We are very pleased to announce that we will very shortly be posting a new collection of twenty-two essays on Northrop Frye by Bob Denham, which he has very generously decided to publish with us. These essays will examine a number of prevailing themes and influences in Frye’s work, including the more esoteric dimension of his interests. Nine of these essays will examine his relation to a number of other influential thinkers, including Aristotle, Giordano Bruno, Kierkegaard, Mallarmé, and Lewis Carroll. I think we can confidently promise that these will be available in our library for you to read in paginated, searchable, and downloadable PDF by Monday.
There is a huge number of Americans who simply don’t realize that they’ve been victimized by Wall Street – that they’ve paid inflated commodity prices due to irresponsible speculation and manipulation, seen their home values depressed thanks to corruption in the mortgage markets, subsidized banker bonuses with their tax dollars and/or been forced to pay usurious interest rates for consumer credit, among other things.
I would imagine the end game of any movement against Wall Street corruption is going to involve some very elaborate organization. There are going to have to be consumer and investor boycotts, shareholder revolts, criminal prosecutions, new laws passed, and other moves. But a good first step is making people aware of the battle lines.
The Conservatives’ Omnibus Crime Bill is working its way through the House. The tax-payer funded Government of Canada television ad above, one of many like it that ran in the weeks before the election was called, is now airing again. The intention clearly is to tenderize the public and put it in the mood for “reform.”
As is typically the case with the Conservatives, it’s about fear. They take a worst-case scenario and make it appear to be the widespread norm. This is a recognizable part of what seems to be a cynical and ongoing propaganda campaign. If anyone can find statistics regarding any significant incidence of middle-class children under the age of ten using “juicy” as depicted in this ad, I’d be grateful.
The Conservatives apparently want to change our attitude toward government on all fronts, and the message is clear: government can’t afford to provide the services we want and need, but it can “protect” us from bogies and bumps in the night. It can’t find the money for expanded health care, but there’s more than enough to build prisons.
Like conservatives in the U.S., Canada’s Conservative Party disdains government as a provider of public service, and has taken hold of the instruments of government in order to undermine it. It is obvious at this point that they do so on behalf of their real constituency, the rich and corporations, who are the only beneficiaries of government policy to any significant extent. The fact that income inequality in Canada is now increasing at a faster rate than the U.S. verifies as much.
Mindy Kaling, who writes for and plays Kelly Kapoor on The Office, in this week’s New Yorker lays out her love of romantic comedies by way of “the female archetypes”:
I like watching people fall in love onscreen so much that I can suspend my disbelief in the contrived situations that occur only in the heightened world of romantic comedies. I have come to enjoy the moment when the male lead, say, slips and falls right on top of the expensive wedding cake. I actually feel robbed when the female lead’s dress doesn’t get torn open at a baseball game while the JumboTron camera is on her. I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world. For me, there is no difference between Ripley from “Alien” and any Katherine Heigl character. They are equally implausible. They’re all participating in a similar level of fakey razzle-dazzle, and I enjoy every second of it.
It makes sense, then, that in the romantic-comedy world there are many specimens of women who—like Vulcans or Mothra—do not exist in real life.
The types Kaling goes on to describe in detail are:
“The Klutz” (“The hundred-per-cent-perfect-looking female is perfect in every way except that she constantly bonks her head on things”)
“The Ethereal Weirdo” (also known as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl: “She is essential to the male fantasy that even if a guy is boring he deserves a woman who will find him fascinating and perk up his dreary life by forcing him to go skinny-dipping in a stranger’s pool.”).
“The Woman Who Is Obsessed with Her Career and Is No Fun at All” (“Often, a script calls for this uptight career woman to ‘relearn’ how to seduce a man, and she has to do all sorts of crazy degrading crap, like eat a hot dog in a sexy way or something.”).
“The Forty-two-Year-Old Mother of the Thirty-Year-Old Male Lead” (“If you think about the backstory of a typical mother character in a romantic comedy, you realize this: when “Mom” was an adolescent, the very week she started to menstruate she was impregnated with a baby who would grow up to be the movie’s likable brown-haired leading man.”).
“The Sassy Best Friend” (“You know that really hilarious and horny best friend who is always asking about your relationship and has nothing really going on in her own life? She always wants to meet you in coffee shops or wants to go to Bloomingdale’s to sample perfumes? She runs a chic dildo store in the West Village? Nope? O.K., that’s this person.”).
“The Skinny Woman Who Is Beautiful and Toned but Also Gluttonous and Disgusting” (“If you look closely, you can see this woman’s ribs through the dress she’s wearing—that’s how skinny she is, this cheesecake-loving cow.”).
“The Woman Who Works in an Art Gallery” (“The Gallery Worker character is the rare female movie archetype that has a male counterpart. Whenever you meet a handsome, charming, successful man in a romantic comedy, the heroine’s friend always says the same thing: ‘He’s really successful. He’s”—say it with me—“an architect!’”).
EthicalOil.org’s campaign against Saudi Arabian oil with a message that is very simple: Muslims bad, Alberta good. This ad began appearing last week.
Frye in “The Present Condition of the World” (1943) observes that North America is “a happy-hunting-ground of all forms of advertisement, propaganda, and suggestions. Advertising and ‘publicity’ are based on the fact that sense experience is involuntary and on the assumption that the mind does not possess enough selective power to resist a large number of repeated impressions.” (CW 10, 212)
As an illustration of the continuing relevance of this principle, Stephen Harper has taken to referring to Alberta’s tar sands as “ethical oil,” which also happens to be the title of a book by Ezra Levant, as well as the name of the oil advocacy group responsible for the television ad above.
Ezra Levant is a well-known right-wing activist with a connection to Harper dating back twenty years. Levant has been the subject of a number of lawsuits for libel. Most recently, he repeated in a column in the Toronto Sun a long-disproven slur against Holocaust survivor and wealthy liberal advocate George Soros. Sun Media was made to retract and apologize when confronted with the possibility of yet another Levant-centred libel suit. Levant is, moreover, a protege of Koch Industries, an oil production conglomerate which, among many other things, bankrolls global warming denialism.
His book, Ethical Oil, is morally idiotic. In it he makes the argument that the tar sands produce “ethical” oil because it comes from a nice place like Alberta, rather than from a nasty and unethical place like Saudi Arabia. The promotion of the idea of ethical oil is demagoguery that trades on resentment and ignorance while conveniently leaving out every other consideration, including a noxiously hypocritical self-interest, as well as the fact that, whatever else happens, we’re still going to be doing business with the dirty Arabs the ad above demonizes. Even so, the term has been adopted by Stephen Harper personally, and at just the time that the Keystone XL pipeline is awaiting American approval.
You can read David Suzuki’s review of Levant’s book here. A sample:
If this is the most “ethical” source of oil we can find, we need to ask other questions about the moral purity of our intensively processed bitumen. For example, if we sell the oil to countries with poor human-rights records, like China, does that affect the product’s “ethical” nature? And how “ethical” are the companies operating in the oilsands: for example, Exxon Mobil, well-known sponsor of climate-change disinformation campaigns; BP, responsible for last year’s massive oily disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, or PetroChina? There’s also the effect of greenhouse gas emissions on our children and grandchildren, which to me is an intergenerational crime.
It is distressing to see this dangerous notion being intravenously introduced into the public discourse by what seems to be a carefully-timed, co-ordinated effort. That Harper would use his office to shill so openly for it makes it that much more alarming.
Two of the anarchist cheerleaders from “Smells Like Teen Spirit” between takes
Amanda Marcotte, on the twentieth anniversary of the release of Nevermind, considers Nirvana’s feminist legacy.
Nirvana’s opening salvo in its assault on mainstream rock, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” did more than just wash away any musical relevance of bands like Poison and Winger, but it also laid waste to the sexism that fueled so much hair metal and other dude-centric hard rock. The first human faces you see in the video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” belong not to the band members, but to a group of heavily tattooed women dressed like anarchist cheerleaders, a swift but brutal rebuttal to all the images of acceptable femininity that your average suburban teenager lived with at the time. Forget the hair metal groupies or the bubbly beauty queen cheerleaders. For girls watching this video, it was a revelation: You could instead choose to be a badass.
The cheerleaders were just a taste of what Kurt Cobain had up his sleeve when it came to subverting traditional gender roles. It wasn’t just the kick-ass women in this one video. Nirvana baked feminist ideas right into their lyrics and image. Nirvana had songs like “Polly,” “Pennyroyal Tea,” and “Breed,” which dealt directly with gender issues from a pro-feminist perspective, and songs like “About a Girl” and “All Apologies,” which employed a layered, nuanced understanding of love and gender. Alison, 31, who reached out through Twitter, marveled at the gap between Nirvana and the bands like Warrant that came before it, saying, “So much of the music made by men at the time that was popular was all about how women were basically just holes to fuck,” adding that Cobain, “felt like a guy who viewed women as people.”
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Nirvana’s feminism stemmed directly from the Northwest rock scene that birthed the band. Even though they were associated with Seattle, NPR’s music critic Ann Powers noted, “They came out of Olympia, a much different scene, more female-dominated.” Riot grrrl—a subgenre of punk rock that focused on empowering girls to speak out on feminist topics such as reproductive rights and sexual violence—sprang from the same circles as Nirvana, and Cobain made friends with famous riot grrrls Tobi Vail and Kathleen Hanna, who inadvertently gave Cobain the title idea for “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” “From the very beginning, he was aware of the gender issue,” Powers said, arguing that the riot grrrls “were important to him.” Fans of both Nirvana and riot grrrl agree. Kate described Nirvana as “a riot grrrl band, basically.” Tara, who was living in Alabama when she discovered Nirvana, particularly admired the riot grrrl connection, saying, “The thing I really loved about that was it didn’t seem like a stunt. They ran with the riot grrrl crowd out of genuine admiration for them and what they stood for.”
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For fans, Nirvana often proved a gateway drug to discovering music that had female musicians to go right along with the feminist sentiments. Tara cited Nirvana as the reason she fell hard for alternative rock, bringing her to Tori Amos, Liz Phair, Hole, and Babes in Toyland. Mickey, a Seattle native, was already a fan of many female-led punk bands, but felt Nirvana broadened her horizons. “I probably became aware of bands like L7, Sleater-Kinney, and of course, Hole, through my love of Nirvana.” Alison, who described herself as growing up in a “basic, bland suburb,” also discovered L7, Hole, and Bikini Kill through Nirvana, but felt that loving Nirvana primed you to listen to feminist musicians outside of their direct sphere of influence. She suggested that the pride Nirvana gave to outcasts and weirdos “eventually led to a more specific validation that being a woman was fine, too,” adding that this shot of feminist pride “made me more inclined to seek out strong women in areas like music, literature, etc.”
“Hope is what divides those who see the leap in the dark as the end of things from those who see it also as a new beginning.” “The Leap in the Dark,” (CW 4, 304)
It’s getting no coverage in the mainstream media, but hundreds of young people are in the eighth day of an organized protest on Wall Street.
The generation coming up behind us has has been so completely abused — obscenely high costs for post-secondary education leaving them tens of thousands of dollars in debt while facing a stagnant job market — that we may see much much more of this and for some time to come.
It’s worth noting that, while the mainstream media have not covered the event, the organizers and participants have likewise shut out the mainstream media. Young people overwhelmingly do not watch network or cable news and do not read “family newspapers.” That means they largely live outside the ludicrous narratives that now make up the “news”: petty scandals, smirking gossip, and, worst of all, politics that are presented as nothing more than self-defeating cycles of “some say this, some say that,” and all of it suffused with unchecked lies. This makes these young people very threatening indeed; unlike too many of their elders, they are not politically and socially narcoleptic. They have their own agenda, which tends to be liberal to an extent that terrifies conservatives, and they have their own sources of information and channels of communication.
Whatever conservatives think they’re doing, it’s doomed in the long run, and at some level they know it. In ten years these young people will more or less have the run of things as the baby boomers die off in greater and greater numbers. Good luck stopping them then.
The Village Voice has an update. OccupyWallStreet website here.
The Harper government does not like the press (Sun Media excepted), does not like its political opposition, does not like critics, does not even, it appears, like free speech that extends to any of these. As we’ve seen, the Conservatives are willing to go to great trouble to suppress videos of Stephen Harper in order to keep them away from a wider audience that might not be as sympathetic to the contents.
Frye in The Educated Imagination:
I don’t see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society. The area of ordinary speech, as I see it, is a battleground between two forms of social speech: the speech of a mob and the speech of a free society. One stands for cliche, ready-made ideas, and automatic babble, and it leads us inevitably from illusion into hysteria. There can be no free speech in a mob: free speech is one thing a mob can’t stand. You notice that the people who allow their fear of Communism to become hysterical eventually get to screaming that every sane man is a Communist. (CW 21, 490-1)
R.E.M. called it quits this week after 31 years, and today is the 20th anniversary of the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind.
I’ve posted it before, but the R.E.M. video above is worth posting again, partly because it’s a humbling reminder of how unmerciful changing fashions can be (poor Michael Stipe: look at that hat), but mostly because it’s a joyful song and because Kate Pierson of the B52s is the other half of the duet.
Nirvana’s Nevermind was the grunge movement’s equivalent of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. In other words, take your pick of songs, any one will do. But I can’t resist going with the most obvious choice, below. Seeing that the kids in the video look the way kids still do today is a pleasant surprise. The extensive tattooing was still new then.
