httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiUCW8EVMy8
I recently watched a perennial favorite, Chaplin’s City Lights, arguably one of the greatest silent films ever made, and perhaps Chaplin’s best. Sometime very soon I’m going to blog on Frye’s essay “The Great Charlie” (and maybe his views on movies in general). In the meantime, the equally poignant and funny opening scenes of City Lights are featured above. If you haven’t seen this movie, then you must. The rest of it appears after the jump.
It’s understandably quiet this week. Joe and I are in the middle of exams, as are many of you. So this is a good time to tell you about our spam situation.
Because we maintain a live email link to the blog, we receive a regular stream of spam to our comments box — 160 and counting. For example, the post “Frye and Music” has attracted a fair amount of spam, including at least one solicitation from a piano mover.
Yesterday we received our first ever pornographic spam. It was from a website called Naked Combats, and the teaser was, “Watch two wrestlers fight balls to the wall and then fuck…”
Which of our posts drew the attention of the Naked Combats web trawler? “The Bondage of History“.
I’m guessing the keyword was not “history.”
Say goodnight, Gracie.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sa3bHKWZoJg
The movie that haunted Frye as a child: Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera, 1925.
I am reading Bob Denham’s wonderful book, Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World. It is divided into two main parts, “Exoterica” and “Esoterica”, the first of which I am making my leisurely way through. I have always called myself an exoteric Frye scholar, which means that I try to approach him as a general reader would through the published work and with the assured assumption that it possesses total coherence. This approach has never failed me. But what Bob manages to demonstrate is how the esoteric element of Frye’s critical vision illuminates the exoteric: and, appropriately enough, illuminates it from within. I’m not even bothering to annotate or highlight the book — that can come with subsequent readings. This first time round I simply enjoy being startled by the clarity of Bob’s insights while tucking away little bits of miscellaneous information here and there, like a chipmunk filling its cheeks.
Here are a couple of observations that stand out for me at this point, and I hope are at least tangentially related to the posts that have been going up the last few days.
The first has to do with Frye’s notebooks, which Bob characterizes as the “imaginative free play” where Frye’s mind displays its tendency to dianoia or the gestalt perception of pattern rather than the narrative continuity of mythos. Here Frye is associative, oracular, synchronicitous. Bob mines a number of excellent quotes from the notebooks to illustrate the tendency, but this one stands out:
[I]n beginning to plan a major work like the third book, don’t eliminate anything. Never assume that some area of your speculation can’t be included & has to be left over for another book. Things may get eliminated in the very last stage . . . but never, never exclude anything when thinking about the book. It was strenuous having to cut down FS [Fearful Symmetry] from an encyclopedia, but . . . major works are encyclopedic & anatomic: everything I know must go into them — eye of bat & tongue of dog. (25)
The second observation relates to the emphasis on katabasis or descent in Frye’s later work, which Bob astutely notes “appears to be even more important” than the theme of ascent. Once again, he comes up with a superb quote from one of Frye’s 1960s notebooks to make the point:
Everybody has a fixation. Mine has to do with meander-and-descent patterns. For years in my childhood I wanted to dig a cave & be the head of a society in it — this was before I read Tom Sawyer. All the things in literature that haunt me most have to do with katabasis. The movie that hit me hardest as a child was the Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera. My main points of reference in literature are such things as The Tempest, P.R. [Paradise Regained], [Blake’s Milton], the Ancient Mariner, Alice in Wonderland, the Waste Land– every damn one a meander-&-katabasis work. (29)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN1t5qdBUzs
Tom Tom Club, “Genius of Love” (single rather than extended club mix)
Today is Tina Weymouth‘s birthday (born 1950). Tina is known primarily as the bassist for Talking Heads from the time of its inception in the early 70s until its slow demise in the early 90s. But with her side project, The Tom Tom Club, she had a monster hit in 1981 with “Genius of Love.” This was the early days both of video and of rap as an emerging mainstream genre. The video remains charming (like most videos associated with anyone from Talking Heads, it is quite precocious), and the song, as unlikely as that may seem, was one the most sampled tracks by rap artists throughout the 80s and 90s. It still occasionally re-emerges from time to time.
A real treat for Talking Heads fans after the jump.
Further to Archetype:
Joe, just to begin the exploration, Mad Men makes frequent use of doubling, most obviously in Don Draper’s dual identity. And in the early episodes we see him in the contrasting worlds of Madison Avenue and the Bohemian Village, and with an artist lover in the city and a family in the country. Then the show really gets into the Rebecca-Rowena pairing with the blonde Grace Kelly-like stay at home wife and the dark-haired Jewish businesswoman lover.
Alan Adamson has pointed out that director Mary Harron is the daughter of Don Harron, establishing a link between Frye and American Psycho.
I suppose by this logic, we’ve also got a link to Stephen Vicinczey’s In Praise of Older Women (novel by second husband of Mary Harron’s mother). If, as Frye says (following Whitehead) that “everything is everywhere at once,” then we won’t be disappointed in finding links.
Frye, incidentally, wrote a dust jacket blurb for Vizinczey’s erotic novel, the request for which rather mortified Mary Harron’s mother–Gloria Fisher Harron Vizinczey.
In Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane (Latin with English subtitles) one Roman soldier calls another “Oedipus.” No prizes for guessing how the subtitles translate that!
Last thought for this holiday weekend: as the story of a woman’s ultimate triumph, The Color Purple can be grouped with Esther, Ruth, and Judith, and given Celie’s erotic awakening (which I remember well from the book, but can’t recall how prominent it is in the film), The Song of Solomon. “I am black and beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem”
Clip from The Color Purple after the break.
I overlooked some obvious literary applications of Oedipus Rex, to, of course, Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth. As Harold Bloom says, instead of doing a Freudian reading of Shakespeare, do a Shakespearean reading of Freud. Perhaps, the Oedipus Complex should have been named the Hamlet Complex, where Freud, so the story goes, discovered his most important analysis at work.
There is also this contemporary usage of Oedipus Rex: In Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite there is a scene set in the old open Athenian amphitheatre, and one masked Chorus member is speaking with Jocasta:
“Look! Here’s a man who killed his father, and slept with his mother.”
“I hate to tell you what they call my son in Harlem.”
Allen’s Oedipus Wrecks after the break.
From Angelo Tallarita, “Italy Camp Focus: We Are No More Than a River of Shadows”
Now October asserts itself, bringing with it a flurry of media news and a legion of chrysanthemums. Autumn is the season of tragedy, according to Northrop Frye. The time when great empires and glittering cities bow down into nameless mud and murk. If that is the case, then it certainly befits the Italian national team at the moment – champions of the world and conquerors of everything in football a few years ago and now incapable of coming to terms with the death and implosion of its own ageing stars. The blue shirts look faded, more than they have done in a while…
This season our team is a beautiful idle woman, bored and tipsy. We look at her like people who are conscious of some coming disaster, yet we have forgotten how to tell her. Around her chrysanthemums, the flowers of autumn, bloom to herald the funerals of a generation deep in winter.
Full article here:
Matthew Griffin:
Empire of the Sun as Isaiah? (especially Second & Third Isaiah…)
Peter Yan:
The Color Purple is definitely in the Exodus group.
I forgot that Prof. Gill listed A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) as Genesis as well: the birth of Adam.
Trailer for A.I. after the break.