Courtesy of Clayton Chrusch:
“The release of creative genius is the only social problem that matters.” Fearful Symmetry
See the full paragraph in Clayton’s comment here.
Frye Quote of the Day
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Category Archives: Quote of the Day
Frye Quote of the Day: “This is liberalism”
Here’s a nice addition on the anniversary our nation was signed into law: Frye in “Trends in Modern Culture” describes liberalism as “the true faith in democracy”:
This is liberalism, the doctrine that society cannot attain freedom except by individualizing its culture. It is only when the individual is enabled to form an individual synthesis of ideas, beliefs, and tastes that a principle of freedom is established in society, and this alone distinguishes a people from a mob. A mob always has a leader, but a people is a larger human body in which there are no leaders or followers, but only individuals acting as functions of the group. Tolerance of disagreement and criticism among such individuals is necessary, not because uniform truth is nonexistent or unattainable, but because the mind is finite and passionate. (CW , 237)
Edward Greenspon in The Toronto Star today illustrates why the Harper government does not meet this standard:
For all its neglect, Liberalism actually stands for something important. It is, in the words of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, not a neutral concept but “a fighting creed.” It says: “That is not the way we do things” in the face of illiberal behaviours, whether these be misleading MPs about signatures on documents, failing to disclose the costs of fighter jets or prisons, proroguing Parliament rather than abide by rulings, attacking the legitimacy of independent watchdogs from Elections Canada to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, jamming the judiciary or weakening the channels of knowledge by which decisions can be taken on the basis of evidence rather than belief.
Quote of the Day: God and “Anatomy”
Michael Dirda on Anatomy of Criticism: “If God were to compose a survey of world literature, it might resemble this book––but probably wouldn’t be half as good.” –– Washington Post Book World (22 July 1990): X5
Quotes of the Day: Sullivan and “Anonymous”
Libertarian conservative columnist for the Sunday Times and The Atlantic, and one of the most-read political bloggers in the world, Andrew Sullivan today:
If your name is Koch, it’s pronounced cock. And if your name is Boehner, it’s pronounced boner. They can always change their names if they want. Until then … I’m calling it like it is.
Meanwhile, the online hacking collective, Anonymous, is targeting the Koch-sponsered Americans for Prosperity. Their press release reads in part:
Koch Industries, and oligarchs like them, have most recently started to manipulate the political agenda in Wisconsin. Governor Walker’s union-busting budget plan contains a clause that went nearly un-noticed. This clause would allow the sale of publicly owned utility plants in Wisconsin to private parties (specifically, Koch Industries) at any price, no matter how low, without a public bidding process. The Koch’s have helped to fuel the unrest in Wisconsin and the drive behind the bill to eliminate the collective bargaining power of unions in a bid to gain a monopoly over the state’s power supplies.
The Koch brothers have made a science of fabricating ‘grassroots’ organizations and advertising campaigns to support them in an attempt to sway voters based on their falsehoods. Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth and Citizens United are just a few of these organizations. In a world where corporate money has become the lifeblood of political influence, the labor unions are one of the few ways citizens have to fight against corporate greed. Anonymous cannot ignore the plight of the citizen-workers of Wisconsin, or the opportunity to fight for the people in America’s broken political system. For these reasons, we feel that the Koch brothers threaten the United States democratic system and, by extension, all freedom-loving individuals everywhere. As such, we have no choice but to spread the word of the Koch brothers’ political manipulation, their single-minded intent and the insidious truth of their actions in Wisconsin, for all to witness.
Story here.
Quote of the Day: “A co-operative state is necessary to preserve us from chaos”
Frye in correspondence with Helen Kemp:
“I think with the C.C.F [Co-operative Commonwealth Federation] that a co-operative state is necessary to preserve us from chaos. I think with the Liberals that it is impossible to administer that state at present. I think with the C.C.F. that man is unable, in a laissez faire system, to avoid running after false gods and destroying himself. I think with Liberals that it is only by individual freedom and democratic development that any progress can be made.” (CW 1, 155-6)
Quote of the Day
“Literary criticism is one of the hardest types of all literary writing. The world has seen only a few good literary critics.” —Frye, as recorded by Margaret Virany in her class notes for his course in literary criticism (1954)
Quote of the Day: “Fools should have full liberty to speak”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-x6MP4-ZrA
Glenn Beck yesterday — and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Frye in one of the late notebooks:
What is important about free speech in a democracy is not only that everyone has the right to express an opinion, however ill considered, but that fools should have full liberty to speak so that they can be recognized as fools. (CW 3, 410)
“Full mooner” is the term emerging from the mainstream punditocracy to describe the increasingly unhinged Glenn Beck, whose rants are more and more like watching Plan 9 from Outer Space; jaw-droppingly awful but also inadvertantly hilarious. It’s got to be the most licit approximation there is to being high on shrooms.
Quote of the Day
Quote of the Day
Following the trail left by Orwell last week, here’s an entry from Frye’s unpublished, newly posted Notebook 51, paragraph 15:
Orwell’s doublethink is the soul-body civil war where the consciousness hypnotizes itself into thinking it believes what the repressed consciousness knows to be nonsense. Fear of external authority creates internal repression. All genuine imgn. [imagination] is doublethink as Orwell defines it.
Quote of the Day: Keith Richards on Open Tuning
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiRXrFP7HGA
Rolling Stones performing “Honky Tonk Women” on Top of the Pops in 1969 with Mick Taylor on second guitar — their best lineup ever. The open G tuning drives the song’s roots very deep into the Delta blues upon which rock ‘n’ roll is based.
I’m reading Keith Richards’s surprisingly good autobiography, Life. Here he is describing his discovery of open tuning, which freed him as a composer and set him apart as a performer:
The beauty, the majesty of the five-string open G tuning for an electric guitar is that you’ve only got three notes — the other two are repetitions of each other an octave apart. It’s tuned GDGBD. Certain strings run through the whole song, so you get a drone going all the time, and because it’s electric they reverberate. Only three notes, but because of the different octaves, it fills the whole gap between bass and top notes with sound. It gives you this beautiful resonance and ring. I found working with open tunings that there’s a million places you don’t need to put your fingers. The notes are there already. You can leave strings wide open. It’s finding the spaces in between that makes open tuning work. And if you’re working on the right chord, you can hear this other chord going on behind it, which you’re actually not playing. It’s there. It defies logic. And it’s just lying there saying, “Fuck me.” And it’s a matter of the same old cliche in that respect. It’s what you leave out that counts. Let it go so that one note harmonizes off the other. And so even though you’ve now changed your fingers to another position, that note is still ringing. And you can even let it hang there. It’s called the drone note. Or at least that’s what I call it. The sitar works along similar lines — sympathetic ringing, or what they call the sympathetic strings. Logically it shouldn’t work, but when you play it, and that note keeps ringing even though you’ve now changed to another chord, you realize that that is the root note of the whole thing you’re trying to do. It’s the drone. (243)
No doubt some will think this is a laughable reach, but Richards is obviously expressing the excitement of finding something in music that is in the potential of music itself and independent of his intention, and about that Frye, of course, has something to say:
Often creative people begin with the sense of a small school to which they belong and they write manifestos defending that school. However, as they get more authority, they tend to break away from the school and speak more and more with their own voice. As the maturing process goes on, the voice becomes steadily more impersonal. If it’s a great creative mind, it moves in the direction of speaking with the authority of the art behind it. I’ve often drawn the distinction between listening to music, say, on the level of Tchaikowsky, where you feel that this is a very skillful, ingenious, and interesting composer, and music on the level of Mozart or Bach, where you feel that this is the voice of music. And that’s not to say that the music is impersonal because it obviously couldn’t be anyone but Mozart of Bach. Nevertheless, the feeling is one of having transcended the ego which is no longer opaque but completely transparent for revealing the authority of the art itself. (CW 24, 488-9)
After the jump, Son House performing the open G tuned “Death Letter Blues,” demonstrating Frye’s principle that “originality” is really a return to origins.