Gerald Emanuel Stearn's 1967 anthology of McLuhan interviews, criticism, and McLuhan's own rejoinders — one of the earliest books about McLuhan, and a text Bob keeps returning to for its interviews and for lines he reads aloud from specific pages. It supplies his standing epigraph (the octopus attacking the Great Pyramid) and, for Cameron, a personal point of entry to McLuhan. New to it — start with dialogue 02 for the epigraph, dialogue 24 for the East–West interval passage.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the source of Bob's essay epigraph — the octopus-and-the-Great-Pyramid image of the detachment media study demands
Cameron reads out the passage Bob has taken as his essay's epigraph — correcting Bob's paraphrase and placing it in the Stearn interview — media study beginning in a detachment so total it looks like arrogance.
"The road to understanding media effects begins with arrogant superiority. If one lacked this sense of superiority, this detachment, it would be quite impossible to write about them. It would be like an octopus attacking the Great Pyramid."
Mined for the Gossage line that seeds the cliché-to-archetype cycle
Bob lifts the Gossage line from the book's opening pages as an early statement of the cliché-to-archetype cycle.
"First something is the last word... then it becomes a cliché, then it becomes an art form, then it becomes an archetype through use."
Reread for its account of the "superiority" required to face an anti-environment, which Cameron recasts as poise and etiquette
Bob returns to the interview's "superiority" as the stance an anti-environment demands; Cameron reframes it as distance, etiquette, "the prerequisite for dialogue."
"you have to have a superiority, a kind of arrogance to deal with anti-environment"
Pinned to a page — the "dynamic symmetry of tensions among proportions" around p. 109 that yields the golden section
Bob roots his chart's proportional logic in a page of the book — around p. 109, the "dynamic symmetry" that yields the golden section in space or time — and insists the chart is not "based on McLuhan."
"a whole different dynamic symmetry of tensions among proportions, to quote McLuhan, from the McLuhan Hot and Cool book, around page 109 or so…"
Named as the antidote to the "McLuhan industry" — the Munsell sphere the theoretician must stand inside, not the distilled Gutenberg McLuhan
Bob names the book's Munsell-sphere image as the picture of what Cameron has just described — the viewer standing inside the whole eye–ear spectrum, not looking at it from a distilled Gutenberg vantage.
"The Munsell sphere in Hot and Cool, where the viewer is inside the mobius strip or the circle or the sphere or the color spectrum."
Read aloud (pp. 108–109) for the East-as-interval / West-as-object passage Bob ties to the tactile "Zen interval"
Bob reads the pp. 108–109 passage as McLuhan's "Zen interval" — a third, tactile space between acoustic and visual that "oral culture resolves."
"the East has the integrity of the interval, and the West has the integrity of the object"
Connections
Gerald Stearn's 1967 anthology of McLuhan interviews, criticism, and rejoinders — the source of the interview Bob quotes as his epigraph.
The "arrogant superiority" / octopus-and-pyramid passage Bob uses as an epigraph comes from the Stearn interview in the book.
The Gossage line in the book's opening pages — last word to cliché to art form to archetype — is one root of the cliché-to-archetype spine.