Fwd: a little more McLuhan (& maybe Pynchon) ADDITION

[Paul Mackin]

On 8/28/2011 9:10 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: alice wellintown<alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> Date: Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 9:09 AM
> Subject: Re: a little more McLuhan (&  maybe Pynchon) ADDITION
> To: Mark Kohut<markekohut at yahoo.com>
>
>
> The binary that McLuhan constructs based on his primitive
> understanding of Tribal civilization and Western civilization and on
> his weak grasp of the complexitiy of human communication, which he
> inflates with another false bianry when he seperates the eyes from the
> ears and so on...is quite useful to Pynchon, but almost utter nonsense
> today. McLuhan has much in common with Jared Diamond and other priests
> of the grand theories of popular science, surely the stuff that is
> useful to authors of romance.
>
>   Asif A. Ghazanfar: "The Emergence of Human Audiovisual Communication"
> The basic patterns of neocortical anatomy that produce a set of fixed
> neural rhythms are conserved throughout the mammalian lineage, and
> they predate the elaboration of vocal repertoires.
>
> http://edge.org/conversation.php?cid=future-science

In other words Pynchon and McLuhan are poets, not purveyors of fact.

Incorrect science can make good fiction, but it has to be incorrect in 
an interesting way.

Pulp novels often make fine movies, whereas literary classics generally 
make schlock ones.

Strange but true.

P