Notes from Marshall McLuhan

The people of the west developed their visual point of view and their acuity of vision along with Euclidean geometry. No other country in the world had Euclidean geometry except the country of the phonetic alphabet. without phonetic alphabet you don’t have euclidean space. there is no euclid in the orient. There's neither any individual identity, private identity in the orient. But the kinds of left and right hemisphere things coordinate quite well since the lineal nature of the left hemisphere is very visual - visual space is the only space that is lineal and connected. Acoustic space is not lineal or connected. The acoustic space is a sphere who we hear from all directions at once. Acoustic space is a sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose margin is no where. That is a simultaneous sound which creates that kind of space. It is the space of the sound bubble in rock space. But right hemisphere is simultaneous acoustic and this is very favourable to the corporate identity of oriental man. People who 'play it by the ear'. As opposed to those people who have a strong bias of 'point of view' and who play it by the eye and by logical connected estimate bottomline quantity and so on. This is all left hemisphere. But the right hemisphere has no bottom line and is interested only in quality, not in quantity. And so the other wordless, the non-worldly orient with its interest in the way of life rather than in the amount of product…you might say, polynesia, our various attempts have been made to organise the polynesian into the dynamic produces of this and that and they remain completely indifferent. They are very acoustically oriented people. Very right hemisphere. But the right and left hemispheres affect both of us to some degree. There, its not an plain either or. We use both the hemispheres to some degree. But in some cultures, the one or the other gets much stress, much play.

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To Read means to guess.

Reading is an activity of rapid guessing.

Old English rǣdan, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch raden and German raten ‘advise, guess’. Early senses included ‘advise’ and ‘interpret (a riddle or dream’)

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...paradoxically, the clown was a person with a grievance. his role in medieval society was to be the voice of grievance. The clown's job was to tell the emperor or tell the royalty exactly what was wrong with the society. He often lost his head in this process. but the clown, the international , motley of our times, the clown is trying to tell us his grievance. the beards, the hairdos and the costumes of the young are  manifestations of grievance and anger. 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_383842&feature=iv&src_vid=ImaH51F4HBw&v=a11DEFm0WCw