Picture of the Day

Leave a reply

A remarkable and inspiring image under any circumstances, but how satisfying to see it happening now: Christians in Cairo form a protective circle around Muslims at prayer.

On the darker side of things, it looks like the military has decided not to withdraw its  support of the Mubarak regime, although it has not so far participated in the crackdown, leaving that to “pro-Mubarak demonstrators”: that is, government-paid goons, which the military stands by and watches as they violently attack peaceful demonstrators.

(h/t Dish)

Simone Weil

Leave a reply

Today is Simone Weil‘s birthday (1909-1943).

From The Great Code:

In our day Simone Weil has found the traditional doctrine of the Church as the Body of Christ a major obstacle — not impossibly the major obstacle — to her entering it.  She points out that it does not differ enough from other metaphors of integration, such as the class solidarity metaphor of Marxism, and says:

“Our true dignity is not to be parts of a body. . . . It consists in this, that in the state of perfection which is the vocation of each one of us, we no longer live in ourselves, but Christ lives in us; so that through our perfection . . . becomes in a sense each one of us, as he is completely in each host.  The hosts are not a part of his body.”

I quote this because, whether she is right or wrong, and whatever the theological implications, the issue she raises is a central one in metaphorical vision, or the application of metaphors to human experience.  We are born, we said, within the pre-existing social contract out of which we develop what individuality we have, and the interests of that society take priority over the interests of the individual.  Many religions, on the other hand, in their origin, attempt to be recreated societies built on the influence of a single individual: Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Mohammed, or at most a small group.  Such teachers signify, by their appearance, that there are individuals to whom a society should be related, rather than the other way around.  Within a generation or two, however, this new society has become one more social contract, and the individuals of the new generations are once again subordinated to it.

Paul’s conception of Jesus as the genuine individuality of the individual, which is what I think Simone Weil is following here, indicates a reformulating of the central Christian metaphor in a way that unites without subordinating, that achieves identity with and identity as on equal terms.  The Eucharistic image, which she also refers to, suggests that the crucial event of Good Friday — the death of Christ on the cross — is one with the death of everything else in the past.  The swallowed Christ, eaten, divided, and drunk, in the phrase of Eliot’s Gerontion, is one with the potential individual buried in the tomb of the ego during the Sabbath of time and history, where it is the only thing that rests.  When this individual awakens and we pass to resurrection and Easter, the community with which he is identical is no longer a whole of which he is a part, but another aspect of himself, or, in the traditional metonymic language, another person of his substance. (CW 19, 119-20)

Crackdown in Egypt

Leave a reply

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

Raw footage from Tahrir Square today

It may be starting.  “Pro Mubarak demonstrators” armed with whips, sticks and bricks are assaulting demonstrators and reporters in Tahrir Square in Cairo.  It’s reported that some are now jumping onto tanks and encouraging the drivers to move against the crowd.

Dish updates here.

Al Jazeera English here.

Al Jazeera YouTube Channel live feed here.

Groundhog Day

1 Reply

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUWhN6j7OS4&feature=related

Phil Connors begins to rescue himself from an eternity of Groundhog Days by reading books and learning to play the piano

It’s Groundhog Day, which, thanks to the 1993 movie, now has an association with the nightmare of eternal recurrence.

Frye on progressive repetition in “The Quality of Life in the 70s”:

I said before that the question of what is news raises another question: what is it that really happens?  I said too that most of our lives is spent in repetition and routine, the world of non-news.  But there are two kinds of repetition.  There is the repetition of ordinary habit, three meals a day, going to the job, driving the car, and all the continuous activities that preserve our sense of identity.  There is also the repetition of practice, as when we learn to play the piano or memorize the alphabet or the multiplication table.  This is directed and progressive repetition, and it si the basis of all education.  The ability to think is just as much a matter of habit and practice as the ability to play the piano.  Whenever anything that we see, or pick up in conversation, or get as an idea, is added to and becomes a part of an expanding body of experience, we are continuing our education.  In that sense we may say that nothing is really happening in the world except the education of the people in it. . . Education, then, is not a preparation for real life: it is the encounter with real life, and the only way in which the reality can be grasped at all.  (CW 11, 294-5)

James Joyce and Ulysses

Leave a reply

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3z1icebbefs

A lively reading of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from last year’s Bloomsday in Dublin

Today is James Joyce‘s birthday (1882-1941), and on this date in 1922 Ulysses was published.

From The Secular Scripture:

Ulysses concludes with the monologue of Molly Bloom who seems a pure White Goddess figure, the incarnation of a cyclical nature who embraces and abandons one lover after another.  And yet she too is an embodiment of the chaste Penelope, and at the end of her ruminations she goes back to something very like the dawn of a first love (CW 18, 113-14)

Quote of the Day: “Uninformed nonsense mixed with brazen bullshit”

Leave a reply

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH7GPPpsw6g

Glenn Beck, once again, peddling lies and paranoia about Egypt.  As with Palin, it never stops.

Conor Friedersdorf, conservative, in the Daily Dish:

As I’ve said before, lots of Glenn Beck listeners aren’t in on the joke. Unlike Roger Ailes, Jonah Goldberg, and every staffer at the Heritage Foundation happy hour, they don’t realize that the Fox News Channel puts this man on the air fully understanding that large parts of his program are  uninformed nonsense mixed with brazen bullshit. When a Fox News host tells these viewers, “I’m not going to treat you like you’re a moron,” playing on their insecurity about other media outlets talking down to or lying to them, they take it at face value. What sort of callous, immoral person allows these viewers to be played for fools?

The Formula of Romance

2 Replies

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I

The Axis of Awesome: Forty four-chord songs in five and a half minutes

I have always been inspired by Frye’s work, and his Secular Scripture in particular has been instrumental in how I conceive the romance. My studies have focused on a small detail from Frye’s theory of romance. In The Secular Scripture, he writes:

One can, of course, understand an emphasis on virginity in romance on social grounds. In the social conditions assumed, virginity is to a woman what honor is to a man, the symbol of the fact that she is not a slave.  Behind all the ‘fate worse than death’ situations that romance delights in, there runs the sense that a woman deprived of her virginity, by any means, except a marriage she has at least consented to, is, to put it vulgarly, in an impossible bargaining position.  But the social reasons for the emphasis on virginity, however obvious, are still not enough for understanding the structure of romance. (CW 18, 49-50)

Something about this notion never seemed right to me.  I could agree that virginity served only a structural purpose, but I was left wondering how it could be structural when it only referred to female characters.  Why was there not a male virgin in romance?  To this end, I have written a dissertation on the subject.  I have surveyed well over one hundred romance novels that include virgins, and I have developed something of an anatomy of male virgins in romance.

While laying out this dissertation, however, I was reminded of the issue of “formula,” because romances are of course “formulaic.”  That is, all romances follow a narrative and must have so many key characters, episodes and so on.  Indeed, many critics of romance note this.  Pamela Regis, for instance, argues that there are eight key requirements:

Eight narrative events take a heroine in a romance novel from encumbered to free. In one or more of the scenes, romance novels always depict the following: the initial state of society in which heroine and hero must court, the meeting between heroine and hero, the barrier to the union of heroine and hero, the attraction between the heroine and hero, the declaration of love between heroine and hero, the point of ritual death, the recognition by the heroine and hero of the means to overcome the barrier, and the betrothal. These elements are essential. (30)

Even with these eight elements, however, romance is remarkably varied. Harlequin Publications, for example, produces romances that have varying levels of eroticism and sexuality — and even a NASCAR setting, for those looking for one.  But all romances evidently possess Regis’s eight requirements.  So the question becomes: why do literary critics in general look down upon formulaic fiction?  In many regards, it seems that sticking to and following the formula presents its own challenges, including, how does any writer make a formula new?

So, with this in mind, I am posting the video above to illustrate the point: just four chords can produce forty different pop songs for the purposes of a single comedy bit.  Why shouldn’t eight elements of an expansive literary formula produce any number of romances?