The Educated Imagination

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq1KOrASOWQ

Rush Limbaugh on the “greed” of Occupy protesters and college professors.

With the Occupy and Keystone XL protests in mind — as well as the right-wing response to them — here’s Frye in Words with Power:

The second half of the century has seen a growing distrust of all ideologies and a growing sense of the importance of primary concern in both bodily and mental contexts. We now see protests in favour of peace, dignity, and freedom rather than an alternative ideological system. Such protests are called counter-revolutionary or whatnot by those who hold power and are determined to keep holding it, power being for them something that, in Mao Tse-tung’s phrase, comes out of the barrel of a gun. If the human race cannot come up with a better conception of power than that it is clearly not long of this world. (CW 26, 54)

“That was my basic quarrel with my former mentor Northrop Frye. He thinks that evaluation has nothing to do with literary criticism. I would tell him, no, it is not true.” – Harold Bloom in an interview published over the weekend perpetuates his agon with Frye upon which he seems to have staked his reputation and legacy.

Here’s Frye in Anatomy addressing the issue of value judgments in a way that uncannily predicts where Bloom’s own criticism would eventually end up:

The first step in developing a genuine poetics is to recognize and get rid of meaningless criticism, or talking about literature in a way that cannot help to build up a systematic structure of knowledge. This includes all the sonorous nonsense that we so often find in critical generalities, reflective comments, ideological perorations, and other consequences of taking a long view of an unorganized subject. It includes all lists of the “best” novels or poems or writers, whether their particular virtue is exclusiveness or inclusiveness. It includes all casual, sentimental, and prejudiced value judgments, and all the literary chit-chat which makes the reputations of poets boom and crash in an imaginary stock exchange. (CW 22, 19)

Previous posts on Bloom here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. That’s a lot of posts, it turns out. We’ll set up a Harold Bloom category to make it easier.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhO3dTdp6ek

Jesse LaGreca surprises Fox News by knowing far more than Fox News expected. Fox News has not broadcast this interview.

Dahlia Lithwick in Slate takes apart the enervating meme that OWS has “no message.” An excerpt:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRc7t6gRkhE

The viral video that took the Occupy movement global: four terrified young women kettled on a public sidewalk, pepper-sprayed and left writhing in agony. Their assailant is NYPD Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna. He makes $154,000 a year. His punishment is to be docked 10 vacation days.

“At the Occupy Wall Street protests and their progeny across the country, protesters are using personal technology to document, broadcast and advertise police abuse like never before. Incidents of alleged police brutality are posted almost instantaneously. And nearly as fast come the ensuing campaigns to take the videos viral. Smartphones, laptops and tablet computers have in fact become so common at protests in the U.S. and elsewhere in recent years, it’s easy to lose sight of how revolutionary it all really is. But it is revolutionary: For the first time in human history, hundreds of millions of citizens around the world carry with them the ability to not only record footage of government abuse, but to distribute it globally in real time — in most cases, faster than governments, soldiers or cops can censor it.” — Radley Balco

More photos of Bologna in action at OWS here.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggtt7cODZd0

Wallace on humor, irony, advertising, entertainment and Infinite Jest

Frye in Anatomy: “The novelist sees evil and folly as social diseases, but the Menippean satirist sees them as diseases of the intellect, as a kind of maddened pedantry” (CW 22, 290)

This seems to be evolving into the go-to excerpt from David Foster Wallace‘s last unfinished novel, The Pale King, but let’s slip it in before it becomes overly familiar. Here’s Wallace’s rendering of the spiritual awakening of college student Chris Fogel:

I was by myself, wearing nylon warm-up pants and a black Pink Floyd tee shirt, trying to spin a soccer ball on my finger and watching the CBS soap opera “As The World Turns” on the room’s little black-and-white Zenith. . . . There was certainly always reading and studying for finals I could do, but I was being a wastoid. . . . Anyhow, I was sitting there trying to spin the ball on my finger and watching the soap opera . . . and at the end of every commercial break, the show’s trademark shot of planet earth as seen from space, turning, would appear, and the CBS daytime network announcer’s voice would say, “You’re watching ‘As the World Turns,’ ” which he seemed, on this particular day, to say more and more pointedly each time—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns’ ” until the tone began to seem almost incredulous—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns’ ”—until I was suddenly struck by the bare reality of the statement. . . . It was as if the CBS announcer were speaking directly to me, shaking my shoulder or leg as though trying to arouse someone from sleep—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns.’ ” . . . I didn’t stand for anything. If I wanted to matter—even just to myself—I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some kind of definite way.