Today’s chapter of Understanding Media is titled “Ads” with a mischievous subtitle, “Keeping Upset with the Joneses.” Oh Marshall, you devil.  But as usual, McLuhan delivers the goods.  My top take-away is his insight that “The protestors are the best acclaimers and accelerators.” ( p. 231)  He has in mind high-brow critics of “false and misleading ad copy.”  I raise my hand in sheepish recognition.  Not so much because I judge the advertising world—that battle is over, and Madison Avenue won. I wring my hands over false and misleading political claims.  I tend to see them more on one side of the ideological divide than the other, but it’s clear no party has a monopoly on using such claims effectively.  How does it work? McLuhan reveals the formula as follows:

“Ads seem to work on a very advanced principle that a small pellet or pattern in a noisy, redundant barrage of repetition will gradually assert itself. Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brain-washing. This depth principle of onslaught on the unconscious may be the reason why.” (p. 227)

Isn’t that a good thing to protest? Well, sure. But it’s difficult to disagree with McLuhan’s observation that ad critics “are godsends to advertisers, as teetotalers are to brewers, and moral censors to books and films.”  To wit:

“Highly literate people cannot cope with the nonverbal art of the pictorial, so they dance impatiently up and down to express a pointless disapproval that renders them futile and gives new power and authority to the ads. The unconscious depth-messages of ads are never attacked by the literate, because of their incapacity to notice or discuss nonverbal forms of arrangement and meaning. They have not the art to argue with pictures.”  ( p. 231)

Jon Stewart this week made a similar point about cerebral critics of the governor of Texas. “You are up against something you are too smart to understand,” Stewart opined in the second episode of his “Oh My God, Rick Perry is Going to Be Our Next President” segment. He showed clips of TV pundits asserting that Mitt Romney had beaten Perry in the GOP debate and scolded them with this: “You are thinking about this with the wrong part of your brain—the brain part.” As usual, Stewart makes his point with profanity and over-the-top satire, so click here at your own risk, to see the segment.

What McLuhan would see here is that Perry bashers will do as much damage to the governor’s prospects as teetotalers did to brewers.  This makes Romney’s challenge one that PowerPoint presentations won’t solve.

I’ve read an entire chapter of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media this morning, looking for a connection with the above photo that I took yesterday at Ocean Park. Nothing. Marshall is in rare form, toying with the automobile like—thank you very much, O blogger Muse—a Labradoodle playing with a ball at the beach.

Who’s having more fun—the dog in the photo or the man who wrote the following description of the automobile fifty years ago?

The car gave to the democratic cavalier his horse and armor and haughty insolence in one package, transmogrifying the knight into a misguided missile.  p. 223

“The Mechanical Bride” - that’s McLuhan’s epithet for the motorcar, which he admires even as he foretells its demise, or at least its ceding of center stage to all things electric.  And no, he did not see Ford’s SYNC MyFord Touch coming, much less the next wave of social media in a can, the Ford Evos.  Or did he?

The simple and obvious fact about the car is that, more than any horse, it is an extension of man that turns the rider into a superman. It is a hot, explosive medium of social communication.  p. 221

If only he’d written “social media” instead of “social communication,” McLuhan might have gotten credit for inventing Facebook as well as “the asphalt jungle,” a term he did in fact coin, at page 224.  But this Mashabledescription of Ford’s Evos concept car certainly fits the extension-of-man idea that is central to McLuhan’s understanding of all technological advances:

According to Ford, the vehicle gives its driver the ability to tap into this “personal cloud” of information at any time — for example, picking up where the driver left off on that favorite song he or she was listening to inside the house. The vehicle’s smart systems monitor its driver’s “physical state and workload,” adjusting the car’s handling, heating, cooling and music to suit the driver’s level of alertness, perhaps even keeping him from falling asleep.

I’m glad to see that Ford is not resting on its SYNC head start, but my Edge of the Road podcast is going to get a lot more expensive than its Kindle cousin if I have to keep buying new Fords to keep up with the curve. Not going to happen. So I hope my humble 2012 Ford Focus will get the benefit of a few Evos concept innovations, as software updates.

You can drive yourself crazy trying to figure out if Marshall McLuhan was sane. For example, do we credit the following conclusion of his motorcar chapter as evidence that he was an eerie seer, or a witty blatherer who was usually off in his predictions by at least a decade?

The car, in a word, has quite refashioned all of the spaces that unite and separate men, and it will continue to do so for a decade more, by which time the electronic successors to the car will be manifest.

McLuhan wrote those words in a book that was published in 1964.  I’m thinking of 1974, when I was working as a cub reporter at The Woonsocket (R.I.) Call, driving a Saab 96. I don’t remember much electronics on that classic vehicle, though the free-wheel feature was very cool.  When you took your foot off the gas, it would slide into coast mode, increasing gas mileage. I managed to find a photo of one in the very color we had, a pale and serene blue.

Yesterday’s photo shoot with Charlie, who is my daughter’s Labradoodle, was all about the ecstasy of motion and play. He leaped into the waves after his ball and pranced back with it as if he’d invented the wheel.  You couldn’t help but smile, and I set a slideshow of him to the song “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” by Randy Newman.  If you’re reading this on your Kindle, you’ll need to switch to something else before you click here to watch it.  Enjoy!

I’m looking out this window and its twin, about four hours after I took advantage of first light to snap the photo above. It’s a classic beach day here at Ocean Park, Maine: 75 degrees, sunlight dancing on the sea, lots of folks playing in the orderly waves.  So why am I inside, you might ask.  Good question. The answer is that I rode a few waves after our early 10-mile bike ride, and since then I’ve been enjoying beach bliss here with a cup of strong coffee at my desk, listening to a Pandora Beach Boys mix and looking out at late summer.  Oh, and I also started writing a book.

Which brings us to today’s verse from the Gospel According to Marshall McLuhan, aka Understanding Media:

The book is a private confessional form that provides a “point of view.” p. 204

And why write a book?

Because for rational beings to see or re-cognize their experience in a new material form is an unbought grace of life. Experience translated into a new medium literally bestows a delightful playback of earlier awareness. p. 211

The experience that I yearn to play back is a literary love story. In the past three years I have fallen in love with e-books. The matchmaker was Amazon, with its several versions of the Kindle. But the object of my affection is not the thing itself; this is not about the smell of the Kindle. It’s about Reading, revealed to me in a new dimension.  It’s as if you had married your high school sweetheart and lived faithfully with her for five decades, only to discover that she is—oh, baby!—a goddess from another universe where love lasts forever and has the power to reverse human aging. 

This desire to write a book about e-books has been gathering within me for about four months. One catalyst was the author Steven Pressfield, whom I interviewed for The Kindle Chronicles for TKC 143. Steve’s The War of Art and the manifesto based on it that he published with Seth Godin’s Domino Project prompted me to jot down the essence of a book on a sheet of yellow, legal-size foolscap paper.  In Do The Work, the manifesto, Steve got me going with this:

Don’t overprepare. Don’t let research become Resistance. Don’t spend six months compiling a thousand-page tome detailing the emotional matrix and family history of every character in your book.

Outline it fast. Now. On instinct.

Discipline yourself to boil down your story/new business/philanthropic enterprise to a single page.

So I did that. I still have my yellow foolscap page, dated April 24, 2011 - not quite six months ago, but I better get going if I’m going to beat that target. 

Steve is a student of Resistance and its infinite wiles, which is what makes his books on this topic so valuable to anyone undertaking a creative project. I share his belief that “the more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.” But I also have a sense that angels often see a struggle developing and arrive on the scene to help out.  Mine at this point include Steven Pressfield, a loyal and articulate listener of the Kindle Chronicles who lives in Paris and Norway, and, as of yesterday, a woman named Melissa Ludtke.

Melissa is editor of the excellent Nieman Reports, published on paper and the web by the Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Via our shared connection with Dan Kennedy at Northeastern, whom I interviewed for TKC 156, she invited me to write an essay for the winter issue. Her original idea was that it would be about what journalists need to know about publishing their work for e-readers, but she showed herself to be a skillful and intuitive editor when she shifted the assignment in mid-stream during our introductory phone call.  She had asked what I’m working on, and I found myself laying out the still-forming plan for a book about how I’ve made an ecstatic transition from reading on paper to reading e-books. “Why don’t you write about that?” Melissa responded. So that’s my assignment, due in mid-October.  Which will be, incidentally, about six months from when I jotted down my plan on foolscap.  Nice try, resistance!

It’s not too smart to gloat in the face of resistance, especially since I’ve now spent four hours on this first day of announced work on the book writing about my writing a book.  But by translating my intention into the medium of a blog post, I am now able to re-cognize the project which has been beckoning me since April. 

I like the idea of sharing my progress on the book here on my blog, but I’ll feel my way forward on that one. Meanwhile, if you have any advice to offer or topics you hope I’ll cover, please leave a comment below or get in touch with me at PodChronicles AT Gmail DOT com. 

Onward!

I had a ball in Ogden, Utah, this past weekend, laying out the possibilities of e-book publishing for members of the Professional Outdoor Media Association. The photo above shows one half of the room where I presented two sessions.  In the first I showed how easy it is to get an author’s work self-published using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing tools. In the second I introduced the group to three authors who are actually making money selling their work in e-book form, and I talked about social media tools that can help make it happen. 

There were a couple of Eureka! moments in the sessions, as individual writers realized how big the e-book market is becoming and how accessible it can be.  ”I’ve been a dinosaur,” one guy in the back of the room said at one point. I really hope that some of my audience will take the plunge and publish their work at the Kindle Store so I can read it on my device and remember the excitement of the sessions.

This morning in McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy I came across a quotation from Pierre Boaistuau’s Theatrum Mundi, in which the wonders of print technology, then only a century old, are described in these words:

I can find nothing that may be equall or compare to the wonderful invention, utility and dignitie of printing, the which surmounteth all that the antiquitie may conceive or imagine of excellencie, knowing that it conserveth and keepeth all the conceptions of our soules, it is the treasure that doth immortalize the monument of  our spirits, and eternizeth world without end and also bringeth to light the fruits of our labours.

One writer I met, Tom Claycomb, works tirelessly to publish his columns about the outdoors in newspapers all over the country. Editor by editor, he introduces himself and his writing, pitching strong material like a piece he wrote listing great Christmas present ideas for outdoorsmen.  It’s a tough way to make a living, and if he can find an audience through e-books, it could be a big deal. Tom was on fire by the time I visited with him at the concluding taco buffet supper, and I am hopeful he is going to begin tapping into the potential of e-books. 

I mixed my enthusiasm with caution, because there are no magic bullets or sure paths to financial success in e-publishing. But, just like the new world that printing opened up 500 years ago, this one has the potential to be “the treasure that doth immortalize the monument of our spirits.” 

I often wonder what Claire, our five-year-old Yorkie, understands of our speech. She certainly gets the idea when we say, “Where’s your ball?” Off she goes, hunting for one of the little, squeaky balls Darlene keeps in stock.  I suspect she understands our urgent tone more than the words, but who knows?

Dipping into Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy after a week away from the project, I feel like a Yorkie trying to understand a tougher question. Like maybe, “Claire, what do you think of Standard & Poors’s downgrading of the nation’s debt?”  Or this:

The immense length and arching plasticity of line in all these musics is evidence of the advantages, counterbalancing the obvious limitations, of music conceived in terms of a single line; if one sacrifices the possibilities of harmony and sonorous contrast, one gains the possibility of creating melody free of the inhibitions of mensuration.  (p. 200)

If one looks up the word “mensuration” in the New Oxford American Dictionary embedded on one’s Kindle, one finds that it means “measuring,” with a special-usage definition from mathematics of “the measuring of geometric magnitudes, lengths, areas, and volumes.” 

A few pages further, McLuhan quotes James Sutherland’s biting critique of Thomas Nashe, the Elizabethan pamphleteer, playwright, poet and satirist, as follows:

The trouble with Nashe is partly that he is a good deal less interested in making things easy for the reader than in enjoying his own superiority over him; or, if that seems too harsh a judgment, in exploiting the linguistic resources of the language for his own amusement.” (p. 202)

McLuhan has a dog in this fight, and his name is Nashe. Sutherland, we’re told, “mistakes this polyphony in Nashe for a failure to be a sensible man of letters.” The horror! No one would ever accuse MM of being “a sensible man of letters.”  Linguistic provocateur, perhaps, or mad-dog visionary and media mystic. But I seriously doubt that McLuhan often sat down to write seeking words “chosen in accordance with wisdom or prudence; likely to be of benefit,” which is how the NOAD defines “sensible.”  

And thank goodness. It’s why I perk up my ears whenever I hear his name or turn to his silent voice in the text of his books.  Maybe this time I’ll understand what he’s saying, and run off to get it myself. 

A couple of hours ago, we saw smoke rising from Old Orchard Beach, a mile away from the cottage here in Ocean Park, Maine.  The fire was under control by the time we reached The Galaxy at 2 East Grand on our bikes, but the popular nightclub was no more.

Marshall McLuhan begins Understanding Media’s Chapter 21, titled “Press,” with his observation that “electrically moved information” involves the entire society in the decision-making process. (p. 203) Let’s identify this as another of his amazingly prescient insights, given the role that tweets, blogs, and e-mail played in the hammering out of a bipartisan debt and spending deal this past weekend in Washington, D.C. 

Here’s the idea:

As the speed of information increases, the tendency is for politics to move away from representation and delegation of constituents toward immediate involvement of the entire community in the central acts of decision.

Information also moved quickly along the beach today, and from there the speed accelerated via smartphones and digital cameras aimed at the firemen and the plumes of water angled down at the smoking nightclub.  I sent a video from my iPhone to my friend Tom in Casper, who is a volunteer fireman and would have been providing play-by-play commentary if he’d been with us. Where else were those photos being electrically moved from the scene of the fire? Many, no doubt, traveled with French text, because Old Orchard is a popular summer destination for visitors from Quebec. 

We arrived at Ocean Park yesterday for an extended stay. Already I feel detached from McLuhan’s abstract ruminations and have decided to lighten up on my daily practice of meditating on them. I’ll be back to MM here from time to time.

I have in mind a new creative project for my mornings by the sea, and I’m going to cut back my podcasting schedule to open up time for the new work.  Instead of a Kindle Chronicles and an Edge of the Road podcast each week, they will go to alternating biweekly schedules till Labor Day.  

With these changes, I’m not exactly stopping the presses.  Just slowing them down a bit to slightly less electric speed.  Stay cool!

It looks to me as if the starboard side of this boat is not in sync. I took the photo at The Head of the Charles Regatta a couple of years ago. You can see splash behind the oars of the number 3 and 5 oarsmen (number one is at the bow, where I rowed in high school). But the bowman has no splash visible, which makes it appear as if he has not completely finished the stroke yet. It’s a very slight departure from perfect timing, and I’m sure I would not have spotted it with my naked eyes from the banks of the river. 

Marshall McLuhan at page 193 of Understanding Media notes that the photograph is useful for collective postures and gestures, whereas written and printed language is biased toward the private and individual.  ”Moreover,” he adds on the next page, “that the photograph is quite versatile in revealing and arresting posture and structure wherever it is used, occurs in countless examples, such as the analysis of bird-flight.”  Or crews. 

This is part of McLuhan’s larger point that photography and movies “restored gesture to the human technology of recording experience.” He posits that this restoration, which followed the severing of the spoken word from its aspects of sound and gesture through the phonetic alphabet, enabled Freud and Jung to identify “collective postures of the mind with which the written form could not cope.” 

I plan to row later this morning if the rain holds off. From my window, I can see that the river is as calm as green glass.  A red boat slices downstream, powered by a pair of rowers. I didn’t take a photo, so I can’t tell you much about their collective posture.

When I row on the Charles, my mind sits upright, alive with memories of my earliest rowing days, nearly 50 years ago. I also carry with me images by the painter Thomas Eakins, whose early work included a painting titled “Max Schmitt in a Single Scull.”  A poet friend of mine, Philip Dacey, wrote a wonderful collection of poems titled The Mystery of Max Schmitt: Poems on the Life and Work of Thomas Eakins.  A fellow member of the Cambridge Boat Club, Craig Lambert, has written a luminous meditation on rowing titled Mind Over Water: Lessons on Life from the Art of Rowing, that I’m about a third of the way through on my Kindle.

McLuhan writes:

In fact, the snapshot of arrested human postures by photography directed more attention to the physical and psychic posture than ever before.

If you happen to be on the Longfellow Bridge as I sweep beneath it in a CBC club single in a couple of hours, please feel free to take a photo and email it to me at PodChronicles AT Gmail DOT com. I could certainly benefit from paying more attention to my physical and psychic posture. 

Rewind. I’ve just finished the 15-page chapter titled “The Photograph” in Understanding Media.  Instead of pressing ahead, to a chapter titled “Press,” I’m going to return to page 188 and read Chapter 20 again, as if I’ve never seen it before.  For photographic inspiration, I’m offering a shot I took this morning of the fountain in John F. Kennedy Memorial Park, a stately expanse of trees and grass between Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the Charles River. 

I just found the photograph referred to in the opening line of the chapter. The photo is titled “St. Peter’s at a Moment of History,” which was on the cover of Life magazine’s June 14, 1963, issue. It’s a beautiful scene, in which the skies appear to open just above the church. It leads McLuhan to opine that, unlike TV images and Egyptian art (go figure), “It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photo that it isolates single moments of time.”  The photo’s power is transforming, McLuhan writes, and is related to the camera’s power “to be everywhere and to interrelate things.” 

I loved how I was able to freeze the bubbling surge and retreat of the JFK fountain with my iPhone this morning. The plumes of water in that moment looked like ice sculpture. As MM says, “Sculpture tends toward the timeless.”  And thus I’ll remember this morning’s bike ride with Darlene and how she stopped at the fountain to stretch her legs after trying out her new bicycle. I’d agree the photo transformed the moment—and made it timeless.

From Understanding Media at page 195:

Education is ideally civil defense against media fall-out. Yet Western man has had, so far, no education or equipment for meeting any of the new media on their own terms. 

You have to give Marshall McLuhan credit for daring to think big about his own role in the history of Western Civilization.  That boldness is probably why his writing retains such intellectual force.  Every technology brings its awkwardness and bafflement, and high stakes for the existing order.  It’s natural to seek someone who can explain what’s happening, and how it will turn out.  Enter a charismatic voice from Canada, offering to meet the new media of television on its own terms.  For a while, the offer was eagerly taken up by corporations, media moguls, and the public. 

I see the same phenomenon now in the age of Social Media. There is a good living to be had in boldly offering yourself as someone who Gets It regarding Twitter, Facebook, and most recently, Google Plus. What I notice is that the people who have the most to offer are actually living in the new media - using it, loving it, testing it, trying to break it through intense use. They are actually more interested in experiencing it and contributing to it than they are in making speeches about it, trying to explain it to people who have not even put a little toe in the water yet. 

Same with e-books.  The people who have something to offer are way in, too far to return. They don’t read print books any more, and they are not interested in debating the virtues of the smell of the book. They just love reading this way.  They are meeting the new media on its own terms.

I’m on a tight schedule this morning, so I don’t have time to bend the photo of Harvard’s Newell Boathouse to the topic of the day.  I hope you enjoy it. 

At the home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on Brattle Street in Cambridge, Mass., I stopped this gray, muggy morning to take a photo near the end of my bike ride.  I had McLuhan on my mind, wondering what I might find today in his chapter on The Photograph in Understanding Media.

Sure enough, at page 194 I found a reference to poets.

Perhaps the greatest revolution produced by photograph was in the traditional arts. The painter could no longer depict a world that had been much photographed. He turned, instead, to reveal the inner process of creativity in expressionism and in abstract art. Likewise, the novelist could no longer describe objects or happenings for readers who already knew what was happening by photo, press, film, and radio. The poet and novelist turned to those inward gestures of the mind by which we achieve insight and by which we make ourselves and our world. Thus art moved from outer matching to inner making.

Longfellow was born in 1807, and the first permanent photograph was created in 1826. Photography became a viable medium by 1839, when he was 22 years old.  So maybe his poetry moved toward “inward gestures of the mind” because of the new technology?  I find that quite a stretch. The following concluding stanza of “A Psalm of Life” , a memorized favorite of my father’s, was first published in 1838, offering unforgettable insight of the sort by which we make ourselves and our world, well before the ubiquity of photography: 

Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

And what of William Wordsworth? He began writing his greatest work, The Prelude, a quarter-century before the first photograph. Talk about inward gestures of the mind!  Here’s a sample from Book 1:

Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows
Like harmony in music; there is a dark
Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, makes them cling together
In one society. How strange that all
The terrors, pains, and early miseries,
Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused
Within my mind, should e’er have borne a part,
And that a needful part, in making up
The calm existence that is mine when I
Am worthy of myself! Praise to the end!

So once again I find sport in testing McLuhan’s cosmic generalities with individual data points. So what?  McLuhan himself followed the inward gestures of his mind as a writer of poetic sensibility. It doesn’t take much snipping and arranging to make a sort of poem from this very chapter.  Like this:

Thus art moved from outer matching
to inner making.
The photograph is not a machine,
but a chemical and light process that,
crossed with the machine,
yields the movie.

Yet there is a vigor and violence
in these hybrid forms
that is self-liquidating,
as it were. 

There you have it. I’m sure Mr. McLuhan and Mr. Longfellow would have had a lot to talk about in one of the grand sitting rooms at the Brattle Street manse. Fun to imagine.