if I had an opinion on the proper adjectival form of “Frye.” For some reason this struck my funny‑bone, and so I dropped my pedantic inquiry into what Frye meant by “chess‑in‑bardo” or whatever I was doing to pen this bit of doggerel:
FRYIAN, FRYGEAN, OR FRYEAN?
So what’s the adjective for “Frye”?
Do you pronounce your “g” as hard?
Do you, like Gill, just wonder why
The “g” is sometimes soft as lard?At other times it disappears,
With triplet vowels aligned in row.
The folks must surely have tin ears
Who say the “g” has gotta go.For precedent consider “Styx”:
Its adjective requires a “g.”
For even Appalachian hicks
“Norwegian” works phonetically.But why restrict phonetic rule
To followers of Norrie Frye?
Does not the pedant, simple fool,
Induce, then universify?Thus, “Frygean” applies to texts,
To arguments and archetypes,
To all the Spirit/Word contexts.
The lightest and the darkest types.But I will quiz the linguist Kris
(My daughter): she may know the rule
To cure our ignorance of bliss
And send us back to suffix school.Meanwhile, methinks that Glen R. Gill
Should forego adjectives for Jung
And Freud and Frye, and just fulfill
What Norrie craved—a simple tongue. Continue reading
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR0588DtHJA
We now have YouTube-embedding capacity! Of course, we don’t actually have any relevant video. But we do have the capacity to embed video, so we just had to come up with something. Given the Northrop Frye-Thomas Pynchon nexus established last week here and here, this video might qualify as marginally germane. Sure, it’s post-modern enough, but is it also Menippean satire?
We are pleased to have Bob Denham (one of whose books on Charles Wright is pictured above) and Russell Perkin (whose “Northrop Frye and Catholicism” appears in Frye and the Word) join us as byline correspondents at The Educated Imagination. We consider ourselves very lucky to have them. Bob and Russell will post when they get that elusive combination of time to spare and something to say. About the latter we have no doubt. Therefore, here’s wishing them as much free time as they can find.
We should also take this opportunity to remind all of our readers that you are welcome to guest blog anytime you have something to contribute. Simply send us your Frye-related post via email and we will put it up under your name.
Thanks to Adam Bradley.
Adam Bradley has kindly registered www.theeducatedimagination.com to our blog. Because of “domain forwarding” we can now be accessed by this very easy to remember address. Try it: www.theeducatedimagination.com
Thanks to the traffic at the blog over the past six days, Google at last has a good handle on us. Googling “educated imagination blog” is now sufficient to bring us up as the first hit.
You’ll notice that we’ve added a new “widget” in our menu column. There is now a drop-down “Category” menu. Every entry we post is assigned a category. For example, all of the “Today in the Frye Diaries” entries posted so far are categorized “Frye Diaries, August.” When you hit the “Frye Diaries, August” link wherever it occurs, you’ll be presented with all other entries in that category. Other categories at the moment include “Metaphor,” “News,” “Guest Bloggers,” and a few others. Needless to say, the number of categories will only continue to expand as our content increases.
We are also slowly but surely lining up commitments from prospective guest bloggers. Let’s be clear on what this means: it only requires that you send us text, in whatever form you care to send it, and we will post it. At no point will you be required to interact with the blog yourself. You are providing content to us via email, we are putting it up on the blog under your name. That’s it. We hope that encourages a lot of you to jot down some thoughts and send them to us so that we can post them for others to read.
Finally, you’ll see that we’re embedding links to other sites relating to people, places and book titles. When it comes to books, we try to link to sites where the chapter or section in question can be found online for quick confirmation. This includes works by Frye, whose Collected Works seem to be extensively excerpted in Google Books. If you have access to better links than we are posting, please forward them to us.
After three full days online, it looks as though our minor technical difficulties have been resolved — all our links now reliably function as they should. Click them with confidence.
We are getting a steady stream of emails from people with proposals for papers for the upcoming journal, Myth and Metaphor. Keep them coming. Please also remember that we are looking for guest bloggers to post here at The Educated Imagination. We encourage anyone who feels they might have something to contribute — a nagging idea that won’t go away, an outstanding issue that hasn’t been resolved, a crazy insight that haunts your sleep — to drop us a line as soon as you can. We want to post your work-in-progress here.
In other news, we are pleased to announce that Bob Denham has kindly agreed to allow us to provide his Northrop Frye Newsletter a permanent digital home at Myth and Metaphor. We will, of course, link it here too once it is online.