And Finally The Miscellany

And on this day of non-stop (read in: compensatory) blogging, a few short-takes on Recent Things:

• Some of us remember too well the terrible insecurity when Mikhail Gorbachev was ostensibly ousted all those years ago. Insecurity is a bit of an understatement. I remember watching the TV without stop, wondering if we were witnessing a giant leap back in time. Then Yeltsin happened. He literally "happened." And from there, the rest is history, even if his successor, Mr Putin, these days sounds and acts more like a mafioso Secretary-General than a President. For whatever his faults, for whatever his inadequacies as a reformer and/or statesman, Mr Yeltsin stood up and said, defiantly, that there was no going back, there was only going forward. That, my friends, took courage. Let that be what he's remembered for.
  
  And, to all you right-wing Reaganite nutjobs: Gorbachev and then Yeltsin ended the Soviet Union, so stop taking credit for something you didn't bloody well do. Let us pray (pray, pray) we're finally near the end of this age of willy-nilly historical revisionism.
  
  
• Yesterday was Saint George's Day-- and as I meant to note, the date of Shakespeare's death. (Some claim it as his birthday, too, but the evidence for that's iffy at best.) So, go celebrate by reading, and ideally viewing, some Shakespeare for the rest of the week. And please, please, please, don't just reread Hamlet. For God's sake, don't. Try King John or Cymbeline, just for a change.
  
  
• 24 continues its full-throttle dead-slowness in resolving a season best forgotten, like that thing you did with the gerbils, a tuning fork and the cast of Oz. For those of you not watching, as if you should, there are still a stabbed President, a murderous Farmer Hogget and a one-armed Russian terrorist unaccounted for. Oh, and a story that, I think everyone agrees, sucks bloated, muddy donkey balls. Or so say the show's fans. Those of us more critical would say much, much worse.
  
  (Correction: I was wrong. These preening, clueless dunderheads disagree. Then again, they use the word "significant" where most of the rest us would use the words "laughably ridiculous.")
  
  
• I imagine Sylvia is ecstatic that I mentioned her specifically in my earlier re-crud-escent post. I assure all of you, she is NOT the first person of whom I think when poop comes to mind. I also imagine Syl's equally thrilled I've felt the need to qualify this. ;-)
  
  
• If I hear one more thing from CNN about the Virginia Tech massacre, I think I'll beat my TV into a mass of busted circuits. The ghoulish, pretentious, manipulative "all-massacre-all-the-time" coverage has finally waned, but the cheap cynicism of their reportage remains shameless. I won't even begin to comment, so of course I will, on its "show-the-Cho-tape-ad-nauseum" day-later reversal as it feigned sensitivity to viewer disgust. Once it had decided to air the material, it had to stick to its journalistic guns, arguing relevance. But it didn't. So, beyond being pandering and exploitative, it's also gutless and unprincipled, which renders it lower-than-Mitt-Romney-low.
  
  
• Opening line for a Cohenesque novel, if one can still be written in this tsk-tsk-tsk-ing age: "She was a damsel in gossamer, but only because of the cobwebs that had formed permanently around her dank and forbidding cu...." [Stop! Stop! We interrupt this sickening, sexist perversion to protect you, the genteel and possibly innocent readers of this blog. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled blathering.] Okay, maybe more Mailer than Cohen, but six, half-dozen and the other....
  
  
• Andrew Sullivan offers an interesting but nearly-hagiographical assessment of Obama-mania. (As Homer Simpson would say, "Patent pending, patent pending, patent pending.") Obama, for now, is getting the RFK man-who-would-be-king treatment, but I remain skeptical. He can't, at least, be any worse than the current President. Inanimate carbon rods, however, couldn't be any worse.
  
  
• And two items, both brought to my attention courtesy Hockey Jones. First, evidently "old, inefficient bulbs" in Ontario will be reduced to running for parliament, with the dimmest and most wasteful vying for the Premiership. Secondly, this link will provide you with some of the most disturbing images you'll ever see. Gives new meaning, however, to Phil Collins' "Coming In The Air Tonight." *shiver*

Okay--- enough. Some stuff on the burner now, so don't be too surprised if I go quiet for a bit. Until time avails itself again. Best.

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.