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Sunday, April 22, 2001

Bob’s Notes | McLuhan with Eric McLuhan at Tony’s Studio, 3 August 1969

Payday

NOTE:Timing based on Payday archives.


Dec.13/1014  1178540-3-2-2  on FINNEGANS WAKE at Tony's:

(Part 17 at 2:32 [Eric starts at 16:34])

Tony asks about his new grant
2:32

Japanese addresses are based on when the building was built not location
2:59

"the Electric Circus world"
3:39

people take inner trips (rather than outer trips) and go to Esalen to sob in bathtubs like Alice in Wonderland ("changes her personality with each tear")
3:52

New York City ("insular, auditory, nuclear, discontinuous, and unconnected space in extremis" ["street signs are useless"]) created by steamboat rather than railway
4:37


effect of the "wall of air conditioners"
5:41

crime increases in the summer because space is different from winter indoors (plus speed-up of fast-changing neighbors causes violence)
6:06

London has 38 deaths per year (1967) vs. New York City had over 600 deaths per year
7:18

sound of an old steel-rimmed wagon wheel on a cobble street (quarries obsolesced by the pneumatic tire) 8:18

clattering steel-shod horses with policemen on them are very effective for deterring violence 9:19
Tony mentions the weirdness of his low-riding Renault (danger of being pissed on by a Great Dane ["help stamp out tall dogs"])
10:12

Farley Mowat used pissing to protect himself from wolves near the North Pole (pun on "the DEW-Line") 10:48

the stages for creating and destroying big cities (the ship, railway, the destructive car, the rotting by jet plane)
12:25

airplanes now travel faster than the speed of sound (means no more cities [NYC will return to agriculture within a few decades], we now have a "global village", HCE must become an archeologist via the study of city blocks [Tony is the first])
13:07

McLuhan chuckles at his insight about Tony's "sound archeology"
13:57

today, silly commuters race downtown to use a telephone
14:24

McLuhan predicts the Internet (electricity decentralizes - see the Armed Services and the DEW-Line "grids")
14:45

Eric and Marshall start explaining FW
16:34

ALP episode: "stem or stone" (oral, gossiping washerwomen "scrubbing the unconscious RIVER [hendiadys]")
Irish alphabet (tree, Finn cycle) vs. Roman alphabet (brick, Tower of Babel [Gen.11], HCE the hod carrier and ALP [environmental forces/ear and kinetic])
"tribalbutience" (non-brick stuttering, return to oral)
21:11

eye/ear is structure of FINNEGANS WAKE ("Royal Divorce" [feudal/ear vs. Renaissance/eye])
mistaking the electric environment as the "Mystical Body"
Humpty Dumpty (Vico, technologies were "gods" as spelled out in "accurate" fables and myths, Old Testament [pro-pastoral, since Cain] anathematizes the mechanical technologies [the golden calf/money], East/ear vs. West/eye)
"the West shall shake the East..." (wakes the East out of its tribal dream)
25:06

"the orb it urbs"
two aspects of the civilized mode: Shem/Hebrew/artist and Shaun/Irish/postman riding backwards through the night pages of FW/tribal memory/bureaucrat ("stem or stone")
day is cliche (eye, tied together) vs. night/dream (scrubbing) is archetype (ear, each item creates its own condition/space, every moment is unique, no connections, depth of repetition)
27:08

Finn/ear/all the Hebrews/the whole of mankind seen as one person/the "sleeping giant"/the "people of the dream" (the "volk"/cloud) lies dormant
Shem the Penman is a "phony"/"low sham"/forger of fictions/crosses all social boundaries/restless/always changing into new forms
28:44

Shaun is a respectable and conventional oral/tribal man (unchanging, fixed, not restless, "burning would", stable but made of software/least material of substance [sound], very perceptive, art as programmed, "astoneaged"/stunned/paralyzed and can't see the new environment)
Joyce says he's the greatest engineer via the mirror/engine ("spickspookspokesman of the specturesque silentiousness...", one wheel is the square wheel/mirror of art/Perseus vs. head of Gorgon, "funferall/funeral at FW", high art/kulch merges with pop kulch [McLuhan says mockingly that the Balinese say they have no art]), Gombrich's "Art and Illusion" and Havelock's "Preface to Plato" deal with "matching vs. making" (archetypal spaces)
30:44

"the medium and the message" is a visually-biased statement, no "content" in acoustic space, baroque spirals
31:47

Joyce's "one world burrowing upon another" (tunneling interface) is acoustic space via resonance
33:22

the quest for identity (the Gnostic Grail Quest) is all through FW ("a poss of porterpease" [a mash of split peas in porridge-like form] repeated throughout FW) ("mishe" [private identity] means "I AM" in Gaelic - Shakespeare uses this in "Hamlet" ["I am a bad sound/echo of something else"] and also in other plays trying to sort out the private personage from the corporate kings [big famous monologue of "to be or not to be"] [see quote from Henry V] [see Othello's "visual proof"])
33:59

McLuhan says the entire FW is contained in the echo of one sentence ("the keys to Given" [the understanding of all the data in the world is given] [McLuhan explains what Nevitt writes later])
36:16

more on the book as a visual pun of the mirror (square wheel without "spooks", the ricorso [wheel as emanation and return] as the expurgation/purification of the old technology)
36:50

"Alice in Wonderland"
37:23

Tony's definition of the specialist (via "one degree")
the obsolescence of the university-educated doctor and engineer
38:01

education becomes "a study of the present" (encyclopedic, pattern vs. data, McLuhan says mockingly "the future of the future is the present")
39:22

McLuhan comments on Picasso's "simultaneously hand, ear, etc."
40:31

"help beautify junkyards" (created by the obsolescence of the steel wheel [the pneumatic tire] via the quarry and the reinforced concrete)
41:05

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