It is a great pleasure to announce that three previously misplaced sections of Notebook 13 have been posted in the Robert D. Denham Library here. The material includes notes for the Alexander lectures which eventually became Fools of Time, notes for Frye’s book on T.S. Eliot, as well as a miscellaneous set of reflections on the imagination, false gods, Romanticism, Poe and other topics.
This is unpublished material, so that makes it especially remarkable.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Quw_RPB0U
Thoreau’s reflections on Walden Pond
On this date in 1847 Henry David Thoreau left Walden Pond and moved into Ralph Waldo Emerson‘s home in Concord, Massachusetts.
Frye on Thoreau in “Varieties of Literary Utopias” in The Stubborn Structure:
Man obviously needs far less to live the best life than he thinks he needs; and civilization as we know it is grounded on the technique of complicating wants. In fact, this technique is widely believed, in America, to be the American way of life par excellence. Thoreau says: “The only true America is the country were you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state may not endeavor to compel you to sustain the slavery, and war, and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly contribute to such things.” The pastoral revolutionary tradition is still at work in this remark, still pointing to the natural and reasonable society buried beneath the false one. (132)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn6E_4g4UAw
From Peter Ackroyd‘s London
On this day in 1666 the Great Fire of London ended.
From Samuel Pepys‘ diary for that day:
I up to the top of Barking steeple, and there saw the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw; every where great fires, oyle-cellars, and brimstone, and other things burning. I became afeard to stay there long, and therefore down again as fast as I could, the fire being spread as far as I could see it; and to Sir W. Pen’s, and there eat a piece of cold meat, having eaten nothing since Sunday, but the remains of Sunday’s dinner. Here I met with Mr. Young and Whistler; and having removed all my things, and received good hopes that the fire at our end; is stopped, they and I walked into the town, and find Fanchurch-streete, Gracious-streete; and Lumbard-streete all in dust. The Exchange a sad sight, nothing standing there, of all the statues or pillars, but Sir Thomas Gresham’s picture in the corner.
Walked into Moorefields (our feet ready to burn, walking through the towne among the hot coles), and find that full of people, and poor wretches carrying their good there, and every body keeping his goods together by themselves (and a great blessing it is to them that it is fair weathe for them to keep abroad night and day); drank there, and paid two-pence for a plain penny loaf. Thence homeward, having passed through Cheapside and Newgate Market, all burned, and seen Anthony Joyce’s House in fire. And took up (which I keep by me) a piece of glasse of Mercers’ Chappell in the streete, where much more was, so melted and buckled with the heat of the fire like parchment. I also did see a poor cat taken out of a hole in the chimney, joyning to the wall of the Exchange; with, the hair all burned off the body, and yet alive.
Frye on Pepys’ diary and the writing of history in the Late Notebooks:
I question whether it is possible to write diachronic history — that is, apart from things like Pepys’ Diary. To write about history you must stand outside it, in a synchronic ambience. That means that all history has to have some mythical underpropping, “decline and fall” or whatever. (CW 5, 37)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6splB7acXc
Joe Cocker, “With a Little Help from My Friends” (Original)
This is a glorious performance, perhaps the only cover of a Beatles’ song that surpasses the original; no mean feat. It’s from Joe Cocker’s “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” tour (1969-1971), which was a crazy affair — a huge traveling band (including a retinue of superlative backup singers, two drummers and a full horn section) — and might be regarded as the tour that effectively marked the end of the hippie era. If that’s so, it went out with a sweet-natured little pop tune transformed into a secularized hymn.
Now that we’ve had a look at Frye speaking and writing about rock ‘n’ roll and popular music generally as a bona fide element of culture and worthy of study (here, here, and here), our occasional Saturday Night Video selections maybe enjoys a little more cachet.
Here’s a collection of great cover versions of great songs, most of which are more famous than the original. A link to the original artist is included, if you want to compare.
Andrew Sullivan’s site, The Daily Dish, has been running an ongoing series from readers describing their jobs. One of them today is a community college professor. What he has to say is very moving and is certainly consistent with my experience. He just puts it better than I ever have.
I believe the assumption is that instructors are the product of a liberal-biased education and then we decide to join that liberal bastion and are just going with the established flow. For those of us in the junior college ranks, however, I think there is a more concrete reason for the lean left, rather than the abstract leftism offered in certain courses we took as students.
When I hear friends and family offer specific illustrations of why they list in a more conservative direction, it often has to do with anecdotes revolving around the person they check out at the grocery store using food stamps to buy a jug of Carlo Rossi zinfandel or spending their welfare check on some other decidedly non-essential item. Or the stories they hear from mutual friends in law enforcement or social services who deal with the dregs of society on a daily basis. Who could possibly support any form of social safety net when a portion of that net will be devoted to such vermin?
Well, on an equally anecdotal and emotional level (not pillars of rational thought, granted, but clearly major inspirations for why and how most people choose a side) we here at a community college tend to see the better side of our fellow humans who are struggling on the low end of the economic ladder. We see them trying to better themselves, working hard in spite of their conditions to try and take a step up said ladder. Hell, some of them may even be spending public money on a pack of Winstons, but we don’t see that. We see them in their best light, for the most part.
And that’s what I want people to know about my job: I don’t have empathy for poor people because I read Sinclair Lewis or Karl Marx; I have it because I work in an environment in which I see them at their best. Some of them are clearly not cut out for college, some of them are unpleasant to deal with, some of them probably do spend their meager checks on stupid things. But they are also trying to change their lot. And they have much less margin for error in doing so. If I taught at an elementary school or high school, I may assume that the kids in my classes were on their way to the destinies that social research and my own perceptions had fated for them. If I taught at a university, I would never meet people who take an English class so they can legitimately compete for a promotion at the hotel chain in which they work, or pass the nursing program to get their AA degree. The world would be easier to categorize. But since I work in the gray area between, I know that it’s not that easy, and that people defy your definitions for them all the time.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nokTjEdaUGg
A segment people might commit to memory if it made any sense. (Tina Fey comes closest by quoting Palin verbatim here.)
Vanity Fair has an article on Sarah Palin this month, which she has used as an excuse to accuse the “lamestream media” of being “impotent” and “limp” — which actually confirms how she is portrayed in the article: snarling, thin-skinned, and incapable of accepting anything but adoring praise without going immediately on the attack in an effort to bully opponents into silence. And with Fox News behind her, she can afford to stomp around noisily, swinging a big stick the entire time. She is the anti-Obama. No cool. No control. All drama. All the time.
A sample from Vanity Fair:
Palin has been a national figure for barely two years—John McCain selected her as his running mate in August 2008. Her on-the-record statements about herself amount to a litany of untruths and half-truths. With few exceptions—mostly Palin antagonists in journalism and politics whose beefs with her have long been out in the open—virtually no one who knows Palin well is willing to talk about her on the record, whether because they are loyal and want to protect her (a small and shrinking number), or because they expect her prominence to grow and intend to keep their options open, or because they fear she will exact revenge, as she has been known to do. It is an astonishing phenomenon. Colleagues and acquaintances by the hundreds went on the record to reveal what they knew, for good or ill, about prospective national candidates as diverse as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Al Gore, and Barack Obama. When it comes to Palin, people button their lips and slink away.
Palin’s rallying cry is “We’re taking America back!” Back? Where did it go? And back from whom? Oh. Right. It starts with Obama and extends to everything that does not rise to the Palin standard of representing the “real America.” For her followers, who are well-polled on the issue, these include non-whites, non-Christians, Christians not Christian enough to believe in the End Times, city dwellers, gays, lesbians, liberals, and voters under 30. In other words, taken all together, most of the country.
“Conservatives” like Palin revere Ronald Reagan as the most perfect president for a more perfect union, even though he raised taxes every year after 1982 (including what was then the largest tax increase in American history), and increased government spending more than twice that of the Ford and Carter administrations combined. He did this while also running record deficits (tripling the national debt), a feat surpassed only by George W. Bush. He was moreover responsible for the collapse of the Savings and Loan industry through irresponsible deregulation. And — does this sound familiar? — $160 billion in losses had to be picked up by the American taxpayer. But these inconvenient and verifiable facts are simply thrown down the memory hole. It only matters the legend persist that Reagan brought down Communism with one well-placed judo chop, so there can’t be much reality to the perception of him from any angle. Frye, however, saw it very clearly. Here are two of his observations on Reagan from Denham’s Frye Unbuttoned:
Television brings a theatricalizing of the social contract. Reagan may be a cipher as President, but as an actor acting the role of a decisive President in a Grade B movie he’s I suppose acceptable to people who think life is a Grade B movie. (249)
The Soviet Union is trying to outgrow the Leninist dialectical rigidity, and some elements in the U.S.A. are trying to outgrow its counterpart. But it’s hard: Reagan is the great symbol of clinging to the great-power syndrome, which is why he sounds so charismatic even when he’s talking the most obvious nonsense. (250)
Which brings us back round to Sarah Palin. She can’t speak in unscripted grammatical sentences, and she’s as mean and flinty as Reagan was genial and reassuring. But apparently she’ll do for a “great-power syndrome” now in such a delusional state that empirical evidence and the historical record are swept aside by a policy of reckless lies delivered with indifference to the damage they do– such as Palin’s infamous “death panels,” which reduced reasoned debate about health care reform to paranoid hysteria.
The reason I always put “conservative” in quotes when talking about such people is because they’re not conservatives. They’re oligarchs. Conservatives accept change while promoting social stability. Conservatives respect tradition and do not seek the radical overturning of it. Disraeli was a conservative (“Upon the education of the people of the nation the future of the nation depends”). Palin is not. She’s more like a narcissistic personality disorder with a political action committee.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfgDPLkMg-w
From the British television adaptation of Robert Graves‘s series of historical novels, I, Claudius. In this scene featuring one infamous period of decadence among many in the Roman imperial family, Caligula addresses the Senate upon his return from his “battle against Neptune.”
On this date in 476 Romulus Augustus, last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, was deposed by Odoacer, who proclaimed himself King of Italy. The mythical date for the founding of Rome is similarly exact: April 21, 753 BC by, of course, Romulus, which is a pretty sweet bit of symmetry. Furthermore, the Roman Republic was established in 509 BC and the Western Roman Empire effectively ended in 476 AD, which is almost exactly the thousand years that Rome was mythically prophesied to be a great power.
So with that remarkable cycle of history in mind, here’s Frye in conversation with David Cayley on the difference between historical cycles and historical spirals — between mere repetition and progressive cultural enlightenment:
Cayley: Do you see instances in history of spiralling rather than cycling?
Frye: We find the idea of the turning cycle in the movement that went from the decline and fall of the Roman Empire to the rise of medieval civilization. People always thought in terms of a renewed Roman Empire, all the way down to the eighteenth century, and they certainly regarded that as a spiral. Whether we would think so or not is another question.
Cayley: I would think there’s some argument for it. So the question then becomes whether we take our tradition with us on another turn, or whether, as appears to be the case and was noted in your remarks on senility earlier, we forget it.
Frye: I think it’s a disaster to forget it, because that means that anything new will simply be the primitive coming around again, making the same mistakes all over. And we can’t afford to make those mistakes with the technology we’ve got now. (CW 24, 1035)
I am working on three sections from Notebook 13 which I glossed over when Michael Dolzani was editing the Renaissance Notebooks and which then disappeared between the cracks. These include notes on the Alexander lectures, notes for T.S. Eliot, and a series of entries on the imagination. They should have gone into the Miscellany volume.
Here’s one passage I could have used in my various efforts to explain interpenetration:
The conceptual elements of irony include myths of cyclical return, of “entropy,” of the all too human, of the inferno & the “dystopia,” of the assimilation of the human (i.e. the social) to the natural, & of historical myths like those of Vico & Spengler. Comedy has progress & evolution, metamorphosis, providential design, salvation & enlightenment in religion, victorious identifying dialectic in philosophy. Romance, besides the quest, pilgrimage & treasure finding myths in its structure & its conceptual identity by interpenetration, destroys the antithesis of subject & object, time & space, creator & creature. The hunch that the Avatamasaka doctrine of interpenetration is the meaning of romance is just a hunch, but a hunch that is going to work out all right. No hunch that’s been in my mind for twenty years can be wrong. I suppose I might reconsider my idea of calling the lectures the [“Information”?] of Tragedy, etc. Or Spirit – sounds vague and sentimental. Or perhaps just plain “theme.”
We’ll be posting all three recovered sections from Notebook 13 in the library shortly.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jG2Vp9XKDc
SNL alum Sen. Al Franken challenges a representative of the Hudson Institute during the recent health care reform hearings on her claim that reform will lead to more medical bankruptcies.
This is our Friday comedy slot. But it’s also a good occasion to see what happens when a very funny man becomes a senator whose primary interest is serving his constituents rather than big business.
After the jump, Al Franken uses humor to show up someone who only thinks she is funny, Ann Coulter — although her ongoing effort to rehabilitate her “hero” Joseph McCarthy is chuckle-worthy.
As readers of this blog likely know, the Centre for Comparative Literature hosts an annual conference organised by the students of Comparative Literature. This year’s theme is Iconoclasm: the Breaking and Making of Images and it has thus far been sponsored by the Centre for Comparative Literature, the Jackman Humanities Institute, Latin American Studies, and the Northrop Frye Professorship in Literary Theory. I would like to encourage readers of this blog to consider submitting an abstract to the conference (deadline September 10, 2010); the Call for Papers appears below the cut. The conference organisers are hoping that this year’s conference will, once again, be an incredible success and highlight the continued importance of the Centre for Comparative Literature.
The 22nd annual conference of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto in March 2011 will focus on the idea of Iconoclasm, the breaking of images and the making of icons.
The word “iconoclasm” is weighted with a long history of religious significance, from the Byzantine war on religious icons of the 8th- and 9th-centuries and the Protestant reformation in the 16th century, to the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of Bamyan in the 21st century. But the idea of destroying or defacing images, especially images that convey aspects of cultural dominance or, conversely, pose a threat to that dominance, is as often political as religious: think of the Chinese Cultural Revolution or graffiti moustaches. Political iconoclasm, unlike religious iconoclasm, does not object to representation as such but rather to certain images that have been granted the status of icons. However, any act of desecrating symbols of authority itself often takes on iconic status: take, for example, photos of the pulling down of statues from Romania to Iraq.
Iconoclasm need not be visual and material and can also take abstract and intellectual forms. Subversive, transgressive, blasphemous writing is also iconoclastic in inspiration and function. Moreover, the power associated with images in general and iconic images in particular has often inspired writers to subdue the power of images or to wrest it for themselves. The ekphrastic contest between literature, or verbal representation, and images, or visual representation, is very often iconoclastic in nature.
Contemporary media culture floods us with images and alters their impact, creating ever more sophisticated organized cults around them, such as celebrity, high art, advertising, the news, etc. Just as the word “icon” has acquired new meanings, ranging from signs for computer applications to logos and celebrity, so, too, iconoclasm, the urge to deface, destroy, or alter images, takes on wholly new meanings.
We wish to examine a wide range of iconoclastic moments in order to understand the political, ethical, and aesthetic stakes involved in challenging the signifying power of the iconic image. Is there a tradition of iconoclasm or is the modern icon and thus modern iconoclasm something new? Is iconoclasm even possible, or does it always participate in the forces of iconicity, creating, in effect, iconoclastic icons? Subjects that are of interest to us include but are in no way limited to: