A McLuhan scholar and York University professor, co-editor with Eric McLuhan of the anthology Essential McLuhan, and a personal acquaintance of Bob's. Bob's estimate is pointedly mixed — he calls Zingrone McLuhan's "worst student," faulted for reading him too literally, yet credits him as the one other person to see McLuhan overwriting Jung's unconscious. New to the figure — start with dialogue 31 for the Essential McLuhan editorship and Bob's ambivalence.
Across the dialogues
The friendship traced — the young MIT professor who befriended William Irwin Thompson and turned to McLuhan after the 1965 MIT lecture
The biographical entry point — Zingrone and William Irwin Thompson met as young MIT professors and were drawn to McLuhan together after his 1965 MIT lecture, a friendship through which Zingrone later got Thompson a post at York.
"They were friends when they both got more interested in McLuhan in 1965 when McLuhan visited MIT and gave a lecture."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 13 (11 Feb 2021), 2:17:59
The ambivalent editor — the man Bob calls McLuhan's "worst student," faulted for taking him too literally, yet the one who put out Essential McLuhan with Eric
The credential and the ambivalence in one breath — Zingrone edited Essential McLuhan with Eric McLuhan, the standard reader, yet Bob insists "he didn't understand McLuhan" and only "got the gig."
"he worked with Eric to put out the Essential McLuhan book he got the gig he didn't understand McLuhan but he got the gig"Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 31 (22 Jul 2021), 1:37:30
Glimpsed personally — the scholar who would not go to conferences and "hated people giving papers"
A personal-acquaintance detail — Bob knew Zingrone directly; the scholar refused the academic circuit, "hated people giving papers and all this stuff."
"I remember Zingrone telling me that he would not go to conferences."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 32 (29 Jul 2021), 1:29:34
Kept as an interlocutor — one of the few Bob "had a lot of good conversation with," who "struggled with it"
Zingrone kept as one of Bob's direct interlocutors on the material — a fellow reader who, in Bob's telling, "struggled with it."
"I had a lot of good conversation with Zingrone about it. He struggled with it."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 40 (4 Nov 2021), 37:52
Granted his due — named the only other reader to notice McLuhan creating "a new meaning for the unconscious," going past Jung
Zingrone's vindication — for all Bob's low estimate, he names Zingrone the only other reader to notice McLuhan remaking the unconscious, going past Jung toward the technology-as-archetype move.
"he's the only other guy who's noticing that McLuhan creating a new meaning for the unconscious."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 51 (23 Jun 2022), 1:45:21
Promoted from a name in the Toronto orbit to a source Bob builds on and then measures himself against — one italicized sentence of Zingrone's supplies the formula for the page being read, and Bob accepts the formula while rejecting the fifth-law ambition it came out of
Zingrone enters as a witness to the teaching problem rather than as a theorist — the report that Understanding Media had stopped landing is what the session's whole argument about examples and principles is answering.
"Frank Zingrone of York University told me that he couldn't really interest his students in the book Understanding Media because none of the students had any experience of the older analog media."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 69 (11 May 2023), 1:43:15
The passage Bob prizes locates change precisely where attention fails, which is why he can read it as a statement about involuntary ESP rather than about ignorance.
"This ignorance of the Cosmic Awareness aspects of any medium of communication is where action and change occur, particularly as one moves from one medium to another."Frank Zingrone, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 69 (11 May 2023), 1:45:28
The three italicized words the second half of the session runs on — Zingrone's answer to whether one form-content relationship holds across all media, which Bob takes over whole and Cameron traces back to Nietzsche.
"Content consumes form."Frank Zingrone, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 69 (11 May 2023), 1:45:50
The sentence is given its provenance — not a stray observation but the residue of a formal bid to extend the Tetrad, which is what lets Bob keep the formula while discarding the project.
"Frank's quotation is a result of the efforts Zingrone was making in the late 80s to come up with a fifth Laws of Media."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 69 (11 May 2023), 2:00:32
Bob's verdict separates the find from the ambition — content-consuming form is real and post-McLuhan, but it does not have the standing of a law, which is exactly the distinction he wants for his own coinages.
"he ends up with the fusion principle as the fifth law. But Zingrone also was trying to describe new things that McLuhan missed. This whole feature of content-consuming form is an aspect, but it's not the fifth law."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 69 (11 May 2023), 2:00:40
Is read at last rather than cited — the book Bob has been quoting piecemeal for a decade is opened twenty-two years late, and the verdict is generous and terminal at once, since he was reaching for the same thing and nobody read him, which turns him from a source into a cautionary parallel
Zingrone is recast as a rival on the same ground rather than a source to quote — which is what makes his commercial failure something Bob has a stake in.
"He's wrestling with what I call the AP in his post-McLuhan way."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 2:20:04
The phrase Bob reads the whole passage for — atomization given a picture, each user a solitary vehicle crossing a shared emptiness.
"and sundry other infocrats across the data desert of the internet in one-person caravans."Frank Zingrone, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 2:20:57
Bob converts the image into a position on the chart — the caravan is coenaesthesia seen from outside, which is how a 2001 metaphor becomes evidence for a structure he was mapping before he read it.
"One-person caravans, that's everybody having the co-anesthetic role of the god at the center of their media sphere."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 2:21:08
Zingrone's flat conclusion, and the point at which Bob's sympathy stops — the sentence states the cost the AP is a response to, without allowing that anything follows it.
"Virtualized, bodiless people can make no real society."Frank Zingrone, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 2:21:42
The reception verdict delivered as an aside, and its force comes from the comparison Cameron draws next — the unread post-McLuhan against the Lewis and McLuhan revival now under way.
"nowadays I'll bet nobody at all reads Zingrone."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 2:23:02
The late reading is offered as vindication of the book and of Bob's own coordinates at once — and as an apology, since the acknowledgement arrives after its recipient can receive it.
"when I read it finally, 22 years after it came out, I was impressed with it. He was getting towards what I was looking at, the AP."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 76 (2 Nov 2023), 2:23:52
Gets his life rather than his book — the archive has cited him for a decade and read him once, and this session finally supplies the biography that makes both intelligible: the neighbour who came to McLuhan late, argued for thirty years, recanted in print, and wrote his own book out of that recantation, which turns a source into a figure with a shape
The biography opens with an accident of geography that explains nothing — proximity from childhood, mass beside McLuhan on Sundays, and no idea what the man was about, which is what makes the later conversion a conversion.
"He grew up across the street from McLuhan on Wells Hill Avenue."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 79 (7 Dec 2023), 2:12:10
The turn is dated to a single room in 1958 — a twenty-five-year-old back in freshman year at St. Michael's after years of labouring work, which sets the pattern Cameron will later name.
"and one of the first lectures he experienced was McLuhan."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 79 (7 Dec 2023), 2:12:54
What the lecture reached was not the scholar but the poet — a latent instinct hearing "the actual top poet of the day," which is Bob's account of why Zingrone's McLuhan was never an academic subject and always a personal wound.
"he walked out stunned."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 79 (7 Dec 2023), 2:13:13
The August 1979 dinner at Club 22 in the Windsor Arms, six weeks before the stroke, is offered as the last good scene of the relationship — Zingrone enjoying exactly the performance he had spent thirty years arguing with.
"McLuhan's making remarks about the people, Donald Sutherland comes out, McLuhan says actors are overpaid, nobodies."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 79 (7 Dec 2023), 2:14:25
The essay in Who Was Marshall McLuhan? ends on a recantation, which is the sentence the whole portrait is built around — the argument was the mistake, and the man only saw it once the argument had no one left in it.
"I should have spent more time listening to McLuhan."Frank Zingrone, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 79 (7 Dec 2023), 2:14:41
The book's motive is placed in a falling-out rather than a research programme — Eric, Derrick and Logan were behind, and The Media Simplex is what Zingrone did about it.
"90s. He was fed up with Eric, Derek, and Logan, and any other of those corny guys."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 79 (7 Dec 2023), 2:07:50
Bob claims causal credit for the book on the same footing as Theall's The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, and the appeal is documentary rather than personal — the preface is offered as the record that he is not making it up.
"And he acknowledged me in the preface."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 79 (7 Dec 2023), 2:16:39
Cameron converts the biography into a structure — Zingrone and Easterbrook both left the academy, both came back, and both recorded the same regret in the same book, which makes the late return the condition for hearing anything at all.
"Notice there's a marked parallel."Cameron McEwen, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 79 (7 Dec 2023), 2:19:05
The shared initials are played as a joke and land as the page's real problem — with Zappa occupying the archive's FZ, Zingrone has to be spelled out every time, which is roughly what happened to his reputation.
"FZ, which is commonly used in the Zappa world for Frank Zappa, that's Frank's initials, FZ."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 79 (7 Dec 2023), 2:20:33
Is read at last on his own terms and found wanting on them — the closing chapter Bob had been circling gets quoted, diagnosed as an escape that never left the alphabet, and then folded into the number-22 coincidences that tie him to Zappa and McLuhan
Zingrone's closing move is to name the electric condition Gnostic, which is the one label McLuhan's Catholic circle treated as an accusation.
"because of electric technology, we have come to a rare millennial shift toward a fifth dimension of awareness that has all the characteristics of Gnosticism."Frank Zingrone, read by Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 80 (14 Dec 2023), 45:09
The fifth dimension is not rhetoric but a structural bid — a fifth law added to the four, split down the middle of the McLuhan family.
"the fifth dimension, Frank had, in 91 it was published, he wrote about the Pentad. He developed a way to go beyond the Tetrad, which Eric rejected, but he says Marshall accepted in a way."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 80 (14 Dec 2023), 45:18
The verdict is that the escape route runs the wrong way — reaching behind print for the Gnostic still lands inside what print made possible.
"He's trying to get out of the Catholic bias. which would to him be the Gutenberg, and get into what he might consider the pre-Gutenberg, the Gnostic, but that's still an extension of the alphabetic"Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 80 (14 Dec 2023), 47:47
The initials Bob joked about a session earlier are now load-bearing, binding Zingrone's last meeting with McLuhan at Club 22 to Zappa's hotel and to McLuhan's number on Bob's chart.
"and Frank Zingrone is FZ, Frank Zappa. So there's a lot of neat synchronicity there with Frank and Marshall, which is important."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 80 (14 Dec 2023), 2:10:10
Connections
Co-editor, with Eric McLuhan, of the anthology Essential McLuhan.
Longtime friend and colleague; the two met as young professors and Zingrone later got Thompson a post at York.
His lifelong subject — the man Bob calls McLuhan's "worst student" who nonetheless edited the canon and, in Bob's telling, saw McLuhan go past Jung.