McLuhan, Joyce, etc.

[pynchonoid]

The website www.mcluhaninstitute.org is worth checking
out.


Date:	Tue, 3 Jun 2003 16:37:47 -0400
From:	"purple" <purple at TELLURIAN.COM> 
Subject:	[MCLUHAN-L] Fine, superfine Q & A.
To:	MCLUHAN-L at LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA

[QUOTE] Originally posted by NEO* on 02 Jun 2003
Bob, what is your 'honest' appraisal of McLuhan. tell
us in your own
words what he left for us. tell us what he didn't do
or couldn't do or
didn't know enough to do.
[/QUOTE]

Good question, Neo. I always like to answer this one
and it's come up
many times. You can read my scholarly answer (2
essays) at
www.mcluhaninstitute.org (in the Baedeker section -
one has 
"Holeopathic
Quadrophrenia" in the title; the other begins
"Literate-Aesthetic
Cliche-Probes..." and is very long, 150 pages, and not
completely 
posted
yet). But here is the short answer:

McLuhan is the greatest thinker of the second half of
the twentieth
century because he figured out the greatest
masterpiece of the first
half - FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce. The problem is
one has to have
read nearly everything (all genres) in the Western
literary canon to
appreciate this. But MM had the guts to see the
obsolescence of this
tradition after mastering it.

AND, I have his unpublished papers on the CONSPIRACY,
too, that prove 
he
knew the esoteric history of the West. Again, he also
had the guts to
recognize the obsolesence of that knowledge, too.

There wasn't anything MM didn't know, including the
uncategorizable
present. There is a new book out, perhaps the best on
McLuhan so far,
called McLUHAN IN SPACE (2002, U of T Press) by
Richard Cavell that is
essential for understanding the 21st Century.

Now, MM was so cool (in spite of his Catholicism) that
when he died, 
his
soul used the latest media, the Evergreens as
channeled by Michael 
Blake
Read, to continue his work. I am the only one who has
taken advantage 
of
this resource and have over 10 hours of MM (done since
1988) on audio
tape discussing the nineties and our present time.

It has been advised by others to pick one author and
read everything it
wrote. I agree with that. Pick your writer based on
your tastes and
develop your consistency.

But if you picked McLuhan one doesn't get his point of
view or his
creativity. One gets langauge writing about itself.
This is a new
tactic, and if you're not a coward, one must learn how
and why this was
done. But one must read everything he wrote and listen
to much of what
he said in other media to rehearse the understanding
he presented.

I say McLuhan updates the Nazarene, the Bible and
other sacred texts 
for
all of humanity, not just for the West and the
"initiated".

I am proud to carry on his legacy. But it's only a
small part of my
life.

I welcome any requests to clarify (when I can get the
time) what I have
just written.


Bob Dobbs



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