httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg1Wl-NmzWg
“Salt Peanuts” (with Charlie Parker on sax): the tune that in 1945 blew open the bebop era with maximum bop
Today is Dizzy Gillespie‘s birthday (1917-1993).
Dizzy Gillespie
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“Forensics of a Straw Man Pharmakos in Northrop Frye’s ‘Theory of Modes'”
That’s the title of an article by Rickard Goranowski published in The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management.
You can purchase it here.
The abstract:
Jacques Derrida in 1981, in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy,’ confronted the inveterate Northrop Frye over the 1971 Critical Path as a “pharmakos” or ‘rascal traducer’: Frye’s ‘straw man’ misprision of the Sidney-Peacock-Shelley controversy belittling Peacock and Shelley was obliquely identified by Derrida, in Pharmacy’s first paragraphs, prosecuting Frye’s undue influence on university publishing and tenure management.
Quote of the Day: “Nothing was undeniably out of the window”
We’re being spammed pretty heavily these days with solicitations like these two from Poland. It’s like found poetry:
Allowable while!
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P.S. Yahoo – the inviolate shooting apt wry be area! Google: nothing was undeniably out of the window…
Effect a confab with you.
And effect a confab with you too!
Hi every at one
I’ve recently set up
a marvelous search vehicle –
P.S. Yahoo – all when a established pleases be found! Google: nothing was categorically astray…
Bye to dick!
Thank you Google Translate for your remarkable linguistic prowess. Or rather (from English to Yiddish to Hindi to Finnish to English): “Thanks to Google’s translation of their language skills are important.”
Jonathan Swift
On this date Jonathan Swift died (1667-1745).
Frye in “On Special Occasions”:
A profoundly Christian writer, Jonathan Swift, remarked that men have just enough religion to make them hate, but not enough to make them love one another. To which we may add that those who have no religion at all don’t seem to hate any less on that account. (CW 4, 324)
How Many Canadians Use American Health Care?
Every year my parents winter in Florida, and every year they are buttonholed by Americans who insist on telling them how bad Canadian health care is, and then get sniffy when assured that, no, no, it’s fine, the service is reliable and comprehensive and safe; no long waits, no preventable deaths caused by waiting. Like universal health care everywhere else in the developed world, Canadian Medicare is vastly superior to the American system when it comes to access and cost of delivery (about half what it costs the Americans). The Republicans are of course responsible for the canard that Canadian health care is all about nightmarish waiting lists, and that as a result desperate Canadian patients flood the U.S. border in search of relief (Republicans also insist on calling our system “socialized medicine,” which it is not). Over the years they’ve successfully twisted the reality to fit their propagandized version of it for cynical, self-serving reasons.
But the quantifiable reality of the situation may startle even Canadians. You can see it at a glance after the jump.
Moby Dick
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryIK9TLAoAs
The finale of the film adaptation of the novel. Pardon the occasionally laughable special effects: it was 1956.
On this date in 1851 Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was first published.
Frye makes a fair number of references to the novel, but this one in Anatomy is particularly resonant because it relates the archetype to its entire mythical family and suggests what this might mean both to the reader and to the writer who engages it:
If we do not accept the archetypal or conventional element in the imagery that links one poem to another, it is impossible to get any systematic mental training out of the reading of literature alone. But if we add to our desire to know literature a desire to know how we know it, we shall find that expanding images into conventional archetypes of literature is a process that takes place unconsciously in all our reading. A symbol of the sea or heath cannot remain within Conrad or Hardy: it is bound to expand over many works into an archetypal symbol of literature as a whole. Moby Dick cannot remain in Melville’s novel: he is absorbed into our imaginative experience of leviathans and dragons of the deep from the Old Testament onward. And what is true for the reader is a fortiori true of the poet, who learns very quickly that there is no singing school for his soul except the study of the monuments of its own magnificent. (CW 22, 93)
Video of the Day: iPhone in Space
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXkoIBDXwd8
An amazing father-son project: launching a weather balloon with an iPhone attached and recording its ascent to 100,000 feet before plunging back to earth. A riveting seven minutes of video. (The actual launch begins at 2:20.)
Frye in Chinese
Cross-posted in the Denham Library here.
Frye’s books continue to be translated into Chinese. The most recent is a translation of The Secular Scripture (Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2010). Trans. Xiang-Chun Meng. The other Chinese translations are:
Anatomy of Criticism
Piping de Pouxi. Trans. Chen Hui, Yuan Xianjun, and Wu Weiren. Tianjin: Baihua Literature and Art Publishing House, 1998.
Piping de Jiepou. Trans. Chen Hui, Yuan Xianjun, and Wu Weiren; revised by Wu Chizhe and annotated by Wu Chizhe and Robert D. Denham. Tianjin: Hundred-Flower Literary Press, 2000.
The Educated Imagination, Creation and Recreation, and The Well‑Tempered Critic
Fulai Wenlun Sanzhong [Three of Frye’s Critical Monographs]: Xiangxiangli de Xiuyang, Chuangzhao yu Zai Chuangzhao, Wenlian de Pipingjai (Trans. Xu Kun et al., rev. with a preface and annotations by Wu Chizhe. Hoh‑Hot: University of Inner Mongolia Press, 2003.
The Modern Century
Xian dai bai nian. Trans. Sheng Ning. Shenyang: Liaoning Educational Press; Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1998.
The Critical Path
P’i ping chih lu: Lo-ssu-lo pu Fu-lai chu. Trans. Wang Fengzhen and Min-li Chin. Beijing: Peking University Press, 1998.
The Great Code
Wei da de dai ma: Shengjing yu wen xue. Trans. Hao Zhengyi, Fan Zhenguo, and He Chengzhou. Beijing: Peking University Press, 1998.
Words with Power
Shenlide Yuyan: Shengjin yu Wenxue Yanjiu xubian. Trans. Wu Chizhe. Preface by Ye Shuxian. Beijing: Social Sciences Documentation Publishing House, 2004.
Selected Essays
Nuosiluopu Fulai Wen lun xuan ji [Northrop Frye: Selected Essays]. Ed. Wu Chizhe. Beijing: China Press of Social Sciences, 1997.
Contents: “The Responsibilities of the Critic” / “Criticism, Visible and Invisible” / “The Search for Acceptable Words” / “Literature as Therapy” / “The Archetypes of Literature” / “Forming Fours” / “Myth, Fiction, and Displacement” / “Design as a Creative Principle in the Arts” / “Expanding Eyes” / “Literature as a Critique of Pure Reason” / “The Koine of Myth: Myth as a Universally Intelligible Language” / “The Symbol as a Medium of Exchange” / “The Mythical Approach to Creation” / “Conclusion” to Literary History of Canada” (1965), / “Criticism and Environment” / “The Cultural Development of Canada” / “The Stage Is All the World” / “Literature as Context: Milton’s Lycidas” / “Blake after Two Centuries” / “Yeats and the Language of Symbolism”
Saturday Night at the Movies: “Oscar Wilde”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmZTexychRk&feature=related
The 1997 biopic about Wilde with Stephen Fry.
Sun TV News: Done
Sorry to be a little late to the party
By Murray Dobbin 5 Oct 2010 Vancouver Sun Community of Interest
It’s quite a come down. From in-your-face arrogance to a total retreat in a matter of a few months, the big money behind Quebecor’s determination to set up a Fox news North is now looking pretty humble.
There’s no doubt that part of this is overreach on the part of Pierre Karl Peladeau and his junkyard-dog front man Kory Teneycke. But mostly it is a huge victory for every Canadian who took time to write, email, phone or other wise protest this grotesque plan to move Canadian political culture to the far right. And a victory in particular for Avaaz the on-line social movement that flushed Teneycke and his bully tactics into the open.
We should all celebrate – maybe by donating to your favourite on-line journal.
Teneycke got a tad ahead of himself having come so recently from the PMO where he was accustomed to having virtually dictatorial powers to use government auhtority in Harper’s interests.
It turns out that the ability to bully a nation as a private corporate citizen isn’t quite so easy.
Teneycke is now still licking his wounds and is hiding from public view hoping that people – including those who might otherwise have employed him – will forget what an idiot he was and what a liability he would be to any public project in the future.
As for Peladeau his enormous wealth – he is a billionaire – hasn’t prevented him from being humbled by citizen action against his plan. Of course he can’t hide his arrogance. He told reporters outside the Canadian Club in Ottawa that his company, Sun Media would now withdraw a request for a special license that would force cable companies to offer his station (now barely on the radar of any audience) in at least some of their packages.
“We’ve decided to go with the policies of the CRTC,” said a Quebecor spokesman..
Big of them – as if obeying the law of the land was optional for Daddy Big Bucks.
His statement indicated that they will simply ask for the ordinary license which means cable companies can take his TV network or leave it.
It put the lie to Peladeau’s previous alarmist declaration by which he attempted to pressure the CRTC. In August, he declared that failing to get his favoured status would be a disaster: “This would be fatal to our business case … and would likely result in the cancellation of the Sun TV News project.”
It’s a sweet victory. Savour it.