The journalist who conducted McLuhan's celebrated 1969 Playboy interview, invoked by Bob as the reason that interview reads so cleanly: in Bob's account Norden "couldn't understand anything McLuhan was saying," so McLuhan wrote out the answers himself . Bob knows the story secondhand through Norden's friend Paris Flammonde, who heard Norden complain about the encounter . The page holds Bob's biographical framing of the interview and its era. New to it — start with dialogue 49 for the "wrote out the answers" claim.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the Playboy interviewer who "couldn't understand anything McLuhan was saying" — the frame for reading the interview as McLuhan's own written text
Bob's provenance claim about the Playboy interview — that its polish is McLuhan's own written prose, not a transcribed conversation, because Norden could not follow him and McLuhan supplied the answers in writing.
"The interviewer, Eric Norden, who was a regular interviewer for Playboy, couldn't understand anything McLuhan was saying. McLuhan had to write out the answers for him."
Bob sources the story — he has it from Norden's best friend Paris Flammonde, who "heard a lot of complaints from Eric Norden" about the McLuhan interview firsthand, the chain of testimony behind Bob's account.
"He heard a lot of complaints from Eric Norden."
Returns as the late-'60s reader who "can't believe" McLuhan is calmly recommending programming, the reaction Bob uses to date the interview's provocation
Norden made the measure of the era — in the late-'60s climate where people "aren't interested in being programmed," Bob uses the interviewer's disbelief to mark how far McLuhan's calm advocacy of programming ran against the moment.
"Eric Norden, the interviewer, can't believe what McLuhan saying. McLuhan pushing this programming."
Connections
Norden conducted the 1969 Playboy interview; in Bob's telling he couldn't follow McLuhan, who had to write out the answers himself.