Category Archives: Popular Culture

Frye and Detective Fiction

1 Reply

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahe372Rzf0g

The conclusion of the 1939 film adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, starring Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes.

Further to Professor Mondo’s earlier post, here is one of  a number of Frye’s observations in the notebooks on the detective story, via Bob Denham’s Northrop Frye Unbuttoned.

I don’t think that I have either a highbrow or a lowbrow pose about detective stories, but I don’t really quite understand why I like reading them.  I read them partly for the sake of the overtones.  I’m not a connoisseur of them: I can never guess what the hell’s up when the detective pulls out a watch and shouts: “My God, we may yet be in time!”, shoves the narrator and half the country’s police force into a taxi, dashes madly across town and finds the girl I’d placidly thought was the heroine all equipped with a blunt instrument & an animal snarl.  I’m always led by the nose up the garden path in search of a false clue, and I never notice inconsistencies.  And I always get let down when I find out who dun it.  As I say, I like overtones.  A good style, some traces of wit & characterization, a sense of atmosphere, and a lot of the professional intricacies of the game can go to hell.  Yet I want a good novel in that particular convention & no other.  The answer is, I think, that I’m naturally a slow & reflective reader, & make copious marginalia.  In the detective story I live for a moment in the pure present: I’m passively pulled along from stimulus to stimulus, and, ignorant & idle as that doubtless is, I’m fascinated by it.  Yet I seldom finish with disappointment. (67)

Video of the Day: “Fuck You”

Leave a reply

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc0mxOXbWIU&feature=player_embedded#!

This video went crazily viral last week: 3 million YouTube hits and counting.  The New York Times produced an article about writing an article about it without using the word “fuck.”  (And that’s what’s wrong with the New York Times.)

It’s late summer and the time for this sort of thing — remember “The Thong Song“?

Except that for a seasonal novelty this really is a catchy little tune whose title just happens to be “Fuck You” (oh, and with this irresistible refrain: “Fuck you / And, uh, fuck her too”).  It’s bright and bouncy in the Motown style (like the Jackson 5’s “ABC“) only with streetwise lyrics.  By the end you may be singing along — or at least humming it under your breath sometime this afternoon.

Prof. Mondo: More Thoughts On “Overrated Writers” — What Lasts?

3 Replies

The Huffington Post published the article on America’s most overrated writers that inspired the National Post’s article previously discussed here at TEI. Having read both articles, I was reminded of a conversation I had with detective fiction grand master Lawrence Block this past Winter.

Block has spent his virtually his entire career (more than sixty books) writing genre fiction, from lesbian porn in his college days to his award-winning series featuring recovering alcoholic PI Matt Scudder. He was the visiting writer here at Mondoville, and as the fan/stalker who did the most to get him here, I escorted him around town, and among other things, we talked about fiction, mainstream and otherwise. He noted that with very few exceptions, almost no one reads the “serious [read mainstream or literary] novelists” of fifty or more years ago. On the other hand, people are still reading and rediscovering the writers of genre fiction, especially science fiction, fantasy, and detective fiction (which was, after all, a favorite of Frye’s.) For that matter, people still read Verne and Doyle, long after such contemporary best sellers as E.D.E.N. Southworth have been consigned to the ash heap of doctoral dissertations.

Meanwhile, bestselling fantasist David Eddings observed that when a writer enters the area of the mythic (as distinct from the self-consciously mythologically allusive), he or she “may as well be peddling dope,” and he meant it as a good thing. These genre novels are highly conventionalized, of course; in the same conversation, Block mentioned that Robert B. Parker (who wrote a dissertation using Frye) described himself as  writing Westerns on a frontier that was paved over, and that the Western itself was a romance.

It’s worth noting that the writers both Posts beat up on are mainstream writers, the sort that Joan Hess described as “writing stuff where nothing much happens to people you didn’t like to begin with.” However, if Block’s observation holds up, it’s the Parkers and Blocks that will continue to engage readers decades from now, and perhaps even a century later, and it may well be because their works tapped into the archetypes and myths in a way that the “serious” writers (and the critics) found to be infra dignitatem. Frye would have understood.

More Frye ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll: “This is exactly the spread that I want”

1 Reply

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXCvZ0cWM-w

“What’s the Ugliest Part of Your Body?” from the Mothers of Invention‘s We’re Only in it for the Money (above), their absurdist parody of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (“What’s the ugliest part of your body? / Some say your nose / Some say your toes / I think it’s your mind”)

Frye in “The Only Genuine Revolution”:

Mickleburgh: What about modern ballads and film criticism? Some people quite strongly argue that the English department should assume a major responsibility for film criticism and for teaching such things as the Beatle records. Some people think it helps to make Beowulf contemporary if you relate the Beowulf themes to some of the Beatle records.

Frye: I think that I’d actually prefer to let the student make those connections himself, because this is where the student can find an immediate sense of discovery on his own. If he can find that the kind of rock and roll records which he is going to be listening to anyway really have a family likeness in their symbolism and their imagery to the kind of literature he’s learning about at school, this creates a personal discovery which I wouldn’t want to take away from him and put into the regular curriculum. I teach a graduate course in university on literary symbolism, and I tell my students that they are to write essays on anything in literature that happens to interest them. One year I picked up two essays side by side: one was on the Gilgamesh epic of ancient Sumeria—about 3,000 years older than the Bible; the other was on the rock and roll group called The Mothers of Invention. And I thought, “Oh boy, this is it—this is exactly the spread that I want.” Naturally most of the other essays fell somewhere in between those two extremes. (CW 24, 165)

Earlier post, “Frye ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll“

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Leave a reply

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcLxsOJK9bs

A real rarity: the Edison Studios 1910 film adaptation of Frankenstein — thirteen minutes and one reel, as was the fashion of the time.  It is startling to think that just barely one lifetime after her death, Shelley’s novel was already being adapted at the very dawn of the film industry, making her monster one of the most recognizable of all movie characters, even if that character usually bore little resemblance to her original literary creation.

Today is Mary Shelley‘s birthday (1797-1851).

Frye on Frankenstein in A Study of English Romanticism:

An almost equally remarkable example of Romantic irony is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  The story is not, as it often is said to be, a precursor of science fiction: it is a precursor rather of the existential thriller, of such a book as Camus’ L’Etranger.  The whole point about the monster is that he is not a machine, but an ordinary human being isolated from mankind by extreme ugliness, Blake’s “different face.”  The number of allusions to Paradise Lost in the narrative indicate that the story is a retelling of the account of the origin of evil, in a world where the only creators we can locate are human ones.  Frankenstein hunts down his monster in the same way that moral good attempts to destroy the moral evil that it has itself created: Frankenstein is as much a death principle as his quarry, and is surrounded by the vengeful spirits of his monster’s victims.  (CW 17, 122)

The Beatles, Candlestick Park

Leave a reply

beatles

Today is the 44th anniversary of the Beatles’ last concert at Candlestick Park, San Francisco.

Fifty-five seconds of lousy video that nicely captures what it must have been like to be there, here.

This was the Beatles’ last concert but not their last public performance, which didn’t occur till three years later on January 30th 1969.  A much better clip of that event after the jump. (Notice how Austen Powers-y London looks: check out Ringo in his red plastic mac.)

Frye in discussion with Robert Fulford and Marty Gross on the ritualistic element of Beatles concerts:

[Fulford discusses the human need for ritual, as seen for instance in the intense emotion of the audience at a Beatles concert where the music could not be heard above the audience’s screams.]

Frye: You need different rituals at different times.  There is something in the pantomime, where you don’t hear the words, that has a very direct childlike appeal.  So it didn’t matter whether you heard the Beatles, as long as you saw them.  The response to the aural stimulus is something that develops much more gradually. (CW 24, 542)

Perhaps that’s what makes the next clip so poignant.  There’s no more Beatlemania, no more adolescent girls screaming like Bacchantes.  The Beatles’ last audience was just a random collection of people (including a number of noticeably middle-aged Londoners, who are somewhat stiff and formal but evidently still fans) who found their way to nearby rooftops so that they could watch and hear the Beatles in public for what turned out to be the last time.

Continue reading →

Frye Alert: Sci Fi Frye

Leave a reply

fryenewdefenders

Frye appeared as a character (above) in Marvel Comics’ The New Defenders in a story called “The Pajusnaya Consignment.”

iO9, a science fiction blog (“We Come from the Future”), cites Frye in a post today: “How many definitions of science fiction are there?”

[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.” — Northrop Frye.

Here’s Frye on “parallel world” science fiction:

I’ve been reading, more or less at random, in science fiction for varieties of the parallel-world conception which seems to me a possible exit from the present up-down mythical universal dilemma.  Reincarnation is now being trumpeted as practically established scientifically; it isn’t, and I still think there’s a fallacy buried in it somewhere, but there’s probably a pattern it fits.  I read the four volumes of Philip Jose Farmer’s “Riverrun” series, but they were a bust.  Now I’m reading Zelazny’s two-volume “Amber” series, which at least has better patter.  They seem to me a development of the Eddison series, where the ideal world is conceived as an archaic one, reminding me of Lawrence’s proposal that if men wanted to fight they should repudiate modern hardware, get into armor and have a good old heroic hack.  Eddison isn’t quite as silly as that sounds, but his fantasy world is simply the old chivalric-romance one back again.  We seem to be in an age of neo-Ariosto. (Northrop Frye Unbuttoned, 254)

Frye ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll

Leave a reply

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsDpznl8eIs

AC/DC, “Highway to Hell” — which is not the same as going to hell in handbasket.  There’s a reason that guitarist Angus Young always wore a school uniform onstage.  At bottom, it’s a myth of deliverance, as the lyrics here make clear: “Look at me / I’m on the way to the Promised Land”

It’s a somewhat  guilty pleasure that I regularly post pop music videos on a Saturday night, but I justify it with, “I’m a Frygian; I cover the waterfront.”  However, all of sudden I’ve got back-up.

Thanks to Bob Denham’s canny selection from the notebooks in Northrop Frye Unbuttoned, there are gems to be found that not only enrich any given moment but leave you wondering if there was anything that Frye didn’t think and write about.

For example, under the entry “Literary Education,” the issue of popular culture, including rock ‘n’ roll, makes an unexpected appearance:

Twenty-five years ago, when I started expounding my views, I met with the most strenuous resistance from my students; today I have the feeling of battering down an open door. . . Educators seem to be as silly & ignorant as ever. . . . [But] young people educate themselves today, partly through films and television, media that are capable of great symbolic concentration, partly through listening to folk singers and rock & roll & music that introduces them to what is, for all its obvious limitations, a more normal poetic idiom.  As a result mythical  habits of thought seem natural to them.  (169)

For what it’s worth, that’s what I see among my students.  Even though they’ve been cheated at every level by underfunded education (and face years of indentured servitude while they work off the debt incurred by the post-secondary education we tell them is mandatory), they are still quite enlightened and decent individuals whose sense of social concern and duty seems to exceed that of their parents and grandparents.  It’s got to be coming from somewhere, and it appears to be derived from a popular culture that, “for all its obvious limitations,” is still managing to put them in a much more liberal state of mind and expectation.

The kind of artists who represent that trend here.

Saturday Night Video: Joe Strummer and the Clash

1 Reply

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfK-WX2pa8c

“London Calling”  (Video not embedded: click on the image and hit the YouTube link)

Today is Joe Strummer‘s birthday (1952 – 2002).  You can watch the excellent documentary about him, The Future is Unwritten, here. The film opens with a scalding version of “White Riot”; I understand this won’t be to everybody’s taste, but to those it is, the studio footage of Strummer laying down the lead vocal track will give you goosebumps.

A few weeks ago I posted on British music of the ’80s, and it must have seemed to some that there was a conspicuous omission — no Clash.  That was no accident.  The Clash need a post all their own.  They were not just another British band.  They were, for starters, the most London of bands.  They made the London of the Thatcher era a habitat for everyone demanding a better world to call home.  If, for example, you haven’t heard it in a while, put on London Calling, which is in its idiosyncratic way the most sunshiny and optimistic punk album imaginable.  The Clash were, for the period, an uncharacteristically un-nihilistic and socially committed band. They were the Happy Warriors of the Left, and it’s why they are still loved by people who weren’t yet born when they stopped recording.

When I lived at Vic in the early 1980s, the Clash were the band of choice in many residences.  It may be somewhat frivolous, I know, but a lot of the music I heard during that time got twisted into the skein of my experience of Frye, the Clash especially. Because they — always under the heartfelt and uncompromising guidance  of Strummer — actually cared. And cared to an extent few people in their situation do. They took the best of punk and became arguably the first (and most enduring) of the post-punk bands; drawing, in a way that is typical of English musicians, from as many popular musical influences as they could convincingly string together.  The effect was to render up a sound and an expectation that was not to be ignored.  They were, like the very best English musical artists, concerned but cheeky monkeys.  Think of the Beatles by way of the Sex Pistols.

I know that Frye probably regarded the punk movement in much the same way he regarded the hippies a decade earlier: as a reaction to “an overproductive society” and not a revolutionary response at all.  But I’ve noticed that many of my students — all of whom were born long after the fact — have enthusiastically absorbed both the hippie and punk outlook to resist and perhaps even reform in a very civilized way an approach to life that is not only unsustainable but seems determined to commit slow suicide.  It will be interesting to see if the genuine concern these students seem to carry so lightly and confidently can translate into the future that Wilde says is what artists are.  Their default settings are strikingly liberal and tolerant and thoughtful when it comes to the accelerating destructiveness of a rapacious consumer society.  I am cautiously hopeful.  I know they are capable of it.  It remains to be seen if they can reverse the inertia that plagues a society rendered almost senile in its indifference to the needs of others, and even to the near future it behaves as if it will not live to see.  But it is still a future that remains unwritten.

So, with that in mind — This is Radio Clash; everybody hold on tight.

Continue reading →