httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEoeU-rOF7o&feature=player_embedded
Euronews report today on mercenary violence in Libya
Al Jazeera English’s live feed is indispensable for breaking news in the Middle East, Libya in particular. Watch it here.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0rnDH7GKYg&feature=related
Continuing with our Frye at the movies series, here’s Chaplin’s 1931 masterpiece, City Lights.
Frye seems to have been a genuine fan of Charlie Chaplin and wrote two Canadian Forum articles about him: “The Great Charlie” (1941) and “The Eternal Tramp” (1947). Here’s an excerpt from the latter:
Chaplin’s tramp is an American dramatic type, and Rip Van Winkle and Huck Finn are among his ancestors. The tramp is a social misfit, not only because he is too small and awkward to engage in a muscular extroverted scramble, but because he does not see the point of what society is doing or to what purpose it is expending all that energy. He is not a parasite, for he possesses some occult secret of inner freedom, and he is not a bum, for he will work hard enough, and still harder if a suitable motive turns up. Such a motive occurs when he discovers someone still weaker than himself, an abandoned baby or a blind girl (students of Jung will recognize the “anima” in Chaplin), and then his tenderness drives him to extraordinary spasms of breadwinning. But even his normal operations are grotesque enough, for in the very earnestness with which he tries so hard to play society’s game it is clear that he has got it all wrong, and when he is spurred to further efforts the grotesqueness reaches a kind of perverse inspiration. The political overtones of this are purely anarchist — I have never understood the connecting of Communism with Chaplin — the anarchism of Jefferson and Thoreau which see society as a community of personal relationships and not as a mechanical abstraction called a “state.” But even so the tramp is isolated by his own capacity for freedom, and he has nothing to do with the typical “little guy” that every fool in the country has been slobbering over since Pearl Harbor. (CW 11, 117)
Jonathan McCalmont at Ruthless Culture and a number of other bloggers will be posting on Anatomy of Criticism, beginning March 7th:
A few of us are going to be blogging about Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957). We are each going to take it in turns to write a position paper on a particular section of the book and then post it and discuss it over at Maureen Kincaid Speller’s blog Paper Knife. The first essay is due to go up on the seventh of March. I’ll link to it when it goes up but if you are looking for an excuse to read through a classic work of literary criticism and discuss it, then this is your chance.
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)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U4Ha9HQvMo
From the Onion News Network: meta-news.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQuNrPg1paM&feature=player_embedded
Shepard Smith — apparently the only employee at Fox News who doesn’t follow Roger Ailes’s policy to lie — weighs in on the Wisconsin union busting effort and explains why it can be called that. Americans seem to have picked up on what’s really going on here: in a poll released yesterday, 61% said that they would oppose an effort in their state to deny unions collective bargaining rights. Decency trumps ideology. Maybe we can cautiously begin to expect more of that.
Conservative senator Doug Finley: charged with election law violation
Four Conservatives, including two senators, have been charged with breaking federal election law on campaign spending. Conservative Party spokesman Fred DeLorey dismissed the charges, saying, “This is an accounting issue.”
That seems to be a pattern of behavior for conservatives everywhere these days: the law is for other people, particularly when it comes to any form of electoral malfeasance intended to gain or hold on to power. It’s just another accounting issue.
Story here.
Jeannine Marie Pitas has recently translated a small book of poetry called The History of Violets by the Uruguyan poet Marosa di Giorgio. Though a slim volume, the poetry is powerful and ripe for analysis. In her introduction, Pitas writes: “For me, her poems recall the British Romantics – Wordsworth’s image of a child terrified by a jutting crag in his Prelude, or Blake’s awe before the little lamb’s innocence and the burning tiger’s power” (viii). These poems stand out because of the imaginative power of a poet whose voice, whatever its sources, seems wholly her own.
Though I have not yet found the time to give the poems the critical attention they deserve, I can hear echoes of Frye’s Blake throughout. As a scholar trained in Latin American Literature, I continue to believe that Frye has a great deal to teach us about a literature with which he evidently had little familiarity beyond an appreciation for Jorge Luis Borges. Just as the appeal of literature is universal, so are its archetypes and expression of prevailing human concerns. When it comes to these two literary elements, Frye remains most relevant to the study of world literature.
You can order The History of Violets here. Review here.
Di Giorgio reading one of her poems after the jump.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_lToyPAUyE
Blanche meets Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire
Tennessee Williams died on this date in 1983 (born 1911).
Frye in The Educated Imagination cites Williams in his account of recurring archetypes in popular literature:
You notice that popular literature, the kind of stories that are read for relaxation, is always very highly conventionalized. If you pick up a detective story, you may not know until the last page who done it, but you always know before you start reading exactly the kind of thing that’s going to happen. If you read the fiction in women’s magazines, you read the story of Cinderella over and over again. If you read Westerns, you’re reading a development of the pastoral convention, which turns up in writers of all ages, including Shakespeare. It’s the same with characterization. The tricky or boastful gods of ancient myths and primitive folk tales are characters of the same kind that turn up in Faulkner or Tennessee Williams. (CW 21, 449)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nweqmMnRi04
Scott Walker confiding in “David Koch.” (Part 2 of the conversation after the jump. A full transcript of the conversation here.)
Koch: Bring a baseball bat. That’s what I’d do.
Walker: I have one in my office; you’d be happy with that. I have a slugger with my name on it.
Koch: Beautiful.
Walker: Union-bashing…
Koch: Beautiful.
You’ve probably heard that Wisconsin’s Tea Party governor Scott Walker got a prank call from a reporter at The Buffalo Beast (founded by Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi) in which he spoke with carefree frankness about his intention to break the public sector unions in the state. What’s crucial to the prank is the person Walker believed he was talking to: David Koch — the same David Koch to whom Walker seems eager to deliver untendered state contracts.
If you want to look into the representative faces of the corporate interests that have by this point more or less purchased the Republican party outright, look no further than the David and Charles Koch: they fund global warming denialism, they co-founded and fund the Tea Party, they threw millions of dollars at the Republicans during last year’s midterms and are looking to raise tens of millions more in 2012; now they intend to do a little union bustin’ in Wisconsin. These guys are not here to fool around. They’re working behind the scenes to distort public perceptions on some of the most important issues of the day and to gin up the political polarization that results. All of this effort is to advance an agenda whose only beneficiaries are themselves and the rarefied corporate cloud dwellers they associate with — as well as their bought-and-paid-for Republican flunkies in Congress. So the first thing to do is to bring them out of the shadows to give them the exposure they shun. That seems to be happening a little more every day.