The poet, and in this archive a single episode: the February 1971 Toronto panel that put him on a stage with Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller two weeks before Bob Dobbs first walked into the Centre for Culture and Technology. Bob tells it in dialogue 72 as an archivist's story — he knocked on Auden's St. Mark's Place door in 1972, found a friend subletting, and learned what Auden had said walking back in from Toronto. The interest is less in Auden than in what the anecdote shows about how a reputation gets settled: by who got the laughs. New to it — start with dialogue 72.
Across the dialogues
Enters through an anecdote about how a verdict gets made — Bob missed the panel by two weeks, tracked down Auden's apartment a year later, and came away with a private claim of victory that the tape does not support
The panel's substance in one line — and Auden's counter is not an argument but an abstention, bragging that he does not own a television.
"McLuhan ends up telling Auden he had no clue about what TV's doing, and Auden's just bragging that he doesn't have one."
The find Bob rates as the real one — not the panel itself but Auden's private verdict on it, which no listener to the tape would have guessed and which Bob attributes to his having got more laughs than McLuhan.
"And he walked in the house or the apartment and he said, I won."
Connections
The February 1971 Toronto panel where McLuhan told Auden he had no clue what television was doing, and Auden answered by boasting he did not own one.