a little more McLuhan (& maybe Pynchon)

[Mark Kohut]

Paul writes:
But, when the number of posts slows down, or they even stop altogether, we feel an unease.

like 'the room, which knew"...love this ob, Paul.

Marshall's subtitle for Understanding Media was 'the extensions of man'....

And, remember, for him The Electric Age was a kind of Return of the Repressed, metaphorically understood.

----- Original Message -----
From: Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Cc: 
Sent: Monday, August 29, 2011 2:39 PM
Subject: Re: a little more McLuhan (& maybe Pynchon)

The p-list is a close-at-hand example of "the medium is the message."

So long as we receive an acceptable number of posts per hour, things seem to be all right.

But, when the number of posts slows down, or they even stop altogether, we feel an unease.

It's not so much that the new message (massage)  makes us comfortable; it's the fact that the medium is still functioning.

The p-list is still out there.

P


On 8/29/2011 12:44 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
> 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.
>