Good news. School Boards across Ontario have unequivocally decided to return to a standardized educational curriculum emphasizing the fundamental 3 R's. Woke is finished:
It took me a while to get my head around parataxis, but it was worth the effort, and I realized that much poetry is in its debt as images follow each other by loose iconic association rather than a logical progression. But it does not pay to put too much weight on it, because it too easily disposes of the very structures that will take that weight. Aesthetic and reason are an attractive couple, but fickle and unreliable.
75 years now I am
and you have counted well
dear Andrea
old love my witness
of hour glass sand
that shared our layer
of grained remembrance
from so long behind us past
40 years ago of time before the mast
for which we strove to bait
the future of our small estate
before its final cast
it does not seem that long
so much water bridged
life and song
that we did once engage
but flowed for but a little while
yet now ‘tis just a fond blown kiss
to fly and cross to banks now washed away
respaced diverted to another time
a look and glance that says it all
and nothing more
until we meet again in final days
as walls do drench to white
and close
time alone stands still
in once such crowded streets
and now a city in retreat
the final call
the curtain sweeps across the stage
falls silent
and then is still
content
it sleeps
I always felt that it was not a good idea to put too much weight on McLuhan. Sure, the ideas were cool and the message was hot, but my answer was why and then why not.....Was it the answer or snake oil cure, to trap the unwary and make them a fool?
He suffers from oracular aphorismo which is a condition of brilliantmindedness not contained by English department guidelines, but bubbles instead from beneath the ground like an emerging illuminati, bewitching the unsuspecting mind with its iconic gestalts of intensity and insight, real or imagined, which is hard to tell, as are the borders of knowing fantasy and unknowing delusion, which he taxes with abandon.
I think McLuhan is more appealing than substantial. I think his comments on say Hitler's media salability are nonsense. Hitler was very good at mobilizing all the media available at the time and tailoring them to get the most out of them, including film. Leni Riefenstahl's, 'Triumph of the Will' is a magnificently dramatic and theatrical presentation of Hitler and his party. It is a masterpiece of image production that contributed enormously to his standing as not just a political character and leader, but a living symbol of the people, the party and the state.
McLuhan's notion of media is very analogous to Marx's class. One can get a certain mileage out of both of them up to a point, and then they fail, because reality is so much more complicated than any single methodology or categorization.
There are consciousness alignments between media, their content and their audiences that are not so much causative as associative and emblematic of a lot of other consonant things that assembled themselves into a multi pronged whole, which we see as a historical narrative.
In the 1920s, Edward Bernays, who was the father of modern public relations and marketing, realized that what moved consciousness was not so much opinion, debate, reason and evidence, but bypassing these things by going straight into the central nervous system where we create iconic memory. It was an insight inspired by the science of psychology that was just starting to scientifically analyze what motivates people and constructs their understandings of the world.
His famous women's smoking campaign was to use glamorous models in a New York Street parade, who were voluptuously smoking all the way down the street, which was filmed and edited into newsreels to produce an instantaneous mass effect, which it did. A similar paper-based billboard/poster/packaging graphic imagery would not have been so instantly powerful, but the psychology would be the same. It would just take a bit longer to have the same impact as film and would cost more by way of distribution. A good propagandist would use all the above, which they do.
What we witness today as mass populations are colonized by the Jewel Wasp of Indulgence Capitalism is a product of psychological colonization and capture, made ever more powerful and dense by enormous propaganda budgets and ever increasingly more sophisticated and thoroughly researched knowledge bases and technique.....using ever more technologically sophisticated and absorbing media feeders.
The result is a form of privatized totalitarian consciousness management that has become so leverageable and absorbing, it has become the main product of the system, whereby products and services cease to be utilitarian things-in-themselves and become etherealized fantasy artifacts of desire almost in their entirety.....which was made much easier when consumer societies sent the reality grounding business end of manufacturing to cheap labor economies.
As I said, McLuhan is entertaining and good for some robust dinner conversation over a good meal and some decent wine. And yes he does add something to our understanding of history....just not very much.....
Chris you are spot on...Parataxis is the structure of poetry. The example you provided illustrates this perfectly.
Regarding McLuhan, I agree that many of his ideas ended up falling apart somewhat - even McLuhan agreed with that. He said things like "I don't always believe what I say."
McLuhan was so influenced by James Joyce, especially "Finnegan's Wake." I think he extrapolated the stream of consciousness of Joyce's characters in the Wake, to a form of real-time exploratory speculative thought he called "probing."
When considering McLuhan's work it can be difficult (next to impossible) to differentiate what emerged from his probing's, and what might have been formulated from a more coherent starting point.
I want to write a piece someday that deals with the typical McLuhan criticisms (some of which you provided in your comment), but it really won't be easy. I plan on calling the essay "Why My Obsession With Marshall McLuhan Complicates Everything."
CPUs are entirely rational as are operating systems. Thus the environment is NOT a CPU, and, hence CULTURE is NOT an operating system. Q.E.D. You may certainly say it again that, requote: ""Why My Obsession With Marshall McLuhan Complicates Everything."
McLuhan was initially obsessed with the ancient/medieval trivium [grammar, rhetoric and logic]. Adopting his obsession might uncomplicate much. Though clever, your post was the longest way that I have ever heard anyone say, in effect: One lie leads to another [and another, etc. ad nauseum]. But since it inspired Chris's poem, the post was both clever and beneficial.
Good news. School Boards across Ontario have unequivocally decided to return to a standardized educational curriculum emphasizing the fundamental 3 R's. Woke is finished:
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/rex-murphy-news-flash-school-boards-to-celebrate-the-3-rs/ar-AA19lzOT?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=63045da6bc8a4d4e80584aef859bf2d5&ei=9#comments&commentId=935ad0c5-8d14-4467-acab-9c99022611e8
April Fools
You had me for a second.
It took me a while to get my head around parataxis, but it was worth the effort, and I realized that much poetry is in its debt as images follow each other by loose iconic association rather than a logical progression. But it does not pay to put too much weight on it, because it too easily disposes of the very structures that will take that weight. Aesthetic and reason are an attractive couple, but fickle and unreliable.
75 years now I am
and you have counted well
dear Andrea
old love my witness
of hour glass sand
that shared our layer
of grained remembrance
from so long behind us past
40 years ago of time before the mast
for which we strove to bait
the future of our small estate
before its final cast
it does not seem that long
so much water bridged
life and song
that we did once engage
but flowed for but a little while
yet now ‘tis just a fond blown kiss
to fly and cross to banks now washed away
respaced diverted to another time
a look and glance that says it all
and nothing more
until we meet again in final days
as walls do drench to white
and close
time alone stands still
in once such crowded streets
and now a city in retreat
the final call
the curtain sweeps across the stage
falls silent
and then is still
content
it sleeps
I always felt that it was not a good idea to put too much weight on McLuhan. Sure, the ideas were cool and the message was hot, but my answer was why and then why not.....Was it the answer or snake oil cure, to trap the unwary and make them a fool?
He suffers from oracular aphorismo which is a condition of brilliantmindedness not contained by English department guidelines, but bubbles instead from beneath the ground like an emerging illuminati, bewitching the unsuspecting mind with its iconic gestalts of intensity and insight, real or imagined, which is hard to tell, as are the borders of knowing fantasy and unknowing delusion, which he taxes with abandon.
I think McLuhan is more appealing than substantial. I think his comments on say Hitler's media salability are nonsense. Hitler was very good at mobilizing all the media available at the time and tailoring them to get the most out of them, including film. Leni Riefenstahl's, 'Triumph of the Will' is a magnificently dramatic and theatrical presentation of Hitler and his party. It is a masterpiece of image production that contributed enormously to his standing as not just a political character and leader, but a living symbol of the people, the party and the state.
McLuhan's notion of media is very analogous to Marx's class. One can get a certain mileage out of both of them up to a point, and then they fail, because reality is so much more complicated than any single methodology or categorization.
There are consciousness alignments between media, their content and their audiences that are not so much causative as associative and emblematic of a lot of other consonant things that assembled themselves into a multi pronged whole, which we see as a historical narrative.
In the 1920s, Edward Bernays, who was the father of modern public relations and marketing, realized that what moved consciousness was not so much opinion, debate, reason and evidence, but bypassing these things by going straight into the central nervous system where we create iconic memory. It was an insight inspired by the science of psychology that was just starting to scientifically analyze what motivates people and constructs their understandings of the world.
His famous women's smoking campaign was to use glamorous models in a New York Street parade, who were voluptuously smoking all the way down the street, which was filmed and edited into newsreels to produce an instantaneous mass effect, which it did. A similar paper-based billboard/poster/packaging graphic imagery would not have been so instantly powerful, but the psychology would be the same. It would just take a bit longer to have the same impact as film and would cost more by way of distribution. A good propagandist would use all the above, which they do.
What we witness today as mass populations are colonized by the Jewel Wasp of Indulgence Capitalism is a product of psychological colonization and capture, made ever more powerful and dense by enormous propaganda budgets and ever increasingly more sophisticated and thoroughly researched knowledge bases and technique.....using ever more technologically sophisticated and absorbing media feeders.
The result is a form of privatized totalitarian consciousness management that has become so leverageable and absorbing, it has become the main product of the system, whereby products and services cease to be utilitarian things-in-themselves and become etherealized fantasy artifacts of desire almost in their entirety.....which was made much easier when consumer societies sent the reality grounding business end of manufacturing to cheap labor economies.
As I said, McLuhan is entertaining and good for some robust dinner conversation over a good meal and some decent wine. And yes he does add something to our understanding of history....just not very much.....
Chris you are spot on...Parataxis is the structure of poetry. The example you provided illustrates this perfectly.
Regarding McLuhan, I agree that many of his ideas ended up falling apart somewhat - even McLuhan agreed with that. He said things like "I don't always believe what I say."
McLuhan was so influenced by James Joyce, especially "Finnegan's Wake." I think he extrapolated the stream of consciousness of Joyce's characters in the Wake, to a form of real-time exploratory speculative thought he called "probing."
When considering McLuhan's work it can be difficult (next to impossible) to differentiate what emerged from his probing's, and what might have been formulated from a more coherent starting point.
I want to write a piece someday that deals with the typical McLuhan criticisms (some of which you provided in your comment), but it really won't be easy. I plan on calling the essay "Why My Obsession With Marshall McLuhan Complicates Everything."
McLuhan was a brilliant intuitive, in the same way that oracles often are.....
CPUs are entirely rational as are operating systems. Thus the environment is NOT a CPU, and, hence CULTURE is NOT an operating system. Q.E.D. You may certainly say it again that, requote: ""Why My Obsession With Marshall McLuhan Complicates Everything."
McLuhan was initially obsessed with the ancient/medieval trivium [grammar, rhetoric and logic]. Adopting his obsession might uncomplicate much. Though clever, your post was the longest way that I have ever heard anyone say, in effect: One lie leads to another [and another, etc. ad nauseum]. But since it inspired Chris's poem, the post was both clever and beneficial.
Kevin