tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1157342843002612388.post5406961743837194298..comments2024-03-05T15:10:07.370-06:00Comments on A Building Roam: Potent Quotables: The Gutenberg Galaxy EditionPQhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1157342843002612388.post-6861002098395728082012-12-02T19:04:25.663-06:002012-12-02T19:04:25.663-06:00Michael,
You're perfectly welcome to come by ...Michael, <br />You're perfectly welcome to come by here and ramble any time you want. Especially on McLuhan, who's become a favorite topic of mine.<br /><br />I've read a couple short bio books on MM plus a few of his original texts and looking forward to getting into the Marchand, Gordon, Theall, etc books. Surely, the man was NUTS in an extremely eloquent and profound way and I can't get enough of it. Been flipping through a collection of his letters to people like Pound, Lewis, etc and it's clear that McLuhan the person and McLuhan the poet/prophet/weirdo were very different people. He was a devout Catholic, kind of a grumpy old professor while also totally revolutionary and highly regarded at the height of hippie culture.<br /><br />I do share your reservations about the surveillance state aspect of the growth of our electronic nervous system and I'm also totally partial to paper books. Can't get used to reading e-books. Hell, I even do the majority of my writing in notebooks.<br /><br />What I think is important to marinate on with all of this is McLuhan's assertion that, yes, we are going back into the dark night of the collective tribal consciousness but we can be AWAKE this time. So while it's dizzying and disconcerting to witness the rapid growth of tech stuff, it's still entirely possible to balance ourselves between the two poles a bit. <br /><br />There's a great quote I heard from him once that I think sums up his work perfectly: "The best way to oppose something is to understand it, then you know where to turn off the buttons."<br /><br />And above all what intrigues me about him is his obsession with Finnegans Wake and how it fits into all this. My plan (down the road) is to write a study of the Wake through the McLuhan view. PQhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14491626995530401441noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1157342843002612388.post-43723275739857709722012-12-02T18:38:01.542-06:002012-12-02T18:38:01.542-06:00Thoughtful and provocative post en extremis. McLuh...Thoughtful and provocative post en extremis. McLuhan seems evermore a prophet, but an ironic, wild, crazy man too. He loved the world of literature and books and, contrary to what a very lot of people think, he didn't like the electronic world very much. In the logarithmic acceleration of hand-held portable Internet/cell phones with camera and thousands of Apps...we do seem to becoming more "tribal" but I see more of a downside than an upside to it, and it's probably my own preference for books/linearity/interiority/vision-dominance, coupled with the rapidity with which we're getting the New Tribalism. <br /><br />I fear it's a runaway thing, and as I stood there at 23 reading William Burroughs and Joyce and Pound and McLuhan and Robert Anton Wilson and feeling like an avant left-progressive, I continue to stand there 20 years later, reading the same authors and others like them, every now and then looking up to see an increasing BLUR of gadgets that I hope lead us to some semblance of sanity, or Teilhard's noosphere, but I haven't moved and I'm now some sort of reactionary about the surveillance state and texting-speak. I'm not on Facebook (big surprise?), but to all this hi-tech tribal dumbness and extensive shallows, I do not "Like." <br /><br />What's interesting to me: how incredibly spot-on McLuhan was, but also: how wrong he seems. Or was he? Like I said, read Marchand and T. Gordon, people who knew him: he didn't even like movies. <br /><br />Sorry for the ramble. But I enjoyed reading this post. michaelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com