a little more McLuhan (& maybe Pynchon)

[alice wellintown]

The finer points of McLuhan's argument, as noted several times by
Playboy and acknowledged several times by McLuhan in the interview
here discussed, are deliberately obscured or draped in shades of gray.
This is simply something we either learn to live with when reading or
listening to the sermons of priests and poets or not. We do well to
remember that McLuhan can't match our current hipness but was surely a
hip-cat connecting in a western-backward paranoid way, like that look
Nabokov gives us on the beach when, like a child, we bend over and see
the shore by looking back with inverted eyes through our legs, the
mass media impact on our human senses, how these were amplified and
extended at the speed of radio and light waves, and reversed the
printed splintering of primitive imagination thus opening our unified
and balanced senses to such arts as post expressionists and
experimental dramatists and postmodern novelists and so on were
creating. A large part of this were the renaissances, like the New
Negro or Harlem Renaissance, and of course, Pynchon, with his brushes
dipped in the American Renaissance in Literature.