Shows
Dilettantery3.12 Why were children and local guides better at seeing cave art than expert prehistorians before 1902? Part 3: Learning to See Nggwalndu and Paintings with the Abelam of Papua New Guinea“The plain fact is that a picture, to represent an object, must be a symbol for it, stand for it, refer to it; and that no degree of resemblance is sufficient to establish the requisite relationship of reference. Nor is resemblance necessary for reference; almost anything may stand for anything else….The eye comes always ancient to its work, obsessed by its own past and by old and new insinuations of the ear, nose, tongue, fingers, heart and brain. It functions not as an instrument self-powered and alone, but as a dutiful member of a complex and capricious organism. Not...
2023-02-251h 02Dilettantery3.11 Why were children and local guides better at seeing cave art than expert prehistorians before 1902? Part 2: Ludwik Fleck, Thought Styles and Thought Collectives“Of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are; and of the things that are not, that they are not.”
-Protagoras, fragment 80 (the Homo Mensura fragment)
“Through logos humanity truly is the measure of everything. Only that which can be experienced as something is, and that which can not be thus experienced is not.”
-Mats Rosengren's updated, clearer version of Protagoras' fragment
‘When a cave supports a mountain on rocks deeply eroded from within, not made by human hand, but excavate...
2023-02-081h 07Dilettantery3.10 Why were children and local guides better at seeing cave art than expert prehistorians before 1902? Part 1: Protagoras vs Plato, Episteme vs Doxa"Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. what we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends on what we look for. What we look for depends on what we think. What we think depends on what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality."
-Bohm, 1977
"...without the making of theories I am convinced there would be no observation"
2023-02-031h 15Dilettantery3.9 David Lewis-Williams Part 3: A Temporary Death or A Foreign Life?“Sometimes I have entered this world of darkness alone, or remained behind alone to finish taking notes or measurements. It is hard to admit, but such occasions are always accompanied by flashes of indefinable apprehension. The comfort you may find in the ray of light from the headlamp is disturbed by the pressure of the darkness that is always behind you – shadows seem to advance from all parts that are not lit up. The shaky well-being you may find in the beam of light is disrupted by the fact that it also makes you very visible, vulnerable, a highlighted eye...
2023-01-191h 23Dilettantery3.8 David Lewis-Williams Part 2: North American Shamanic Rock Art and Other Ways to Conclude Homo Sapiens is Homo Aestheticus(episode 3.7 is part 1)
“People did not ‘invent’ two-dimensional images; nor did they discover them in natural marks. On the contrary, their world was already invested with two-dimensional images...The first two-dimensional images were thus not two dimensional representations of three-dimensional things in the material world, as researchers have always assumed...For the makers, the paintings and engravings were visions, not representations of visions – as indeed was the case for the southern African San and the North American shamans...They were not inventing images. They were merely touching what was already there.”
-David Lewis-Will...
2023-01-1557 minDilettantery3.7 How 19th Century Shamans Gave the 21st Century a New Theory of Rock Art (With the Help of 20th Century Science)"The /Xam San spoke of the rain as an animal. A rain-bull the thunderstorm that roared and destroyed the people’s huts; a raincow the gentle, soaking rain; columns of rain falling beneath a thunderstorm were called the ‘rain’s legs’—the rain was said to walk across the land." (discussed at 59:36: https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1582459918418071552)
rock art discussed at 55:20: https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1582459942589857797/photo/1
rock art discussed at 1:09:20: https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1582459938802388992/photo/1
rock painting of trance dance: https://twitter.com/Diletta...
2022-12-141h 19Dilettantery3.6 Two Beginnings: A Standard History of Modern Cave Wall Art Studies"Deep
in the timecrevasse,
in the
honeycomb-ice,
waits a breathcrystal,
your unalterable
testimony."
-Paul Celan
“When you do an archaeological excavation, you usually find what people left behind, their trash. But when you look at rock art, it’s not rubbish—it seems like a message, we can feel a connection to it.”
-Maxime Aubert
"When a cave supports a mountain on rocks deeply eroded from within, not made by human hand, but excavate...
2022-12-0539 minDilettantery4.1 To Think, We Must Split up the World: A History of 20th Century Theories of Categorization"Some of our most common and comforting groups no longer exist if classifications must be based on cladograms [evolutionary branching diagrams] .... I regret to report that there is surely no such thing as a fish.”
-“What, If Anything, is a Zebra?” by Stephen Jay Gould, 1983
"To change the concept of category itself is to change our understanding of the world.”
-Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, by George Lakoff, 1987
Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/Dile...
2022-12-051h 14Dilettantery3.5 Deleuze and Guattari and Cave Art Part 2: Beyond Abstraction and Representation There Is a Cave, I’ll Meet You Therehttps://twitter.com/PersianPoetics/status/1261745279860080641
[The Northern Line or the Gothic Line] “is a line that passes between things and, in the process, imbues the figures of people, animals, plants, etc. with a common nervous and frenetic energy. Its movement gives birth to a dynamic and chaotic geometry of diagonals, jagged edges, and swirling lines that actively construct space rather than merely describing it. This nomadic line connects and assembles heterogeneous elements while maintaining them as heterogeneous. Thus, space is assembled piece by piece, with each piece of space having its own internal geometrical co...
2022-10-161h 20Dilettantery3.4 Deleuze and Guattari and Cave Art Part 1: Primeval Magma of Life and "Another history which is still ours [that operates like] fires answering one another in the night."How My Poetry Comes To Me
by Gary Snyder, 1992
"It comes blundering over the /
Boulders at night, it stays /
Frightened outside the /
Range of my campfire /
I go to meet it at the /
Edge of the light"
Warning: This episode is me trying to figure out complicated philosophy. If that's not your thing you can skip to episode 3.6 without missing anything.
Example of the "primeval magma of life": https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1541657274438914048
“For Lorblanchet, the...
2022-10-151h 11Dilettantery3.3 The Origin of Art or Homo Aestheticus? Part 2: A Japanese Mirror, The Aesthetic Mode of Consciousness, Homo faber, and Ochre"Amédée Ozenfant wrote of the art in the Les Eyzies caves, 'Ah, those hands! Those silhouettes of hands, spread out and stencilled on an ochre ground! Go and see them. I promise you the most intense emotion you have ever experienced.' He credited the Paleolithic artists with inspiring modern art, and to a certain degree, they did. Jackson Pollock honoured them by leaving handprints along the top edge of at least two of his paintings. Pablo Picasso reportedly visited the famous Altamira cave before fleeing Spain in 1934, and emerged saying: 'Beyond Altamira, all is decadence.'"...
2022-10-141h 28Dilettantery3.2 The Origin of Art or Homo Aestheticus? Part 1: Pareidolia, Hunter-Gatherer Mimicry, and the Assumptions Hiding in the Word "Art"“The modern system of art is not an essence or fate but something we have made. Art as we have generally understood it is a European invention barely two hundred years old. It was proceeded by a broader, more utilitarian system of art that lasted over two thousand years, and it is likely to be followed by a third system of the arts.”
-Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (2001)
(What do you think this third system of the arts would look like?)
"...a therianthrope comb...
2022-10-011h 11Dilettantery2.3 Was the Concept of Objectivity Invented in the mid-1800s? Part 3: Kant and Scientific Personae, Structural Objectivity and Trained Judgement
"Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?"
-William James
“Ways of scientific seeing are where body and mind, pedagogy and research, knower and known intersect…once internalized by a scientific collective, these various ways of seeing were lodged deeper than evidence; they defined what evidence was. They were therefore seldom a matter of explicit argument, for they drew the boundaries within which arguments could take...
2022-09-231h 29Dilettantery3.1 Prehistoric Animation and Proto-Cinema, The Archaeology of Light and Darkness, and the Thirty-Thousand-Year-Old Holy Movie TheatreChapter One: Wachtel and Superposition 0:00:00
Chapter Two: Azéma and Thaumatropes 0:22:13
Chapter Three: Gatton and Camera Obscura 0:43:48
Chapter Four: Archaeo-optics 2:16:14
Epilogue: Chauvet Cave 3:19:19
"…the shadows of man and beast flickered huge like ancestral ghosts, which since the days of the caves have haunted the corners of fantasy, but which the electric light has killed."
-Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969)
...
2022-09-013h 27Dilettantery2.2 Was the Concept of Objectivity Invented in the mid-1800s? Part 2: Arthur Worthington's Tragedy, Photography, and Mechanical Objectivity“…the atlas maker’s plight: nature is full of diversity, but science cannot be.”
-Daston and Galison
“…a race of eunuchs…neither man nor woman, nor even hermaphrodite, but always and only neuters or, to speak more cultivatedly, the eternally objective.”
-Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (1873-1876)
“What, the religions are dying out? Just behold the religion of the power of history, regard the priests of the mythology of the idea and their battered knees! Is it too much to say that all the virtues now attend...
2022-08-2954 minDilettantery2.1 Was the Concept of Objectivity Invented in the mid-1800s? Part 1: Intro/Contextalization and Truth to NatureBeauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all/Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know
-John Keats, Ode On A Grecian Urn, 1819
“The great tragedy of Science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”
-Thomas Huxley, 1870
"My work has always tried to unite the true with the beautiful and when I had to choose one or the other I usually chose the beautiful.”
-Hermann Weyl, 1885–1955
“Objectivity came to seem at once stran...
2022-08-261h 16Dilettantery1.31 The Four Dimensions of Reality and the Two Dimensions of the Canvas Part 5: "Retribalization" and The Art of the Electronic Age
“We are witnessing the end of perspective and panoptic space…The medium is no longer identifiable as such, and the merging of the medium and the message (McLuhan) is the first great formula of this new age.”
-Jean Baudrillard
“The natural world is a spiritual house, where the pillars, that are alive, let slip at times some strangely garbled words”
-Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Associations, 1856
"I have spent my life in clearing out of poetry every phrase written for the eye, and bringing all back t...
2022-08-263h 05
Dilettantery1.30 Formal Cause Part 2: Chairs, Memes, Graham Harman, and Emergence“Ecology does not seek connections, but patterns”
-Marshall McLuhan
“There is no simple linear cause and effect relationship in the emergence of an emergent system as the components that make up the emergent system exert an upward effect on the composite system (the parts creating the whole), and vice versa the composite system exerts downward effects on its components, which form constraints on the behaviour of those components. The interactions of the components that lead to the self-organization of the emergent system are non-linear because of that upward and downward causation. The latera...
2022-01-141h 11Dilettantery1.29 Formal Cause Part 1: Technological Determinism, Aristotle, Environments and Atmospheres, The Syrian Civil War, and T.S. Eliot“Without an understanding of formal causality, there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation.
Mass media in all their forms are necessarily environmental and therefore have all the character of formal causality. In that sense all myth is the report of the operation of formal causality. In that sense all myth is the report of the operation of formal causality. Since environments change constantly, the formal causes of all the arts and sciences change too.”
-Marshall McLuhan
"Form...
2022-01-0658 minDilettantery1.28 The Tetrad, Cliches, Archetypes, and...the Fifth Law of Media?
"Human bodies are words, myriads of words..."
-Walt Whitman, Song of the Rolling Earth, 1856
"What Western philosophers, right, left, and center, have continued to ignore is that matching the old excludes making the new. Concepts always follow percepts. In fact they are a kind of ossification of percepts - endlessly releated percepts which frequently obscure invention and innovation."
-Marshall Mcluhan and Barrington Nevitt, Causality in the Electric World, 1973
Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/rk8rg6/128_the...
2021-12-1956 minDilettantery1.27 Mcluhan's Later Life, Three of the Four Laws of Media, and Photographs and Motion Pictures"The goal of science and the arts and of education for the next generation must be to decipher not the genetic but the perceptual code. In a global information environment, the old pattern of education in answer-finding is of no avail: one is surrounded by answers, millions of them, moving and mutating at electric speed. Survival and control will depend on the ability to probe and to question in the proper way and place. As the information that constitutes the environment is perpetually in flux, so the need is not for fixed concepts but rather for the ancient skill...
2021-12-1846 minDilettantery1.26 The Electronic Age Part 2: A Brief History of Electronic Technologies and Mcluhan's Thoughts“In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness...we can translate more and more of ourselves into other forms of expression that exceed ourselves.”
-Marshall Mcluhan
"This is a marvel of the universe:
To fling a thought across a stretch of sky—
Some weighty message, or a yearning cry,
It matters not; the elements rehearse
Man's urgent utterance, and his words traverse
The spacious heav'ns like homing...
2021-08-1322 minDilettantery1.25 The Electronic Age Part 1: A Brief History of Electricity and Mcluhan's Thoughts"Then there is electricity! — the demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the all-pervading intelligence...Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence: or shall we say it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we dreamed it."
-"The House of the Seven Gables," Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851)
“When everythi...
2021-08-1321 minDilettantery1.24 Windows and the Body Part 2: The Anatomical, Abandoned Body and its Shadows"Man is himself, is man, only at the surface. Lift the skin, dissect: here begin the machines. It is then you lose yourself in an inexplicable substance, something alien to everything you know, and which is nonetheless the essential."
-Paul Valéry, Notebook B
“‘The monsters we create by way of an advanced technological civilization are ourselves as we cannot hope to see ourselves—incomplete, blind, blighted, and, most of all, self destructive.’”
-Joyce Carol Oates
Dead body: https://i.imgur.com/Uzosq0j.jpg
2021-08-1338 minDilettantery1.23 Windows and the Body Part 1: Homo Punto di Fuga to Homo Astronauticus“They sang as they lifted the children into the ship. They sang old space chanteys and helped the children up the ladder one at a time and into the hands of the sisters. They sang heartily to dispel the fright of the little ones. When the horizon erupted, the singing stopped. They passed the last child up into the ship.
The horizon came alive with flashes as the monks mounted the ladder. The horizon became a red glow. A distant cloudbank was born where no cloud had been. The monks on the ladder looked away from the fla...
2021-07-2346 minDilettantery1.22 The Four Dimensions of Reality and the Two Dimensions of the Canvas Part 4: The Development of Linear Perspective, Medieval Simultaneity, and the Zulus"May God us keep From Single vision & Newtons sleep."
-William Blake
"When a man has seen a [linear perspective] picture for the first time, his book education has begun."
-Robert Laws (1851–1934)
"My main argument was that a photograph could not be looked at for a long time. Have you noticed that? You can’t look at most photos for more than, say, thirty seconds. It has nothing to do with the subject matter. I first noticed this with erotic photographs, trying to find them lively: you...
2021-06-0941 minDilettantery1.21 The Four Dimensions of Reality and the Two Dimensions of the Canvas Part 3: An Unsystematic, Anecdotal Anthropology of Linear Perspective"The Waorani [people]...were not peacefully contacted until 1958, though their homeland is scarcely 150 kms from Quito, the national capital of Ecuador and a city settled for well over 400 years. In 1957, five missionaries attempted to contact the Waorani and made a critical mistake. They dropped from the air eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white photographs of themselves in what we would describe as friendly gestures, forgetting that the people of the forest had never seen anything two-dimensional in their lives. The Waorani picked up the prints from the forest floor and looked behind the faces to try to find the figure. Seeing nothing...
2021-05-2528 minDilettantery1.20 The Four Dimensions of Reality and the Two Dimensions of the Canvas Part 2: A Return to Ancient Mesopotamia"The evolution from evocation to narrative in seal and pottery decoration denotes different cognitive skills—preliterate topsy-turvy glyptic compositions and repetitious pottery paintings were apprehended globally, but literate linear compositions were 'read’ analytically. Art, a unique mirror of culture, reflects the schism that separates preliterate from literate societies. Glyptic and pottery art illustrate with remarkable clarity how the preliterate Near Eastern societies perceived the world circularly and all-inclusively, while literate cultures viewed it analytically and sequentially.”
-Denise Schmandt-Besserat
Sources:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Dilett...
2021-05-2131 minDilettantery1.19 The Four Dimensions of Reality and the Two Dimensions of the Canvas Part 1: Caveman Proto-Movies, Aivilik Carvers, and Spaces“From paleolithic times to the present, all painters have been challenged by a fundamental problem: how to express the four dimensions of experience on a two-dimensional surface.”
-Edward Wachtel
"According to Andrea Stone: In Maya thought caves were a conduit into the bowels of the earth, a dangerous but supernaturally charged realm, often referred to as the 'underworld' in current literature or by the Quiché term, Xibalda. Herein dwelt the ancestors, rain gods, various 'owners' of the earth, culture heroes, nefarious death demons, animal and wind spirits. The Maya made pilgrimages to caves...
2021-05-1935 minDilettantery1.18 Elizabeth Eisenstein Part 4: Printing and Science (Mostly Astronomy)“One wrong word may now kill thousands of men”.
-Rabelais
“If science helped give birth to the printed book, it was clearly the printed book that sent science from its medieval habits straight into the boiling scientific revolution.”
-Derek J. de Solla Price, 1967
“By seeming paradox, their most sacred festival kept Christian energies bent toward puzzle-solving of a purely scientific kind...Until the advent of printing, scientific inquiries about ‘how the heavens go’ went hand-in-hand with religious concerns about ‘how to go to heaven.’”
-Elizabeth Eisenste...
2021-05-1950 minDilettantery1.17 Elizabeth Eisenstein Part 3: Christianity, the Reformation, and the Bible"Historians have noted that the shift from oral to written scripture often results in strident, misplaced certainty. Reading gives people the impression that they have an immediate grasp of their scripture; they are not compelled by a teacher to appreciate its complexity. Without the aesthetic and ethical disciplines of ritual, they can approach a text in a purely cerebral fashion, missing the emotive and therapeutic aspects of its stories and instructions.”
-Karen Armstrong
“On the elite level, laymen became more erudite than churchmen; grammar and philology challenged the reign of theology; Greek and...
2021-05-1726 minDilettantery1.16 Elizabeth Eisenstein Part 2: Stereotypes and Clichés, Recovery and Discovery, Viewing the Past From a Fixed Distance, and Much More“Medieval scholars did not see the classical past from a fixed distance as we do now. They did not regard it as a container of objects to be placed in glass cases and investigated by specialists in diverse scholarly fields.”
-Elizabeth Eisenstein
"Given drifting texts, migrating manuscripts, localized chronologies, multiform maps, there could be no systematic forward movement, no accumulation of stepping stones enabling a new generation to begin where the prior one had left off. Progressive refinement of certain arts a skills could and did occur, but no sophisticated technique could be s...
2021-05-1758 minDilettantery1.15 Elizabeth Eisenstein Part 1: The Printer's Workshop"[Printing] is the most beautiful gift from heaven. It soon will change the countenance of the universe… Printing was only born a short while ago, and already everything is heading toward perfection… Tremble, therefore, tyrants of the world! Tremble before the virtuous writer!”
-Louis-Sebástien Mercier, Pre-revolutionary France
“The prospering merchant publisher had to know as much about books and intellectual trends as a cloth merchant did about drygoods and dress fashions; he needed to develop a connoisseur’s expertise about typestyles, book catalogues and library sales. He often found it useful to master m...
2021-05-1029 minDilettantery1.14 Mcluhan on the Revolutionary Effects of Print"Books are carefully folded forests"
-Saul Williams
“The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention. A new method entered into life, In order to understand our epoch, we can neglect all the details of change, such as railways, telegraphs, radios, spinning machines, synthetic dyes. We must concentrate on the method in itself; that is the real novelty which has broken up the foundations of the old civilization…One element in the new method is just the discovery of how to set about brid...
2021-05-0352 minDilettantery1.13 Printing Technologies in Asia and Europe“What the world is to-day, good and bad, it owes to Gutenberg. Everything can be traced to this source. . . .”
-Mark Twain, 1900
Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/n3ruco/113_printing_technologies_in_asia_and_europe/?
2021-05-0323 minDilettantery1.12 The Manuscript Age Part 2: Renascences, Miscellaneousness, and Audiences as FictionsSorry for the delay, I had to relearn Garageband because it "updated." Also, this is a bit of a meat and potatoes episode, I promise things will get more interesting following this one.
Sources:
https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/n0c12r/112_the_manuscript_age_part_2_renascences/?
2021-04-2836 minDilettantery1.11 The Manuscript Age Part 1: Silent Reading in Antiquity and the Audile-Tactility of Pre-Print Europe“Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.”
-Cicero (probably apocryphal)
“The words the reader sees are not the words that he will hear.”
-James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, paraphrased by Mcluhan
Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/lxfj6d/111_the_manuscript_age_part_1_silent_reading_in/?
2021-03-0424 minDilettantery1.10 Jack Goody Part 3: The Vai, Scribner and Cole, The Mau Mau Uprising, and a Story"The global village was modeled on colonial strategies intended to transform the semiotic, economic, and spatial fabric of the decolonizing world in such a way as to safeguard British economic and political interests in the aftermath of independence. Following the example of British strategy in Kenya, the global village can be understood as a mechanism for pacifying postcolonial agrarian society by absorbing people made landless by the relentless expansion of agrarian capital. The global village—like villagization—was intended to enfold dispossessed denizens into the incipient nation-form and into the global market, while simultaneously withholding the modes of semiotic powe...
2021-02-0951 minDilettantery1.9 Jack Goody Part 2: The Gonja Kingdom and The LoDagaa"He was an old man who had seen life. In his village he had prepared himself to live a full life. But the change came. It was not a sudden change. A white man with a book in his hand. Every evening this white man with the book had sat at the edge of the village and played with the children."
—David Rubadiri, No Bride Price, 1967
"Because of the colonizing structure, a dichotomizing system has emerged, and with it a great number of current paradigmatic oppositions have developed: traditional versus modern; oral ve...
2021-02-0651 minDilettantery1.8 Jack Goody Part 1: Nuance and ChinaContinuing our divergence away from Mcluhan, I introduce the work of Jack Goody, the anthropologist, and look over his and some other people's criticisms of what's called the Alphabet Effect or the Alphabetic Literacy Theory.
Sources and discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/kabgyl/18_jack_goody_part_1_nuance_and_china/?
Follow me on twitter @DilettanteryPod
2020-12-1020 minDilettantery1.7 Ong and Orality"The strongest memory is weaker than the lightest ink."
-Chinese proverb, (via Louis Lavelle, La Parole et I’ecriture, Paris, 1947)
"...the Hebrew term 'dabar' means ‘word’ and ‘event’."
-Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982)
"...when we speak...we also always express a mood. There are no words uttered without this added spin. The act of saying something is part of the meaning we express, whether we like it or not. We can't separate the *what we say* from the *how we say it...
2020-11-291h 07Dilettantery1.6 The Greek Alphabet Part Two: Mcluhan's Thoughts and the Power and Magic of Words“I shall not recite the hardships of my toil. More than once I cried out to the vault that it was impossible to decipher that text. Gradually, the concrete enigma I labored at disturbed me less than the generic enigma of a sentence written by a god. What type of sentence (I asked myself) will an absolute mind construct? I considered that even in the human languages there is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe; to say *the tiger* is to say the tigers that begot it, the deer and turtles devoured by it, the grass on...
2020-09-0645 minDilettantery1.5 The Greek Alphabet Part One: Development"The nature then of the dragon and of serpents Tauthus himself regarded as divine, and so again after him did the Phoenicians and Egyptians: for this animal was declared by him to be of all reptiles most full of breath, and fiery. In consequence of which it also exerts an unsurpassable swiftness by means of its breath, without feet and hands or any other of the external members by which the other animals make their movements. It also exhibits forms of various shapes, and in its progress makes spiral leaps as swift as it chooses. It is also most l...
2020-09-0433 minDilettantery1.4 Other Origins of Writing and Other Scripts“When signs are written with care they attest to an interest in proclamation and durability; when they are cursive they show that a society was familiar with writing. Then they are laid out without separations the remind us that our modern page layouts are recent acquisitions. When they are written on scrolls the text unfolds like a film.”
-Henri-Jean Martin (1994)
“Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world...enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all di...
2020-09-0224 minDilettantery1.3 The Origin of Writing and James Joyce"Because the messenger's mouth was heavy and he couldn't repeat [the message], the Lord of Kulaba pattes some clay and put words on it, like a tablet. Until then, there had been no putting words on clay."
— Sumerian epic poem Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta (~1800 BC)
“For writing is a visual enclosure of non-visual spaces and senses. It is, therefore, an abstraction of the visual from the ordinary sense interplay, And whereas speech is an outering (utterance) of all of our senses at once, writing abstracts from speech.”
-Marshall Mcluhan, G...
2020-08-2547 minDilettantery1.2 Marshall Mcluhan Intro + Biography Part ThreeThe final episode introducing Marshall Mcluhan's thought.
“My canvasses are surrealist, and to call them ‘theories’ is to miss my satirical intent altogether […] You are in great need of some intense training in perception in the arts.”
"Using a format borrowed from Pound, he combined seemingly disparate elements into ‘mosaics.’ When you interface the right images, each illuminates the other, like a blade on a grindstone. Sparks fly."
-Donald Theall (2001)
Sources and Discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/iaoefg/12_marshall_mcluhan_intro_b...
2020-08-1625 minDilettantery1.1 Marshall Mcluhan Intro + Biography Part TwoA continued introduction. I start looking at how Mcluhan thinks and writes.
sources: https://www.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/i8bmkl/episode_11_marshall_mcluhan_intro_biography_part/
2020-08-1638 minDilettantery1.0 Marshall Mcluhan Intro + Biography Part OnePart one of a series centred on Marshall Mcluhan. In this first episode, I go over some biographical details and Mcluhan's thesis.
“He had a mind that could only think in metaphors.”
-Norman Mailer, on Marshall Mcluhan
“The great alchemists…were grammarians. From the time of the Neo-Platonists and Augustine to Bonaventure and to Francis Bacon, the world was viewed as a book, that lost language of which was analogous to that of human speech.”
-Marshall Mcluhan
Sources and discussion at https...
2020-08-1129 min