Fulford Reviews Denham’s “Remembering Northrop Frye”

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Robert Fulford’s review of Bob Denham’s Remembering Northrop Frye: Recollections By His Students and Others in the 1940s and 1950s, here.

An excerpt:

By 1946, when he was 34 years old, he stood at the centre of a circle — “We were a coterie,” as one member put it. Doug Fisher, one of many war veterans who came to university on a federal grant, took five Frye courses and edited the college literary magazine with Frye as faculty adviser. Fisher became a socialist politician and made his name in 1957 by unseating C.D. Howe, the most powerful minister in Ottawa; he later moved to journalism and after 40 years retired as dean of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.

In the 1940s, Fisher noticed that Frye had more graduate students than any other professor, the largest audiences for his lectures and a claque of followers that no other teacher could equal. Fisher listened carefully to Frye’s words and for the rest of his life cherished them. Even after 50 years he would sometimes feel the need of fresh stimulation and dig out his Frye lecture notes on a subject like the Book of Job or Thomas Carlyle.

I’m quoting from Fisher’s remarks in a new book edited by Robert D. Denham,Remembering Northrop Frye: Recollections by His Students and Others in the 1940s and 1950s, published by a North Carolina firm, McFarland (mcfarlandpub.com). Denham, a professor at Roanoke College in Virginia and an expert on Frye, edited his diaries years ago. While working through Frye’s hasty journal entries, he wrote to many students and friends for help explaining them. Remembering Northrop Frye brings together letters from 89 of the people who responded.

They were all Frye-ites, the term one of them uses in his reply. Others called them Fryedolators. Irving Layton invented the term Frygians, suggesting they were cold and academic, like their leader; later he changed his views. Many of them, of course, knew each other long ago, which gives this book the feeling of a reunion.

Frye: “There can be no general elite in a democratic society”

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Jon Stewart exposes the hypocrisy of those who begrudge teachers their union-negotiated $50,000 a year plus benefits salaries but also fiercely defend the Bush tax cuts for the top percentile of wage earners and defend the kleptocracy and billion dollar bonuses of Wall Street. Watch the video here.

Frye in The Modern Century captures nicely the sinister forces now openly undermining American democracy, especially a “general elite” employing immediately recognizable agents provocateurs — Ailes, Palin, O’Reilly, Beck, Limbaugh, and so on — who are attempting to consolidate political and economic power while simultaneously instilling confusion, fear and resentment in an already assailed general population through the incessant clanging of tin pot patriotism. Replace “John Birch Society” with “Tea Party,” “nostalgic intellectuals” with “neo-conservatives,” and “those who readily identify themselves as belonging to some kind of elite that a closed myth would produce” with mealy-mouthed white bread demagogues like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, and this passage is fully up to date:

In the democracies there are many who would like to see a closed mythology take over.  Some are hysterical, like the John Birch Society, who want a myth of the American way of life, as they understand it, imposed on everything. . . . Some are nostalgic intellectuals, usually with a strong religious bias, who are bemused by the “unity” of medieval culture and would like to see some kind of “return” to it.  Some are people who can readily imagine themselves as belonging to some kind of elite that a closed myth would produce.  Some are sincere believers in democracy who feel that democracy is at a disadvantage in not have a clear and unquestioned program of its beliefs. . . [T]here can be no general elite in a democratic society: in a democracy everybody belongs to some kind of elite, which derives from its social function a particular knowledge or skill that no other group has. (CW 11, 66-7)

Everybody belongs to an elite — like, say, teachers and nurses and police officers and fire fighters, who represent their common interests by way of labor unions; much the same way corporations have their common interests represented by Republican legislators and the “corporations are people too” Supreme Court of Roberts/Scalia/Thomas/Alito.

Video of the Day: “America is not broke”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgNuSEZ8CDw

Michael Moore in Wisconsin, yesterday

A sample:

America is not broke.

Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you’ll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It’s just that it’s not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.

Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.

Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer “bailout” of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can’t bring yourself to call that a financial coup d’état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.

And I can see why. For us to admit that we have let a small group of men abscond with and hoard the bulk of the wealth that runs our economy, would mean that we’d have to accept the humiliating acknowledgment that we have indeed surrendered our precious Democracy to the moneyed elite. Wall Street, the banks and the Fortune 500 now run this Republic — and, until this past month, the rest of us have felt completely helpless, unable to find a way to do anything about it.

Meanwhile, child poverty in the U.S. is drifting toward 25%, fourth among OECD countries, just behind Turkey, Mexico and Poland, and just ahead of Latvia, Spain and Lithuania.  These are the statistics of a second world country.

And there are still tens of millions of Americans who think America is the best country in the world with nothing to learn from anyone, because the really important metric is that the top 400 individuals possess more wealth than the bottom 150 million.

The Descent of Jewish Humour

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

Larry David of Curb Your Enthusiasm, in a moment clearly descended from the “badkhn” tradition, takes the stage at a Bat Mitzvah as part of a botched effort at score-settling

According to UC Berkley professor Mel Gordon, sardonic Jewish humor emerged from a pogrom in the Ukraine lasting from 1648 to 1651. Jewish elders determined that the massacre was God’s punishment, and so outlawed traditionally raucous shtetl entertainers to encourage communal piety. There was however one exception, the badkhn, who was regarded as a cruel truth-teller rather than a frivolous mirth-maker.

From the Jerusalem Post:

The badkhn was a staple in East European Jewish life for three centuries, mocking brides and grooms at their weddings. He also was in charge of Purim spiels in shtetl society.

His humor was biting, even vicious. He would tell a bride she was ugly, make jokes about the groom’s dead mother and round things off by belittling the guests for giving such worthless gifts. Much of the badkhn’s humor was grotesque, even scatological.

“They would talk about drooping breasts, big butts, small penises,” Gordon said. “We know a lot about them because they were always suing each other about who could tell which fart joke on which side of Grodno.”

It’s that same self-deprecating tone that characterizes the Yiddish-inflected Jewish jokes of the 20th century, Gordon points out. Who is the surly Jewish deli waiter of Henny Youngman fame if not a badkhn, making wisecracks at the customer’s expense? . . .

And that’s how the badkhn became the only Jewish comic permitted in the shtetls, Gordon says, and how his particular brand of sarcastic, bleak humor set the tone for what we know today as Jewish comedy. Before the 1660s, the badkhn was the least popular Jewish entertainer – now he was the sole survivor.

“Jewish humor used to be the same as that of the host country,” Gordon said. “Now it began to deviate from mainstream European humor. It became more aggressive, meaner. All of Jewish humor changed.”

The badkhn’s role was secure from the 1660s to the 1890s and the beginning of the great Jewish migration to America and to the larger cities of Russia and Ukraine.

This character is recognizable in Frye’s account of the “churl” in Anatomy‘s “Theory of Myths“:

Such a character [the churlish plain dealer] is appropriate when the tone is ironic enough to get the audience confused about the sense of the social norm: he corresponds roughly to the chorus in a tragedy, which is there for a similar reason. When the tone darkens from the ironic to the bitter, the plain dealer may become a malcontent or railer, who is morally superior to his society…but who may also be to motivated by envy to be much more than another aspect of his society’s evil… (CW 22, 164)

Quote of the Day: “Canada a model for liberal democracy and freedom”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrNl6-j9x5w

What we don’t get here and why

“In looking at two countries as closely related as Canada and the United States, no difference is unique or exclusive: we can point to nothing in Canada that does not have a counterpart, or many counterparts south of its border.  What is different is a matter of emphasis and of degree.” Frye in “Canadian Culture Today,” (CW 12, 510)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gives Canada props for preventing Fox-style “news” from developing here because we regulate the deliberate dissemination of lies.  He points out, however, that we must be particularly vigilant with Stephen Harper on the scene.

Money quote:

Canada’s Radio Act requires that “a licenser may not broadcast….any false or misleading news.” The provision has kept Fox News and right wing talk radio out of Canada and helped make Canada a model for liberal democracy and freedom. As a result of that law, Canadians enjoy high quality news coverage including the kind of foreign affairs and investigative journalism that flourished in this country before Ronald Reagan abolished the “Fairness Doctrine” in 1987. Political dialogue in Canada is marked by civility, modesty, honesty, collegiality, and idealism that have pretty much disappeared on the U.S. airwaves. When Stephen Harper moved to abolish anti-lying provision of the Radio Act, Canadians rose up to oppose him fearing that their tradition of honest non partisan news would be replaced by the toxic, overtly partisan, biased and dishonest news coverage familiar to American citizens who listen to Fox News and talk radio. Harper’s proposal was timed to facilitate the launch of a new right wing network, “Sun TV News” which Canadians call “Fox News North.”

Harper, often referred to as “George W. Bush’s Mini Me,” is known for having mounted a Bush like war on government scientists, data collectors, transparency, and enlightenment in general. He is a wizard of all the familiar tools of demagoguery; false patriotism, bigotry, fear, selfishness and belligerent religiosity.

Full story here.