Log24

Wednesday, May 1, 2019

The Medium and the Message

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:45 pm

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 . . .

 .

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.

Friday, August 19, 2016

Princeton University Press in 1947

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:17 am

From a review, in the context of Hollywood, of a Princeton
University Press book on William Blake from 1947 —

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Analogies Test

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 am

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."

Thursday, June 2, 2016

Bullshit Studies

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:30 am

(Continued)

"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.

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.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

The McLuhan Dimension

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:56 am

"History is a deep and complicated puzzle—
especially when it involves more dimensions than time."

Introduction to a novella in Analog Science Fiction

IMAGE- Marshall McLuhan

IMAGE- Annenberg Hall at Harvard

IMAGE- Search for 'quilt geometry' yields a result from Annenberg Media.

"Annenberg Hall" at Harvard was originally part of a memorial for
Civil War dead. Formerly "Alumni Hall," it was renamed in 1996.

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Through the Vanishing Point*

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:48 am

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…

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110420-DarkAndStormy-Logicomix.jpg

— Page 180, Logicomix

A photo opportunity for Whitehead
(from Romancing the Cube, April 20, 2011)—

IMAGE- Whitehead on Fano's construction of the 15-point projective Galois space over GF(2)

See also Absolute Ambition (Nov. 19, 2010).

* For the title, see Vanishing Point in this journal.

Monday, May 21, 2012

Brightness at Noon

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm

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 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)

Friday, September 16, 2011

Art, Jung, Toronto

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:29 am

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110916-ArtJungToronto-NYT.jpg

Related art—

Midnight's Icons,

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110915-Jung-FourDiamonds.gif

Faust in Toronto,

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110916-NYT-Faust.jpg

and…

McLuhan 'tetrad' figure with four diamonds surrounding a fifth, the medium

McLuhan and the Four Diamonds

(Wikipedia figure)

"Visually, a tetrad can be depicted as
 four diamonds forming an X…."

" X never, ever, marks the spot."

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Sunday Review

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:33 pm

The Sunday New York Times  today—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110814-GablerNYT500w.jpg

This suggests…

The Elusive Small Idea—

Part I:

McLuhan and the Seven Snow Whites

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110814-GablerNYT500w7white.jpg

Part II (from "Marshall, Meet Bagger," July 29):

"Time for you to see the field."

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110814-TheFieldGF8.jpg

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.

Friday, July 29, 2011

Marshall, Meet Bagger

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:28 am

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.

Friday, November 19, 2010

Absolute Ambition

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:30 am

"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 …

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101119-AMSnoticesSm.jpg

 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 .

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Go Ask Alice

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:13 pm

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.")

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Gameplayers of the Academy

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:00 am

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–

McLuhan 'tetrad' figure with four diamonds surrounding a fifth, the medium

Click figure for background.

Ong discussed "agonistic" culture.
See "Sunday's Theater" and a film
based on the novel discussed there–

Menin... First line, in Greek, of the Iliad

Classics 101

IMAGE- Anthony Hopkins in 'The Human Stain'

Prof. Coleman Silk introduces
freshmen to academic values

For academic gameplayers who prefer
less emotionally challenging subjects,
there is Othello Online —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100316-NewGame.jpg

"New Game. You May Pass for White to Start."

Monday, February 22, 2010

Annals of Philosophy

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:00 pm

The Medium is the Message

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100222-McLuhan.jpg
Marshall McLuhan

From the Wikipedia article
on Marshall McLuhan–

McLuhan 'tetrad' figure with four diamonds surrounding a fifth, the medium

From yesterday

(Click images for some background.)

Ian McKellen at 'Neverwas' diamond windows

Related material:

Feast of St. Louis, 2003,

a web page on McLuhan's
student Walter J. Ong, S. J.,

and Jung and the Imago Dei

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Wednesday February 4, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:23 pm
Overkill
 
In memory of
James Joyce and of
Patrick McGoohan.
who both died on
a January 13th —
Scene from 'The Seventh Seal' on McLuhan book cover
Baby Blues cartoon on global positioning systems

 

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

Number Six meets Global Village
 

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Wednesday January 28, 2009

ACTUAL BEING
continued from
October 25, 2008

John Updike at Boston Public Library, 2006, photo by Robert Spencer for The New York Times
 

"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?

Black disc from end of Ch. 17 in Ulysses

Ulysses, conclusion of Episode 17

 

Cover of 'Through the Vanishing Point,' by Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker

Happy Feast of
St. Thomas Aquinas.

Sunday, December 31, 2006

Sunday December 31, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:00 pm
Tools of
Christ Church
(Continued from
St. Thomas Becket’s day)

The author of the thesis
“Conversations with the Dead”

described in this morning’s entry,

Aesthetics of Evil
vs. Christ Church
,

is Darren Joseph Danylyshen.

 
This may be the same
Darren Danylyshen who has
taught at St. Stephen’s SS
(a Catholic secondary school
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:
 
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06B/061231-McLuhan.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
 
This ties in rather neatly with the
“Tools of Christ Church” entry
for last Friday–
St. Thomas Becket’s day–
and with the fact that
today would be the feast day
of Marshall McLuhan,
if McLuhan were a saint.
(McLuhan, a Catholic, died on
Dec. 31, 1980.)
 
Related material:
 
The Communion of Saints as
the Association of Ideas
 

Thursday, June 26, 2003

Thursday June 26, 2003

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:00 am

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…."

 "When Alice went
     through the vanishing point
"
 

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