a little more McLuhan (& maybe Pynchon)

[Paul Mackin]

On 8/29/2011 7:01 PM, Mark Kohut wrote:
> 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.

When the p-list goes down for any extended period I feel violated.

Something of mine has been taken away.

P
> ----- 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.
>>