Great news! W. Terrence Gordon, author of many McLuhan related books and the editor of the edition of Understanding Media that I am reading, has agreed to do a guest lecture on May 20th (more info to follow). He has just asked me the following question:
From the most recent discussions, do you think there is some aspect of MM’s work that is of particular interest that I could use as a focus for presentation?
Suggestions in the comments please…
Stephen Downes wrote to me:
As I was summarizing Chapter 11 my mind went back over and over to my recent poem ‘Why Numbers Exist’, which captures exactly the sense of mystery and meaning in numbers McLuhan was describing. Please feel free to share it with the group as part of my contribution.
I think it is a delightful poem, so here goes…
by Stephen Downes
One exists to show us the way
It is the self, it is today
It is the place where we departed
It is the one to get us started
Two exists to join me to you
It is the pair, it is the glue
It is the way we start out with math
It is the choice, the fork in the path
Three exists to give us hope
It is the plan, the way we cope
Three keeps us level looking ahead
It is the rumple left in the bed
Four exists to even the score
Strong and square, the table, the door
It is the meal we share to stay strong
The hammer we wield to right the wrong
Five exists to lead us beyond
To see the night before it dawned
Five is the spirit, the star, the cult
The hand of man, the final result
Six exists to show us the road
It is the balance in the load
Calmness and reason, power of sight
It is the way, the path and the light
Seven exists to hand out fate
It is the luck we all await
It is the random we see in chance
It is the change we make in the dance
Eight exists to give us our due
It is reward, it is the new
It is good fortune reaped from the land
It is the harvest we always planned
Nine exists to be the best
Of mice and men and all the rest
A sense of spirit and justice combined
The steel we forge from iron refined
Ten exists to give us measure
Ways to add and count our treasure
To understand that our greatest worth
Is what we were given at our birth
Eleven exists to imply
A wink, a smile, a batted eye
It reminds us that we need to smile
To take a break and laugh a while
Twelve exists to top the hour
To mark the months our lives devour
And on the days our lives seem hollow
To keep our minds on those who follow
Thirteen exists as a warning
Lest we spend our lives in mourning
A baker’s dozen may feel quite nice
But excess always comes with a price
The other numbers are combined
With proportion in each assigned
A more complex universe begun
By weight of the factors barring none
The primes exist to keep us true
For there’s always something new
The are like nature’s memorandum
To keep an eye out for the random
Zero does not exist at all
We made it so that we recall
That though it all may seem so stringent
It really just is quite contingent
I just want to thank Stephen for his contribution to this group as I do see it as him working on fulfilling his personal vision statement:
I want and visualize and aspire toward a system of society and learning where each person is able to rise to his or her fullest potential without social or financial encumberance, where they may express themselves fully and without reservation through art, writing, athletics, invention, or even through their avocations or lifestyle.
Where they are able to form networks of meaningful and rewarding relationships with their peers, with people who share the same interests or hobbies, the same political or religious affiliations – or different interests or affiliations, as the case may be.
This to me is a society where knowledge and learning are public goods, freely created and shared, not hoarded or withheld in order to extract wealth or influence. This is what I aspire toward, this is what I work toward.
Paul Levinson is the author of Digital McLuhan (and many other books). He has agreed to be the host of a crowdfunding campaign to have him speak about McLuhan in our reading group.
Paul Levinson
This talk (followed with a conversation) will happen if we manage to get together USD 255 (about EUR 200). We will use the crowdfunding platform Crowdtilt for this. You can pledge a certain amount of money (with your credit card) which you will only need to pay if there is enough others willing to do so. This is similar to Kickstarter with which you might be more familiar.
“The Xerox makes everyone a publisher,” McLuhan frequently observed in the 1970s. Like most of his brilliant probes, this was not literally true in 1970s – xeroxed manuscripts looked little like books and newspapers – but it caught the wave of the future, in which the Kindle revolution would allow any author to easily become a publisher, and therein render the traditional, gatekeeping publisher obsolete. This profound development is good for the body politic as well as letters and arts.
Paul will talk for 20-30 minutes on one of our Monday afternoons (CET time) via live online video about this revolution in gatekeeping, followed by discussion with us (and any other attendees).
Paul Levinson, PhD, is Professor of Communication & Media Studies at Fordham University in New York City. His eight nonfiction books, including The Soft Edge (1997), Digital McLuhan (1999), Realspace (2003), Cellphone (2004), and New New Media (2009; 2nd edition, 2012) have been the subject of major articles in the New York Times, Wired, the Christian Science Monitor, and have been translated into ten languages. His science fiction novels include The Silk Code (1999, winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel), Borrowed Tides (2001), The Consciousness Plague (2002), The Pixel Eye (2003), and The Plot To Save Socrates (2006). His short stories have been nominated for Nebula, Hugo, Edgar, and Sturgeon Awards. Paul Levinson appears on “The O’Reilly Factor” (Fox News), “The CBS Evening News,” “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” (PBS), “Nightline” (ABC), Dylan Ratigan (MSNBC) and numerous national and international TV and radio programs. His 1972 LP, Twice Upon a Rhyme, was re-issued on mini-CD by Big Pink Records in 2009, and was re-issued in a vinyl remastered re-pressing by Sound of Salvation/Whiplash Records in December 2010. He reviews the best of television in his InfiniteRegress.tv blog, writes political commentary for Mediaite, and was listed in The Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Top 10 Academic Twitterers” in 2009.
Lucky
In the introduction to the first edition of Understanding Media McLuhan writes:
The Theater of the Absurd dramatizes this recent dilemma of Western man, the man of action who appears not to be involved in the action. Such is the origin and appeal of Samuel Beckett’s clowns.
I had never heard of the Theater of the Absurd, but Wikipedia helped out. Samuel Beckett’s clowns refer to Pozzo and Lucky in Waiting for Godot.
The people in the Netherlands are in luck: the Stadsschouwburg is organizing a week on Beckett in middle April. There will be two performances of Waiting for Godot by Toneelgroep Oostpol. I will go to the performance on April 18th. Let me know if you’ll be there too, so we can meet up.
I have tried to map all the participants of the reading group (at least the ones that didn’t tell me they were from Centurion). You can find the map here.
Understanding Media 