the unphallic extensions of mann
2001-07-27 - 10:48 p.m.
I got exceptionally bored today, and systematically eliminated all of my pressure points. Beat on those overly large nerves of the body until they couldn�t hurt anymore. The funny bone ones I wore away at all last year, because of the weird way I sat in my chair...must�ve slipped and hit my elbows a couple hundred times. The between-forefinger-and-thumb nerve (which name eluded me at present) took a while on my left hand...and my ears are still sorta vonerable, in the sense that they bleed profusely when cut and generally stick out the sides of one�s head. But I figure it�ll save me a lot of pain when I have twins cliffhanging off my collarbone.
Another ambulance today. It�s rained nearly every third day this summer, and for every day of rain, an ambulance has driven down the street near my house, sirens moaning. And for every ambulance, a story of tragedy. And I thinks to me, I says to myself, they should put bells on the ambulance, and not sirens. That way, the angels would get their wings, in case they never made it to the hospital.
Blasphemy of the worstest sort. Sarah wants to change her name. Jannie May-Valentino er sumthin� similar. I told her that whatever she decides to change it to, she�s always gonna be �sarah� to me. I should have threatened to change my name to �Tarzan�, but I heard somewhere that a word for a word leaves the world dictionaryless.
It seems to me that dreams are meant to be eaten. Consumed. Wasted. They get used by all those little happy girls, with the smiley faces, and there�s nothing but bones of nightmares when the platter comes to my end on the table. And the dogs usually get all the good bones. I just wanna dream, just for a night...and as if that�s not enough, I�d like to ask for a dream that doesn�t end up with my dying. But then again, Freud suggested that we dream that which we truly want. Objection: Freud also had a thing for his mother.
Have you ever stood in a shower, and closed your eyes so tight that you forgot that they could open? Forgot that colour, and light, and reflections can exist...nothing but air, and water, and water. Eventually you realize that you are not a fish, and open your eyes as if you�d never had them opened before...Well, that�s how you make me feel. There�s colour out there, but I can�t remember how to open my eyes.
Sidenote: Milk does funny things to my head. Calcium is not to be trusted.
Finished �American Gods� today. It seems to me, that Gaiman writes in an exponential manner. You read a little at first, and it�s just background noise...and you read a little more, and the whole thing snowballs into a train wreck. Mixing metaphors; bad habit. *smiles* Gawd, I haven�t smiled in a long time...But yes, exponential. And once you reach the event horizon of page 341 (er so), you just gotta finish the rest of the book, in that one sitting. Perhaps he slept.
My ultimate pick-up line: �a penny fer yer thoughts er a dollar fer yer number?� And yes, I have a deficiency in picking people up. My record time is 20 seconds, and how was I supposed to know he was undercover?
I crack me up. And other things besides. �erg. my tits be cold. it was so cold this morning that they froze off, and fell on the ground, and the doctor told me there was nothing he could do, and showed me his had frozen off too. that cold. and there's only one cure fer cold tits, and that's a warm back, and I've got both, but they won't reach...so I'm just gonna put a shirt on, before I loose my belly button.� �Nemo
I�ve been wanting to do this fer a while now...I�m quickly getting siC of people that call themselves �intellectuals� and think that they sumhow have the right to tell the rest of the world �how things are�. I want a free world, with free ideas and free freedom. What follows is my one-paragraph summary of the nonsense of the first chapter Marshall McLuhan�s �The Medium is the Message�. As you can see, the summary is still rather nonsensical. (Warning: This will most likely be excrutiatingly boring if you�ve never tormented yourself with the actual script.)
Really, the title says it all...the book is just cluttered with words to confuse the unwary. This is to say that a message is a medium between two bodies- by the way, atomization eliminates jobs and has changed human social interaction. But the machine is not evil, it is a tool. And, as everyone knows, the machine was fragmentary, centralist, and superficial in it�s patterning of human nature. Consider a light bulb. The light itself bears no message (unless used to spell �Al�s Diner� or some other variant thereof, but for which is needed multiple sources of light; and thereby we can conclude that multiple mediums may form a single message) and yet, is a medium. And each medium, after all, has a �content� with which it spreads it�s message, and the content is, in itself, another medium. As the railway accelerated the scale of human functions, whether it functioned in a tropical or northern environment. Lets us return to the light bulb. Brian surgery and baseball, although different sports, could be considered the �content� of the light, because that is the medium in which the message of the light is used. The medium is the message. GE makes a considerable portion of it�s profits from electric light bulbs and light systems, but does not produce lamp shades. The light bulb itself, however, eludes attention because it has no �content� (just as it has no message) And this is an example of why people fail to study media at all. Most persons studying media consider the content of several light bulbs. The message of the light bulb is radical, pervasive, and decentralized (not to mention, non-existant, as stated before). Now let us consider the works of Shakespeare as a handbook not for studying characters, but for studying human interaction. And was it not Shakespeare who said, �let there be light� (which he promptly followed with �through yonder broken window�)? Einstein simply put it in a bulb and called it a �light bulb�. In Othello, a game of black chips versus white chips, one could say that the chips have always existed, but it is the �content� of the game which propels and accelerates the human interaction, and it is the message of the game which concludes who assumes the win. A statement frequently used to describe the media is the Snarnoff argument (which I used above), who says, in the truly Narcissus style of one who is hypnotized by his amputation and extension of his being in a new technical form, that the value of apple pies, or guns, are determined by the way in which they are used. But this statement ignores the nature of the medium, the internal workings which make the apple pie an apple pie. But Sarnoff never considered that technologies can not only add on to, but also subtract from, and divide into, and exponentiate what we already are. The medium is the message. And in the case of mechanization, David Hume said that there is no casualty in a sequence; that no difference is gained from putting one�s socks on after one�s shoes. Nothing follows from following, except the change of the followed of the followers, whom he follows. Just as an airplane breaks the sound barrier, waves of sound become visible on the wings of the plane. Mechanization was never fragmented so brilliantly as in the movies, which translated us into a world of growth and organic interrelation. The message of the movies (which are, by the way, nothing more than electrical light, and therefore have no message) is that of transition from lineal connections to configurations, such as the statement, �if it works, it�s obsolete�. (A statement which logically proves itself, because it is an obsolete statement, and therefore must work.) We return to the inclusive form of the icon. The movie can be said to be �cubist� in nature, conbining points of view, drama, and plot to drive a message through the audience�s involvement. In other words, cubism provides the top, bottom, back, front, inside and outside on a single screen; dropping the illusion of prospective to access a sense of the whole. Segments of attention have shifted to total field, and we can now say �the medium is the message� rather naturally. But before the light bulb, the message Was the content, as people would ask what a painting was About. But they never considered what a house was About, and now, realizing this new media, we are forced to deal with the situation in our schools; instead of doing problems in arithmetic the teaching style now focuses on number theory and �sets�. Napolean Bonaparte. Alexis de Tocqueville. E M Foster. J C Carothers. Wyndham Lewis. J M Synge. A L Rowse. Arnold Toynbee. All people who have but one aspect in common: They have absolutely nothing with the point I�m about to make. The medium is the message. The �content� of a medium is like a piece of meat used by the burglar to distract the watch dog. The effect of the medium is made more intense because it has been given another medium as �content� (even though, as I�ve said prior, all mediums have a content which is another medium, so the medium must have already had content). Arnold Toynbee (again). G B Sansom. Arnold Toynbee. Wilbur Schramm. Leonard Doob. Pope Pius XII. A J Liebling. J U Nef. Another list of people whom I only mention because I like looking at their names on My paper, in a very unNarcissistic manner. Technological media are staples or raw materials, from which to build a civilization. But any civilization with a limited diversity of staples will also be limited, and their social patterns will be the result. And the society also must pay deeply for each staple at the cost of it�s culture, as staples in one�s finger are always likely to hurt. C G Jung. The medium is the message.
