Reddit reviews The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in The Learning of His Time

Sometimes when I feel inclined to growl, it comes out in the mildest statements made by Marxists.

Alas. I'm not quite Canadian enough to believe Marshall McLuhan's arguments are organized enough to qualify as human speech (or writing), and further don't have the energy to paraphrase his argument.

And nobody knows who Thomas Nashe is anymore, and to a certain extent that is a good thing. Same with Thomas Wolfe (if you're a fan, I'm very sorry).

McLuhan's book:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Classical-Trivium-Thomas-Learning/dp/1584230673

He was pretty young when he did this one, his specialty still teaching literature.

The McLuhan that knew Leary and Watts was decades later, after McLuhan had made a name for himself as founder of a department of technogy and communications at a university in Toronto. He was invited to an academic post in New York, but refused it.

One way to control the media is to own it. And the viewership numbers for a lot of traditional media outlets is in free fall.

I am sure that McLuhan, Watts, and Leary consulted with each other. Leary saw some stuff he was not supposed to see regarding the JFK assasination and was lucky to have lived. McLuhan lived on happily in his head. Watts had reason to be a little depressed at the end, but he had had a good run.

McLuhan hated new age stuff, privately. But he had some fun with the electronic and psychedelic styles, maybe even with hallucinogens, their affect on time and perception. He was fascinated with perception. How technology alters it. One way or other, intelligence departments would have been picking his brain. I know he consulted the Canadian government as well. He was a loyal Canadian, and a declared Catholic. But he did not trust what he called the gnostic influence in literature that affected TS Elliot and others.

I had to really focus to get McLuhan. It wasn't easy. I had to read and re read. What it left me with though is a deeper appreciation of how the way we get our information, by hearing, by reading, over the web, does change the way we process the information. Years ago the intellectual class was so much more linear and so much more oriented towards incrementalism. The preliterate world was also a very different world. Now, we are straddling. And its chaotic with the only efficient spots being places where the Apples, the Elon Musks, the Bransons hang out. Academia has become incredibly inefficient in delivering good information. Bureaucracies are in chaos. Much will be bypassed by new information technology. A lot of apparent success these days is not efficiency but corruption by government favoritism.

Have you seen this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khhsboVsyrw

Kind of a strange side note.