#bothersome things

Since I have been feeling so emotionally blocked lately, I have decided to begin with a list of what is causing unexplained emotion and will hopefully dissect each one in the coming days.  I am so much better than silence; I am so much more than self-inflicted paralysis.

“Whoever came up with this task is a sadist,” Ava declared as she put the giant egg down on the table in front of her. It had quickly been nicknamed ´terrible thing´ after she´d put it down for a few moments too long and it had began screaming bloody murder. Circe had bolted in the opposite directions and Ava was very tempted to follow the cat. Instead she had been stuck trying to coddle a damn egg while stuttering through the only lullaby she knew to try and make it shut up. 

Her morning shift was over, she had decided, so she´d tucked the egg under her arm and headed towards the Great Hall in hopes that Simone was eating breakfast and willing to take over it. Ava made her way over to her friend and nobody cared that she was not as her designated table, mainly because most of the students seemed to be busy with their own eggs. Besides, she was sure that it was far easier for her to sit down at the Slytherin table than to try and coax Simone over to the Gryffindor one. 

“Go to your other mommy,” Ava told the egg, unsure if speaking to it would help its mood, before gently rolling it towards Simone. “Do you think eating scrambled eggs would make it upset? If so, you try to keep it silent because just looking at this thing makes me hungry.”

I'm just going to make a list here of bothersome things in the first 100 pages of McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy, then, after that, I can talk about the non-bothersome things. I hope my list isn't too bothersome to you... kind of.

"Since the object of the present book is to discern the origins and modes of the Gutenberg configuration of events, it will be well to consider the effects of the alphabet on native populations today. For as they are in relation to the phonetic alphabet, so we once were" (21). 

"the westerner appears to people of ear culture to be a very cold fish indeed" (22)

"Carothers feels that the early Greek intelligentsia not only had the stimulus of sudden access to the acquired wisdom of other peoples, but, having none of its own, there were no vested interests in acquired knowledge to frustrate the immediate acceptance and development of the new. It is this very situation which today puts the western world at such a disadvantage against the "backward" countries" (31)

"...thus only phonetic writing has the power to translate man from the tribal to the civilized sphere" (31)

The whole section on educating people on how to watch film. pages 44 and thereabouts. 

"Education has become largely a matter of reading and writing, and it is possible for all" (55)

"Innis also explained why print causes nationalism and not tribalism and why print causes price systems and markets such as cannot exist without print" (56)

and, borrowing from a classmate, the Marshall/McLuhan conversation: "The trouble with the nonliterate is not that he isn't logical, but that he applies logic too often, many times on the  basis of insufficient premises. He generally assumes that evens which are associated together are causally connected" (87)

I like it when he answers himself, don't you?

Continuing with the bothers:

"On the other hand, the suppression of the visual sense in favour of the audile-tactile complex, produces the distortions of tribal society, and of the configuration of jaz and primitive art imitations which broke upon us with radio..." (61).

"'Entirely abstract' means the non-visual resonating interplay of the audile-tactile by which electricity and radio especially were to regenerate what Conrad called 'the Africa within' the Western experience" (62).

"which is as unnoticed by the sophisticated world, and quite as little affected by it, as is the culture of some dwindling aboriginal tribe living out its helpless existence in the hinterland of a native reserve" (Opie qtd in McLuhan 104)