Page 1590 —
Log24:
Thomas Pynchon:
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
The Year 1591 —
Tuesday, March 2, 2021
McLuhan and the Time Machine
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Sunday, February 2, 2020
Tetrads for McLuhan, or “Blame It on Video”
"I like to put people on myself by skipping logical steps
in the conversation until they're dizzy." — Jemima Brown
in The Eiger Sanction
Related posts — See "McLuhan Tetrad" in this journal.
Related theology — See "The Meaning of Perichoresis."
Background — The New Yorker , "On Religion:
Richard Rohr Reorders the Universe," by Eliza Griswold
on February 2, 2020, and a different reordering in posts
tagged Eightfold Metaphysics.
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Thursday, June 26, 2014
The McLuhan Dimension
"History is a deep and complicated puzzle—
especially when it involves more dimensions than time."
— Introduction to a novella in Analog Science Fiction
"Annenberg Hall" at Harvard was originally part of a memorial for
Civil War dead. Formerly "Alumni Hall," it was renamed in 1996.
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Thursday, February 17, 2022
Space Memorial
"FILE – Retired Sandinista Gen. Hugo Torres poses for portrait
at his home, in Managua, Nicaragua, May 2, 2018."
— Photo caption from a Feb. 12 Washington Post obituary
Also on May 2, 2018 —
Related theology —
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
|
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Monday, February 3, 2020
A Kuhnian Register
Ereignis in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy —
|
Further aspects of the essential unfolding of Being are revealed by what is perhaps the key move in the Contributions—a rethinking of Being in terms of the notion of Ereignis, a term translated variously as ‘event’ (most closely reflecting its ordinary German usage), ‘appropriation’, ‘appropriating event’, ‘event of appropriation’ or ‘enowning’. (For an analysis which tracks Heidegger's use of the term Ereignis at various stages of his thought, see Vallega-Neu 2010). The history of Being is now conceived as a series of appropriating events in which the different dimensions of human sense-making—the religious, political, philosophical (and so on) dimensions that define the culturally conditioned epochs of human history—are transformed. Each such transformation is a revolution in human patterns of intelligibility, so what is appropriated in the event is Dasein and thus the human capacity for taking-as (see e.g., Contributions 271: 343). Once appropriated in this way, Dasein operates according to a specific set of established sense-making practices and structures. In a Kuhnian register, one might think of this as the normal sense-making that follows a paradigm-shift. — Michael Wheeler, 2011 |
See as well "reordering" in Sunday evening's post Tetrads for McLuhan
and in a Log24 search for Reordering + Steiner.
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Monday, July 1, 2019
Desperately Seeking Clarity
"Let us consider the crux of Hopkins' sensibility…"
Seeking claritas :
From a "cube tales" post of June 21 —
The number "six" in the second tale above counts faces of the cube,
as shown in a post of June 23 —
.
". . . Then the universe exploded into existence . . . ."
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“The Ontological Secret”
The phrase "ontological secret" is from 1927 —
" Beauty is thus 'a flashing of intelligence…
on a matter intelligibly arranged' or, as Maritain
adds in the 1927 edition of Art and Scholasticism ,
it is 'the ontological secret that [things] bear within
them[selves], their spiritual being, their operating
mystery.' "
— John G. Trapani, Jr., "'Radiance': The Metaphysical Foundations
of Maritain's Aesthetics," pp. 11-19 in Beauty, Art, and the Polis ,
ed. by Alice Ramos, publ. by American Maritain Association, 2000.
This 1927 phrase may be the source of McLuhan's 1944
"ontological secret" —
From a search in this journal for "Object of Beauty" —
“She never looked up while her mind rotated the facts,
trying to see them from all sides, trying to piece them
together into theory. All she could think was that she
was flunking an IQ test.”
— Steve Martin, An Object of Beauty
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Sunday, June 30, 2019
Tuesday, June 25, 2019
Rhetorical Question, Rhetorical Answer
Q —
"What kind of person
bokehs an inscape?"
A —
Robert Gorham Davis:
McLuhan's " 'mosaic' mode of presentation …
rules out discriminations, qualifications,
close reasoning, the structuring of
articulated wholes."
— Robert Gorham Davis on Marshall McLuhan.
See also Articulation in this journal.
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Tuesday, May 28, 2019
Quaternion at Candlebrow
From a Groundhog Day post in 2009 —
|
The Candlebrow Conference The conferees had gathered here from all around the world…. Their spirits all one way or another invested in, invested by, the siegecraft of Time and its mysteries. "Fact is, our system of so-called linear time is based on a circular or, if you like, periodic phenomenon– the earth's own spin. Everything spins, up to and including, probably, the whole universe. So we can look to the prairie, the darkening sky, the birthing of a funnel-cloud to see in its vortex the fundamental structure of everything–"
"Um, Professor–"…. … Those in attendance, some at quite high speed, had begun to disperse, the briefest of glances at the sky sufficing to explain why. As if the professor had lectured it into being, there now swung from the swollen and light-pulsing clouds to the west a classic prairie "twister"…. … In the storm cellar, over semiliquid coffee and farmhouse crullers left from the last twister, they got back to the topic of periodic functions…. "Eternal Return, just to begin with. If we may construct such functions in the abstract, then so must it be possible to construct more secular, more physical expressions." "Build a time machine." "Not the way I would have put it, but if you like, fine." Vectorists and Quaternionists in attendance reminded everybody of the function they had recently worked up…. "We thus enter the whirlwind. It becomes the very essence of a refashioned life, providing the axes to which everything will be referred. Time no long 'passes,' with a linear velocity, but 'returns,' with an angular one…. We are returned to ourselves eternally, or, if you like, timelessly." "Born again!" exclaimed a Christer in the gathering, as if suddenly enlightened. Above, the devastation had begun. |
"As if the professor had lectured it into being . . . ."
See other posts now tagged McLuhan Time.
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Monday, May 27, 2019
But Seriously . . .
I prefer the simple "four dots" figure
of the double colon:
For those who prefer stranger analogies . . .
Actors from "The Eiger Sanction" —
Doctor Strange on Mount Everest —
See as well this journal on the above Strange date, 2016/12/02,
in posts tagged Lumber Room.
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Wednesday, May 1, 2019
The Medium and the Message
In memory of Quentin Fiore — from a Log24 search for McLuhan,
an item related to today's previous post . . .
Related material from Log24 on the above-reported date of death —
See also, from a search for Analogy in this journal . . .
.
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Friday, June 29, 2018
Analogies Between Analogies:
Literary Meditation for the Feast of SS Peter and Paul
Background: McLuhan on analogy.
See a publication offering facsimiles of the original 4×6 cards
of John Shade's "Pale Fire," as Nabokov described them.
Regarding these card proportions, note that 4/6 = 333/500, approximately —
the proportions of the text box in a post from yesterday.
"Continue a search for thirty-three and three" — Katherine Neville.
These rather pointless, but vaguely poetic, analogies were suggested by …
-
Yesterday morning's "The Corrections," a post
featuring spider ballooning and a dead poet, and
- "Blue Dream," a post of Feb. 11, 2006.
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Sunday, January 7, 2018
Thursday, August 24, 2017
Maori Chess, Vol. 2
This just in …
"Genesis Potini died of a heart attack aged 46
on the 15th August 2011."
The 15th of August in New Zealand overlapped
the 14th of August in the U.S.A.
From a Log24 post, "Sunday Review," on August 14, 2011 —
Part II (from "Marshall, Meet Bagger," July 29):
"Time for you to see the field."
For further details, see the 1985 note
"Generating the Octad Generator."
McLuhan was a Toronto Catholic philosopher.
For related views of a Montreal Catholic philosopher,
see the Saturday evening post.
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Friday, July 21, 2017
Faux News
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Monday, June 26, 2017
Four Dots
Analogies — “A : B :: C : D” may be read “A is to B as C is to D.”
Gian-Carlo Rota on Heidegger…
“… The universal as is given various names in Heidegger’s writings….
The discovery of the universal as is Heidegger’s contribution to philosophy….
The universal ‘as‘ is the surgence of sense in Man, the shepherd of Being.
The disclosure of the primordial as is the end of a search that began with Plato….
This search comes to its conclusion with Heidegger.”
— “Three Senses of ‘A is B’ in Heideggger,” Ch. 17 in Indiscrete Thoughts
See also Four Dots in this journal.
Some context: McLuhan + Analogy.
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Friday, November 18, 2016
Through the Vanishing Point
This post's title is that of a book by Marshall McLuhan,
Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting .
From a post of 6 PM yesterday —
Click image to enlarge.
From the Web —
" The mystical school of thought came to be known as
Kabbalah , from the Hebrew root Qof-Beit-Lamed ,
meaning 'to receive, to accept.' The word is usually
translated as 'tradition.' " — Judaism 101
Gruber reportedly died yesterday — November 17, 2016.
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Friday, August 19, 2016
Princeton University Press in 1947
From a review, in the context of Hollywood, of a Princeton
University Press book on William Blake from 1947 —
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Wednesday, August 10, 2016
Analogies Test
Obituary for Wilford Stanton Miller, author in 1926
of the Miller Analogies Test —
Marshall McLuhan writing to Ezra Pound on Dec. 21, 1948—
"The American mind is not even close to being amenable
to the ideogram principle as yet. The reason is simply this.
America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had
chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy—
the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD.
It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still
verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all
human thought for the U.S.A.
I am trying to devise a way of stating this difficulty as it exists.
Until stated and publicly recognized for what it is, poetry and
the arts can’t exist in America."
A line for W. S. Miller, taken from "Annie Hall" —
"You know nothing of my work."
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Thursday, June 2, 2016
Bullshit Studies
"The allusion to 'the most precious square of sense' shows
Shakespeare doing an almost scholastic demonstration of
the need for a ratio and interplay among the senses as
the very constitution of rationality."
— Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy ,
University of Toronto Press, 1962, page 13
"What Shakespeare refers to in Lear as the 'precious
square of sense' probably has reference to the traditional
'square of opposition' in logic and to that four-part analogy
of proportionality which is the interplay of sense and reason."
— McLuhan, ibid. , page 241
This is of course nonsense, and, in view of McLuhan's pose
as a defender of the Catholic faith, damned nonsense.
Epigraph by McLuhan —
"The Gutenberg Galaxy develops a mosaic or field
approach to its problems."
I prefer a different "mosaic or field" related to the movable
blocks of Fröbel, not the movable type of Gutenberg.
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Sunday, May 29, 2016
The Ideogram Principle …
According to McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan writing to Ezra Pound on Dec. 21, 1948—
"The American mind is not even close to being amenable
to the ideogram principle as yet. The reason is simply this.
America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had
chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy—
the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD.
It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still
verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all
human thought for the U.S.A.
I am trying to devise a way of stating this difficulty as it exists.
Until stated and publicly recognized for what it is, poetry and
the arts can’t exist in America."
For context, see Cameron McEwen,
"Marshall McLuhan, John Pick, and Gerard Manley Hopkins."
(Renascence , Fall 2011, Vol. 64 Issue 1, 55-76)
A relation in four terms —
A : B :: C : D as Model : Crutch :: Metaphor : Ornament —
See also Dueling Formulas and Symmetry.
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Monday, April 11, 2016
Combinatorial Spider
“Chaos is order yet undeciphered.”
— The novel The Double , by José Saramago,
on which the film "Enemy" was based
Some background for the 2012 Douglas Glover
"Attack of the Copula Spiders" book
mentioned in Sunday's Synchronicity Check —
-
"A vision of Toronto as Hell" — Douglas Glover in the
March 25, 2011, post Combinatorial Delight - For Louise Bourgeois — a post from the date of Galois's death—
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Wednesday, February 24, 2016
The Media Message
See a link referencing The Gutenberg Galaxy (a Catholic's 1962 view of literacy)
in a Log24 post yesterday suggested by a New York Times obituary.
A different obituary this evening in that newspaper describes a Jew's 1979 view
of literacy. See "Elizabeth Eisenstein, Historian of Movable Type, Dies at 92."
Related material — McLuhan in Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent
of Change , Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Eisenstein reportedly died on January 31, 2016. Synchronologists may
consult some media-related material reposted here on that date —
Fittingly, the Times concludes Eisenstein's obituary as follows —
"This article will be set in 8.7 point Imperial and printed on
one of several presses, including the Goss Colorliner."
For a perhaps more interesting printing press related to change,
see Despedida in this journal.
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Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Revolutionary
From a New York Times obituary today —
"The Rev. Fernando Cardenal, a son of privilege
who embraced Latin America’s poor as a revolutionary
priest and brazenly defied Pope John Paul II’s order to
quit Nicaragua’s leftist cabinet in the 1980s, died on
Saturday in Managua. He was 82."
Photo caption from the same obituary —
"Fernando Cardenal in 1990. As education minister of
Nicaragua under the Sandinistas in the 1980s, he
oversaw a sweeping campaign credited with reducing
illiteracy to 13 percent from 51 percent."
This alleged literacy improvement makes him sound like
a Protestant revolutionary.
For a Catholic view of literacy, see The Gutenberg Galaxy .
See also the post Being Interpreted (Aug. 14, 2015) —
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Thursday, May 22, 2014
Visual Structure
“Chaos is order yet undeciphered.”
— The novel The Double , by José Saramago,
on which the recent film "Enemy" was based
For Louise Bourgeois — a post from the date of Galois's death—
For Toronto — Scene from a film that premiered there on Sept. 8, 2013:
Related material: This journal on that date, Sept. 8, 2013:
"I still haven't found what I'm looking for." — Bono
"In fact Surrealism found what it had been looking for
from the first in the 1920 collages [by Max Ernst],
which introduced an entirely original scheme of
visual structure…."
— Rosalind Krauss quoting André Breton*
in "The Master's Bedroom"
* "Artistic Genesis and Perspective of Surrealism"
(1941), in Surrealism and Painting (New York,
Harper & Row, 1972, p. 64).
See also Damnation Morning in this journal.
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Wednesday, May 21, 2014
Through the Vanishing Point*
Marshall McLuhan in "Annie Hall" —
"You know nothing of my work."
Related material —
"I need a photo opportunity
I want a shot at redemption
Don't want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard"
— Paul Simon
It was a dark and stormy night…
— Page 180, Logicomix
A photo opportunity for Whitehead
(from Romancing the Cube, April 20, 2011)—
See also Absolute Ambition (Nov. 19, 2010).
* For the title, see Vanishing Point in this journal.
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Saturday, September 29, 2012
Immerse Yourself
From the Wikipedia article (with links altered) on Mormon baptism of the dead—
Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe that baptism is a prerequisite for entry into the kingdom of God as stated by Jesus in John 3:5: "Except that a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God" (KJV).
From The Painted Word (with link added), by Tom Wolfe—
|
PEOPLE DON’T READ THE MORNING NEWSPAPER, Marshall McLuhan once said, they slip into it like a warm bath. Too true, Marshall! Imagine being in New York City on the morning of Sunday, April 28, 1974, like I was, slipping into that great public bath, that vat, that spa, that regional physiotherapy tank, that White Sulphur Springs, that Marienbad, that Ganges, that River Jordan for a million souls which is the Sunday New York Times . Soon I was submerged, weightless, suspended in the tepid depths of the thing, in Arts & Leisure, Section 2, page 19, in a state of perfect sensory deprivation, when all at once an extraordinary thing happened: I noticed something! |
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Monday, May 21, 2012
Brightness at Noon
Occultation according to McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan writing to Ezra Pound on Dec. 21, 1948—
"The American mind is not even close to being amenable to the ideogram principle as yet. The reason is simply this. America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy— the basic fact that
I am trying to devise a way of stating this difficulty as it exists. Until stated and publicly recognized for what it is, poetry and the arts can’t exist in America."
For context, see Cameron McEwen, "Marshall McLuhan, John Pick, and Gerard Manley Hopkins." (Renascence , Fall 2011, Vol. 64 Issue 1, 55-76)
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Friday, September 16, 2011
Art, Jung, Toronto
Related art—
Midnight's Icons,
and…
(Wikipedia figure)
"Visually, a tetrad can be depicted as
four diamonds forming an X…."
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Sunday, August 14, 2011
Sunday Review
The Sunday New York Times today—
This suggests…
The Elusive Small Idea—
Part I:
McLuhan and the Seven Snow Whites
Part II (from "Marshall, Meet Bagger," July 29):
"Time for you to see the field."
For further details, see the 1985 note
"Generating the Octad Generator."
McLuhan was a Toronto Catholic philosopher.
For related views of a Montreal Catholic philosopher,
see the Saturday evening post.
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Friday, July 29, 2011
Marshall, Meet Bagger
Marshall McLuhan writing to Ezra Pound on Dec. 21, 1948—
"The American mind is not even close to being amenable to the ideogram principle as yet. The reason is simply this. America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy— the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the U.S.A.
I am trying to devise a way of stating this difficulty as it exists. Until stated and publicly recognized for what it is, poetry and the arts can’t exist in America."
"Time for you to see the field." —Bagger Vance
The field — See June 2010.
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Friday, November 19, 2010
Absolute Ambition
"It's my absolute ambition that you are touched to the core of your being with the content…."
— Julie Taymor on Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (Playbill video, undated)
Another ambitious comic-book promotion —
"What Logicomix does that few works in any medium do is to make intellectual passion palpable. That is its greatest strength. And it’s here that its form becomes its substance."
— Judith Roitman, review (pdf, 3.7 MB) of Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth , in …
The December 2010 AMS Notices cover has excerpts from Logicomix.
Related material:
"In the classical grammarians’ sense of the power of form over 'content' and style over 'substance,' he originated the phrase, 'the medium is the message.'"
— Joseph P. Duggan on Marshall McLuhan at The University Bookman
See also, in this journal, The Medium is the Message, Wechsler, and Blockheads .
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Saturday, April 24, 2010
Go Ask Alice
McLuhan in Space by Richard Cavell—
As the word "through" in the title of Through the Vanishing Point □ hints… key reference points for McLuhan and Parker in writing Through the Vanishing Point were the "Alice" books.
[The footnote symbol □ here is mine.]
Alice Rae, McLuhan's Unconscious, doctoral dissertation, School of History and Politics, University of Adelaide, May 2008—
What McLuhan calls the "unconscious"' is more often named by him as Logos, "acoustic space" or the "media environment," and I trace the debts that these concepts owe not only to Freud and Jung, but to Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, gestalt theory, art theory, Henri Bergson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Wyndham Lewis, Siegfried Giedion, Harold Innis, the French symbolist poets of the late nineteenth century and the British modernists of the early twentieth.
The declaration section of the thesis is dated November 19, 2008.
Related material— Halloween 2005 and The Gospel According to Father Hardon.
□ A work suggested by Ander Monson's new Vanishing Point . (See April 17 and April 23, together with the April 22 picture of a non-Euclidean point □ in the context of "The Seventh Symbol.")
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Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Gameplayers of the Academy
New Game
In memory of a Jesuit who died on February 22 (see yesterday's "For the Ides of March")–
“The Game in the Ship cannot be approached as a job, a vocation, a career, or a recreation. To the contrary, it is Life and Death itself at work there. In the Inner Game, we call the Game Dhum Welur, the Mind of God."
— M. A. Foster, The Gameplayers of Zan
"… for Othello, no less than his creator Shakespeare, death without speechmaking is almost unthinkable."
— "Walter Ong," by Jeet Heer (Book & Culture, July/August 2004)
"This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood…."
— Jesuit quote at David Lavery's weblog today
See also this journal on February 22, the date of the Jesuit death. A post on that date mentions Ong and his teacher McLuhan, and displays a McLuhan figure related to the "joke" quote above–
Click figure for background.
Ong discussed "agonistic" culture.
See "Sunday's Theater" and a film
based on the novel discussed there–
Prof. Coleman Silk introduces
freshmen to academic values
For academic gameplayers who prefer
less emotionally challenging subjects,
there is Othello Online —
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Monday, February 22, 2010
Annals of Philosophy
The Medium is the Message
Marshall McLuhan
From the Wikipedia article
on Marshall McLuhan–
(Click images for some background.)
Related material:
a web page on McLuhan's
student Walter J. Ong, S. J.,
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Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Wednesday February 4, 2009
Overkill
In memory of
James Joyce and of
Patrick McGoohan.
who both died on
a January 13th —
In memory of
James Joyce and of
Patrick McGoohan.
who both died on
a January 13th —
Related material:
The phrase
"Habitat Global Village"
in the previous entry.
Marshall McLuhan was
apparently the originator
of the phrase
"global village."
The phrase, coined by McLuhan,
a Catholic, should be associated
more with Rome than
with Americus, Georgia.
"The association is the idea."
— Ian Lee, The Third Word War
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Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Wednesday January 28, 2009
ACTUAL BEING
continued from
October 25, 2008
continued from
October 25, 2008
|
"The only wealth he bestowed on his subjects lay in the richness of his descriptive language, the detailed fineness of which won him comparisons with painters like Vermeer and Andrew Wyeth."
— Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in today's International Herald Tribune |
|
"These people have discovered how to turn dreams into reality. They know how to enter their dream realities. They can stay there, live there, perhaps forever."
— Alfred Bester on the inmates of Ward T in his 1953 short story, "Disappearing Act"
Related material:
"Is Nothing Sacred?" |
|
When? Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler. Where?
— Ulysses, conclusion of Episode 17 |
Happy Feast of
St. Thomas Aquinas.
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Sunday, December 31, 2006
Sunday December 31, 2006
Tools of
Christ Church
described in this morning’s entry,
This may be the same
Darren Danylyshen who has
taught at St. Stephen’s SS
in Bowmanville, Ontario).
Following a link in the
section of that school’s site
beneath the title
“St. Stephen’s Goes Hollywood,”
we find the following:
This ties in rather neatly with the
for last Friday–
St. Thomas Becket’s day–
St. Thomas Becket’s day–
if McLuhan were a saint.
(McLuhan, a Catholic, died on
Dec. 31, 1980.)
Related material:
Comments Off on Sunday December 31, 2006
Thursday, June 26, 2003
Thursday June 26, 2003
ART WARS:
Art at the Vanishing Point
From the web page Art Wars:
"For more on the 'vanishing point,'
or 'point at infinity,' see
Midsummer Eve's Dream."
On Midsummer Eve, June 23, 2003, minimalist artist Fred Sandback killed himself.
Sandback is discussed in The Dia Generation, an April 6, 2003, New York Times Magazine article that is itself discussed at the Art Wars page.
Sandback, who majored in philosophy at Yale, once said that
"Fact and illusion are equivalents."
Two other references that may be relevant:
The Medium is
the Rear View Mirror,
which deals with McLuhan's book Through the Vanishing Point, and a work I cited on Midsummer Eve 
…
Chapter 5 of Through the Looking Glass:
" 'What is it you want to buy?' the Sheep said at last, looking up for a moment from her knitting.
'I don't quite know yet,' Alice said very gently. 'I should like to look all round me first, if I might.'
'You may look in front of you, and on both sides, if you like,' said the Sheep; 'but you ca'n't look all round you — unless you've got eyes at the back of your head.'
But these, as it happened, Alice had not got: so she contented herself with turning round, looking at the shelves as she came to them.
The shop seemed to be full of all manner of curious things — but the oddest part of it all was that, whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite, empty, though the others round it were crowded as full as they could hold.
'Things flow about so here!' she said at last in a plaintive tone…."