httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iJ7bs4mTUY
On this date the legendary gypsy jazz guitarist, Django Reinhardt, died (1910 – 1953).
Reinhardt could only play with the first two fingers on his left hand, the other two having been crippled in a fire. And yet, as you’ll see and hear in the clip above, he could do more with those two fingers than most people can do with all four.
Andrew Von Hendy’s The Modern Construction of Myth (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2003) includes an interesting section on Frye (you can read it here). Hendy has an impressive knowledge of modern theories of myth, and he certainly sees real strengths in Frye’s approach. His treatment, however, is restricted to the Anatomy and, perhaps because of this, he is dissatisfied with Frye’s understanding of the social context of literature. His position is that Frye’s view of the transformational power of literature is ultimately “romantic”–a purely personal projection that exalts the individual self over society. (This is neither a fair construction of Frye or, for that matter, of romantic writers like Shelley and Blake.) Thus Frye’s emphasis on the hypothetical and disinterested condition of literature is understood as a failure to address myth’s relationship to immediate social concerns and the concrete reality of history.
This is a typical criticism of Frye’s work. As he himself recognized, one of the unfortunate outcomes of the Anatomy’s enormous celebrity and influence is that it overshadowed Frye’s later elaborations and refinements of the myriad concepts it introduced, in particular his dynamic understanding of the role of both literature and literary criticism in society. Bad faith and vested interests being what they are, the crude assessment of Frye as an aloof and disengaged formalist is now a shibboleth for many, most of whom have never read the Anatomy.
Hendy is not one of them; he is in good faith and has certainly read the Anatomy carefully. His treatment is far from dismissive. His analysis is worth reading.
Sigh. David Brooks and Tom Friedman.
I confess I cannot write extensively about either because I can no longer stand to read them. Brooks is a highfalutin reformulator of the conventional wisdom, a perennial apologist for the powers that be. (He’s supposed to be the thinking liberal’s conservative, but for my money the person who matches that description is Andrew Sullivan.) As for Friedman, it’s hard to imagine another serious columnist so undeserving to be taken seriously. He talks and talks and talks and talks. He says almost nothing worth hearing. He’s the Ross Douthat of “liberalism”, proving that, for the privileged, there’s apparently no greater privilege than watching the privileged enjoy their privileges.
But if I can’t rise to the occasion beyond ad hominem characterizations of professional hackery, I can at least leave it to someone who is very very good at it, and reads both closely enough to write extensive uproarious takedowns of their pretensions and considerable intellectual shortcomings — Matt Taibbi.
Taibbi holds Hunter S. Thompson‘s old position at Rolling Stone as chief political correspondent. Like Thompson, he’s as profane as he is articulate, and openly contemptuous of those who abuse their power. He’s also an old school journalist who does the legwork, gets the facts, and provides reportage that is not just cold-filtered polemic (take note, Maureen Dowd). Taibbi is the only high-profile, mass-circulation journalist to take on Goldman Sachs. Last year he produced a notorious article that had them running scared and included this often repeated formulation: “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Here’s a little taste from a post (“Let Them Eat Work“) that encapsulates Taibbi’s estimation of David Brooks:
Would I rather clean army latrines with my tongue, or would I rather do what Brooks does for a living, working as a professional groveler and flatterer who three times a week has to come up with new ways to elucidate for his rich readers how cosmically just their lifestyles are? If sucking up to upper-crust yabos was my actual job and I had to do it to keep the electricity on in my house, then yes, I might look at that as work.
But it strikes me that David Brooks actually enjoys his chosen profession. In fact, he strikes me as the kind of person who even in his spare time would pay a Leona Helmsley lookalike a thousand dollars to take a shit on his back. And here he is saying that the reason the poor and the middle classes are struggling is because they don’t work hard enough. Is this guy the best, or what? Does it get any better than this?
Now, that’s speaking truth to power. (More Taibbi on Brooks here and here.)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgiPXFVY0T8&feature=channel
The movie that haunted Frye as a child, The Phantom of the Opera. (The full movie appears at the link above.)
Frye in “Notebook 12”:
I have a feeling — probably it is just one of those would-be profound feelings that it’s comfortable to have — that I cannot really get at the centre of a problem unless something in it goes back to childhood impressions. Thus my New Comedy ideas, the core of everything I did after Blake, go back to my [Horatio] Alger reading, and now I think the clue to this labyrinth is the sentimental romance of the 19th century, the roots of which are in Scott. While I lived on Bathurst St. I was constantly reading ghost stories with similar patterns in mind, & Poe & Hawthorne have always been favorites. Underground caves; the Phantom of the Opera & the like, are all part of the Urthona penseroso pattern. (CW 9, 141-2)
On this date Emily Dickinson died (1830 – 1886).
Frye in his essay “Emily Dickinson”:
Like Blake, with whom she has been compared ever since Higginson’s preface of the 1890 volume, Emily Dickinson shows us two contrary states of the human soul, a vision of innocence and a vision of “experience”, or ordinary life. One is a vision of “Presence,” the other of “Place”; in one the primary fact of life is partnership, in the other it is parting. Thus she may say, depending on the context, both “Were Departure Separation, there would be neither Nature nor Art, for there would be no World” and “Parting is all we know of heaven, / And all we need of hell.” (CW 17, 266)
An adaptation of “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died” after the jump.
“I do not recall reading any literary criticism, as opposed to literary biography, until I was an undergraduate. At seventeen I purchased Northrop Frye’s study of William Blake, Fearful Symmetry, soon after its publication. What Hart Crane was to me at ten, Frye became at seventeen, an overwhelming experience. Frye’s influence on me lasted twenty years but came tumbling down on my thirty-seventh birthday, when I awakened from a nightmare and then passed the entire day in composing a dithyramb, “The Covering Cherub or Poetic Influence.” Six years later, that had evolved into The Anxiety of Influence, a book Frye rightly rejected, from his Christian Platonist stance. Now, at seventy-eight, I would not have the patience to reread anything by Frye but I possess almost all of Hart Crane by memory, recite much of it daily and continue teaching him. I came to value other contemporary critics—Empson and Kenneth Burke particularly—but have now dispensed with reading them also. Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Walter Pater, Emerson, Oscar Wilde I go on reading as I do the poets.”
Harold Bloom, “The Point of View for My Work as a Critic: A Dithyramb.” The Hopkins Review 2, no. 1 (Winter 2009), New Series: 28–48.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Crw85HvIFs
In a world where unforgettable moments of well-earned defeat and humiliation in an iconic sitcom can be stripped of their context and re-edited to transform one of the most hapless and selfish of characters into the redeemed hero of a tearjerking melodrama — in only such a world could that hero be. . .George Constanza.
This ingenious re-alignment of the Seinfeld universe brought to you by lorocker.
Thanks for this post on Sinatra, Mike. Frye’s erudite knowledge of classical music is well known, but the one essay he wrote on Frank Sinatra is a little known fact. It just goes to show Frye’s incredible range, like ol’ blue eyes himself. The essay remained unpublished; Sinatra threatened to sue, or worse–and you know what that means.
Below are some excerpts from the essay, “The Fearful Symmetry of Frank Sinatra,” which opens with a statement by the singer about his legendary sense of wardrobe and style, “I am a symmetrical man, almost to a fault,” a thinly veiled allusion to both Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience” and Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus
The excerpts start in fact with a brilliant gloss on Sinatra’s version of Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got you Under my Skin” (great choice for the post, Mike!), worth quoting as it puts to to rest all the lame accusations that Frye was somehow weak on texture:
“In ‘I’ve Got you Under My Skin,’ [Nelson] Riddle starts with a comfortable, loping rhythm that he called ‘the heartbeat rhythm’–‘Sinatra’s tempo is the tempo of the heartbeat,’ he said–and then created a marvelous instrumental tension around Sinatra’s voice. Riddle always found little licks–certain spicy, nearly out-of-key notes–that would tease the key, and added the glue of ‘sustaining strings’ almost subliminally to the rhythm and woodwind sections. At the instrumental breaks in the songs, Riddle gave solo voices to oboes, muted trumpets, piccolos, bassoons; in ‘I’ve Got you Under My Skin,’ it was Milt Bernhart’s trombone, which is whipped up the excitement and Sinatra joined the song again and brought it back to the heartbeat rhythm where it had begun. Sinatra had wanted an extended crescendo; Riddle provided one that was longer than had ever been heard in an organized arrangement.”
And for you cultural studies types:
“What Sinatra evokes is not strictly urban. It is a very particular American loneliness–that of the soul adrift in its pursuit of the destiny of ‘me,’ and thrown back onto the solitude of its own restless heart.”
“The cocked hat, the open collar, the backward glance with the raincoat slung over the shoulder, the body leaning back with arms wide open in song–these images of perfect individualism dominated the albums of the fifties.”
And finally, in the context of ritual and dream, opsis and melos:
“In time, Sinatra seized more than power; he infiltrated the Western world’s dream life.”
Frye never stops amazing his readers. Who’d have thunk it? Not even Bob Denham. As one critic of Frye has justly remarked, “in whatever direction you happen to be going, you always meet Frye on the way back.”
And Sinatra. Just don’t get in his way.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab4VD_ll3h0
On this date Frank Sinatra died (1915 -1998).
Above, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”.
Parts of this post come from my introduction to Eva-Lynn Jagoe’s plenary lecture – The Linda Hutcheon and J. Edward Chamberlin Lecture in Literary Theory – at the annual conference at the Centre for Comparative Literature.
I recently had the great pleasure of studying and learning in an experimental setting. The goal of the course – Proust and Modernity – was to read Proust in relation to Modernity alongside various theoretical texts. The theory texts consisted of the usual suspects: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Fredric Jameson, Jacques Lacan, Kaja Silverman, Julia Kristeva, Malcolm Bowie, and Carol Mavor. The course itself consisted of response papers, presentations, and a term paper. Nothing, so far, out of the ordinary. Well, let me introduce the first oddity: only one of the students had read Proust previously, and the professor like the rest of the students was reading Proust for the first time. We ultimately, toward the end of the class, called this “virginal reading.”
Most readers of this blog will likely have never encountered Eva-Lynn Jagoe, the author (currently at work on “the long novel”) or the professor, so let me briefly indulge here in giving some account of her as instructor. In the classroom, Professor Jagoe’s central goal is always to test ideas and question students and their ideas. Her classroom is a laboratory for readers. The first thing to know is that Eva-Lynn often seeks to break down the institutional walls of the structure: we ultimately tossed the syllabus. In its place, each student agreed to offer commentary, work through Proust, and decide with Professor Jagoe (I’m oscillating between the professorial and the personal precisely because blurring of lines is so important, and to show that students ultimately did recognise there was a professor in the room) how we would be evaluated – but evaluation, as a university requirement, takes on a new role in her classroom. Throughout the course on Proust, we experimented with a new pedagogy and a new classroom experience (or, perhaps, just new to me, but something felt novel). The classroom always has food, always has drinks, always had laughter: these were the requirements. Additionally, we were to read and discuss the novel from personal, subjective, and confessional starting points – which, naturally, makes Proust the near perfect subject of study. It is in this space that we, students and professor, began to experiment with modes of teaching, modes of learning, modes of reading.
Initially, we had set upon reading a series of theorists in addition to Proust and we had agreed to follow Roger Shattuck’s plan of study for reading Proust. However, as we began to read, we realised that something was not working; we were not able to do what we had wanted to do, which was read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Thus, the critical readings became optional and then later they became obsolete. In addition to tossing the theory, we added an extra hour to our Friday sessions. One of our meetings lasted over five hours, we left around 6 pm on a Friday, we began at 1, and the discussion continued over email. In the classroom, Professor Jagoe managed to create something of a utopian space in which Proust was read, discussed, and in many ways dreamed into the living. In these moments, Proust became real, or we became Proustian and from here the text was no longer studied in and of itself, but in relation to the greater problem of the imagination. Proust, of course, will teach this very lesson in the last volume of the novel, he writes: “In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without his book, he would perhaps never have expressed himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is a proof of its veracity.”