Tuesday Meld

Just a few notes on recent items & events:

• The much, much, much too-hyped CNN-YouTube debate for the Democratic presidential nominees wasn't the failure some predicted it would be, but it wasn't the political watershed moment CNN would have you think it was either. The big winner from last night? Democrats generally. With the Republican version not happening until September, the Dems will get almost two months of credit for engaging "the public" directly. The Republicans, however, are going to get crucified when their questions get sent in; by September, the schisms within the party will be plain and the calls for blood will be positively choral.
• You Jane Austen fans out there might appreciate this. In the Google age, this is inexcusable and should send more than a few heads rolling.
• The Guardian put together its list of the fifty greatest film comedies. Note some of the really bottom-of-the-barrel inclusions. We'll see if The Simpsons Movie makes a future version, but if the Guardian review is any indication, it will be; the review falls somewhere between supplication and fellatio.
• I will not link to any item about the LiLo fiasco. Period. I will only add this: given the paranoiac effects of alcohol and cocaine, and her constant realization that yes, she is being hounded everywhere, one should hardly wonder why she keeps going on and off the, ahem, rails. Remember the old adage: Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean that no one's following you.
• Recent online discovery: this wonderful reflection by the great lyric critic Helen Vendler. Pious Labours, especially: as RK would say, RLAID; read, learn and inwardly digest.
• After being reminded recently of Northrop Frye's The Well-Tempered Critic, I decided the other day to reread it in its entirety--- and which I did, in one sitting over pints at one of my locals. The first essay I'd still encourage everyone, of literary bent or not, to read & re-read & re-read yet again: it's brilliant, central and more valuable now than when it was written those forty-plus years ago. It also reminded me why I loathe the current critical trend to discuss literature as "discourse." Discourse, in its current usage, is really just an attempt to conflate the various areas of critical distinction which Aristotle rightly separated: the ethical, the rhetorical, the poetical. It also conveniently allows lit-critters to say and to write whatever the hell they want, regardless of disciplinary considerations, while guising it as scholarship. In short, it's a license to bullshit and has been used, egregiously, as one. No wonder I wince when I see the word in any scholarship in the past forty years; it has become meaningless, save to say that it indicates and enables pretentious prognostication of the broadest order. We'd do well, I think, to re-read our Aristotle--- without the commonplace sniggering about the convenient compartmentalization of elements.

Hair shorn and beard gone, believe it or not, I have been shocking the hell out of people lately. Further to the Ripley's file, from a young woman the other day: So how old are you? 22, 23?

If only, dear lass, if only....

Creaky Fryeday

Just some pointless points, assembled for no reason whatsoever:

• Glancing again over some of the fragments from the Northrop Frye notebooks, I'm reminded how eminently quotable the man was even when he wasn't trying to be. Here's one I'd love to see splattered all over the ALDaily or Chronicle pages:
  

  The 'publish or perish' syndrome created a variety of prefabricated formulas for enabling sterile scholars to become productive: they were aided by a recrudescence of the old myth-as-lie syndrome.
  

  One of these days, I'll publish (here, probably, where I have editorial control) the template for a publishable paper in the humanities. There are only three reasons why I haven't yet: 1) I'd have to put it into legible form, heaven forfend; 2) after releasing it, I'd likely be picked up and sent with the Simpsons and Patrick McGoohan to a mysterious island where I'd be drugged up daily with all the wrong bloody drugs; and 3) Dave Barry probably did a better job years ago than I ever would when he pithily remarked that the job of an English student is to prove that Moby-Dick is really about the Republic of Ireland. My template would spill the beans more methodically, but the end result's about the same.
  
  
• SiteMeter, among many other odd things, tells me that (by far) the most popular single entry on this blog is this one on Emily Dickinson. Every day for the past three or four weeks, I've been getting at least five visitors a day just for that very, very old post, and always without referrers (Google, &c.). Truly odd, and wish I knew why, though I have heard that apparently it has been quoted in at least one undergrad paper on Emily D. Go figure. I have the sneaking suspicion I may be the subject of some ridicule on a mailing list out there--- which is fine with me, since even I'd admit that post's a mental-mess. *shrug*
  
  
• Also from Frye:

  I think social feminism, genuine social & intellectuality between men & women, a centrally important issue. Feminist literary criticism is mostly heifer-shit. Women frustrated by the lack of outlet for their abilities turn to pedantic nagging, and the nagging pedantry of most feminist writing is a reflection of frustration unaccompanied by any vision of transcending it. As Newman resignedly said of English literature, it will always have been Protestant. Perhaps female (not feminist) writing has a great future, but that doesn't make its effort to rewrite the past any less futile.

  Ouch. (Or, as the Net-kind say: Ewwww, SNAP!!) I would probably agree with this, but I'm contractually barred from doing so publicly. But now you know why grad students read Frye like Soviets used to read Solzhenitsyn: under their bed-covers with a flashlight. Big Sister, after all, is watching, Big Brother long shut into permanent quietude, and Big Mama having ceased to care about such trifle years ago.
  
  
• Frye might not have had the chance to cameo in Annie Hall, but this guest appearance is funny. Especially since the illustrators obviously had no idea what Norrie looked like.
  
  
• The photographer here has one hell of an eye. Shot in question recalls some of those Catherine Deneuve-Nastassja Kinski pics that still look magnificent. The stunning young lass, of course, has nothing to do with it, even though she bears a striking resemblance to one of my exes.
  
  
• I wonder if I'm thinking so much about Frye because I've been bothered a bit lately by the lingering itch of a book in me. Not a dissertation, alas, but a book, though one more like Frye's Spiritus Mundi or Barthes' Mythologies than a sustained project. But writing always seems pointless, as I know all too well I'd inevitably rip the work asunder and toss the shreds into the dustbin. So many unwritten pieces, but none of them more than études. Meh.