William Faulkner

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxM0C7zjoAc

Faulkner’s Nobel Prize speech.  (Transcript here.)

Today is William Faulkner‘s birthday (1897-1962).

Frye in “Tradition and Change in the Theory of Criticism”:

[B]ecause literature is born of a specific culture and a specific locale, most great literature is intensely localized.  I know of no great literature written about an empire, with the very dubious exception of Virgil’s Aeneid.  William Faulkner, for example, is a great writer today not because he is a citizen of a great power or speaks one of the world’s major languages (although those factors are undoubtedly important for his reputation), but because he deals with a provincial and decaying civilization in Mississippi which most even of his fellow Americans know very little about.  The writer has two centres of gravity: one in his own time and audience; the other in our time and in us.  It is a mysterious but primary fact of literature that a poet remote from us in space and time and culture can still communicate his central vision to us, though we may admire him for reasons quite unintelligible to him or his age.  Literature survives only by virtue of what is communicable across these barriers of culture.  (CW 10, 250)

Levant and Libel

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Libel suits are nothing new to Ezra Levant, who’s racked up a remarkable number of them in the last decade.

He’s currently shilling for a new book about the Alberta tar sands called (no joke) Ethical Oil, despite that fact that Alberta’s bitumen is the single most toxic source of oil mining in the world.

But that should come as no surprise.  In 1994 Levant was in Washington D.C. for an internship funded by the Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow Progam.  Charles Koch and his brother David own 84% of Koch Industries, an oil production conglomerate, and have pumped tens of millions of dollars into funding global warming denialism.

It’s thanks to the efforts of the Koch brothers that a lot of people think they can have an opinion on global warming (maybe yes, maybe no) — which is like having an opinion on gravity.

On Second Thought

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I have decided to take down Ezra Levant’s column slandering George Soros.  Since posting it this morning with the intent to expose the viciousness of the libel and the ugly way it is expressed in Levant’s September 5th Toronto Sun column, I have realized that it also makes the full text available to those who might wish to reproduce it in order to perpetuate the slander.  I have therefore simply resorted to reporting the libel — the nature of which has long been in the public domain and has been refuted many times — in my own words.  The revised post is here.

That said, I wish to emphasize just how wretched a thing that column is, as well as what it says about Levant and Sun News.  You can read a very thorough account of the evolution of the slander with direct quotes from Levant’s column and what the public record reveals about his libelous claims here.

Out of curiosity, I called a lawyer friend of mine to ask about the legal status of reporting a libel verbatim with the obvious intention to contextualize it and fully expose its fraudulent nature — as well as bear witness to the kind of person who would  perpetrate it in the first place.  (I am especially curious to know because the column still circulates on the internet, which raises the question of being allowed to address the fact of the libel as it was expressed without any implied assertion of truthfulness about its fraudulent content.)  My friend referred me to another lawyer specializing in libel law.  I have put a call in to him and hope to report back on what he has to say about it soon.

In the meantime, I’ve kept a copy of Levant’s column for my files.  Whenever I get complacent about what we’re dealing with here, I’ll pull it out and read it again.

Margaret Atwood in the Toronto Sun

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Atwood’s recent response to accusations by the Sun in the Sun here.

Money quote:

THE ACTUAL PETITION

“As concerned Canadians who deeply oppose American-style hate media on our airwaves, we applaud the CRTC’s refusal to allow a new “Fox News North” channel to be funded from our cable fees. We urge Mr. von Finckenstein to stay in his job and continue to stand up for Canada’s democratic traditions, and call on Prime Minister Harper to immediately stop all pressure on the CRTC on this matter.” THE VERBS ARE “APPLAUD,” “URGE,” AND “CALL ON;” NOT “BAN,” “SUPPRESS,” AND “CENSOR.”

The “Fox News” comparison is from the Sun’s own CRTC Application # 1. Is it “American-style hate media?” You judge.

The CRTC refused Sun TV News’ request for a special licence that forces all cable and satellite distributors to offer the station, thus generating almost automatic income. Application #2 — almost the same deal as #1, but for three years — will be considered. The Sun says it needs this special deal for its “business plan.” Should it get one? Should anyone? Can I have one too?

This last point goes to the heart of the matter.  Why, just because Sun News has applied for the license, must it be granted one?  Hell, I’d love one of those myself — like Sun News I could have a “business plan” which includes making millions of dollars.  Why should I be refused?  If I’m not owed it, why is Sun News?  Particularly as they employ libel-spouting nincompoops like Ezra Levant.

Mohammed

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Mohammed’s Call to Prophecy and the First Revelation; leaf from a copy of the Majmac al-tawarikhTimurid. From Herat, Afghanistan. In The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ca. 1425

On this date in 622 Mohammed completed his hijra from Mecca to Medina.

Frye in notebook 11f:

Still with the Koran: it’s a perfect example of my concern and imagination thesis.  Mohammed was a very great inspired poet, but he found that this quality was precisely what made him distrusted.  So he insisted that he wasn’t a poet but a prophet, & started brainwashing his followers with interminable repetitions of the just-you-wait type.  Islamic culture, Sufi mysticism, geometrical art, mathematics & the like, descend from the suppressed poet; Islamic fanaticism descends from the paranoid prophet.  Yet, human nature being what it is, there would never have been any Islamic culture without the brainwashing paranoia.  Ugh.  But I think we’re finding the moral equivalent of war [para. 78, p. 87] and the next thing to find is the moral equivalent of concerned paranoia.  One element of this is counter-prophecy, of the sort Blake describes in his Watson-Paine notes.  A prophecy that, without being facile or “optimistic,” points out the positive opportunities in each situation. (CW 13, 88)

Ezra Levant’s Vile Slander [Updated]

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Sun News, under threat of a lawsuit, has apologized to George Soros for the scabrous column by Ezra Levant published in the Toronto Sun on September 5th, alleging, among other things, that Soros, as a thirteen year old Jewish boy in occupied Hungary, collaborated with the Nazis.  This is a slander that has been circulated by the likes of Lyndon LaRouche and Levant associate Ann Coulter.

All traces of the libelous column have been scrubbed from the Sun News site and from Levant’s own website.  However, I have seen it and it is horrific reading for anyone who still has a sense of common decency.

The charges of collaboration are demonstrably manufactured lies and have been publicly debunked many times, right down to the maliciously misleading re-edit of the 60 Minutes piece about Soros for which Levant provides a bogus “transcript.”  It is as wretched a hatchet job as you could ever expect to see in any journalistic medium.  It’s hard to imagine, in fact, how Levant and his editors could have proceeded without knowing that what they were publishing was slander.  Besides the revolting mean-spiritedness of the piece, therefore, there is the sheer recklessness with which it was produced and circulated.  And these are the people who want a broadcast license for a “news” channel with “mandatory access” status.

The Columbia Journalism Review today published an article on the affair here.

The whole awful story of how the noxious combination of Ezra Levant, Kory Teneycke, Sun News, and the vast resources of the right-wing hate machine in the US gave birth to this monstrosity here.

Ben Jonson

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On this date in 1598 Ben Jonson was indicted for manslaughter.  In the same year he also produced his first major success, Every Man in His Humour.

Frye in A Natural Perspective:

With Every Man in His Humour Jonson began a new type of comedy, of which Ibsen and Chekhov (Ibsen at least in his middle or “problem” period) are the inheritors.  The contrast between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson is hackneyed, but like many hackneyed subjects, not exhausted.  One seventeenth-century play that we know failed to please was Ben Jonson’s The New Inn: we know this because its failure was highly publicized by Jonson himself.  Jonson wrote on the occasion a poem in which he scolds the public for not appreciating it and for preferring “some mouldy tale like Pericles” instead.  A critical issue is involved here that it might be fruitful to examine.  The New Inn is not first-rate Jonson; but neither is Pericles first-rate Shakespeare.  Yet Pericles was not only popular in its own time, but has been revived with success in ours, and I doubt that any dramatic company in its right mind would attempt to revive The New Inn, though I should hope to be wrong on this point.  Jonson’s critical principle was obviously true to him that he honestly could not understand why his audience preferred Pericles, and in trying to explain why it did we may get some insight into the rationale of Shakespeare’s technique. (14-15)