Comments on: Guardian sheds journalists, but comment remains free

By: Francis Sedgemore

Francis Sedgemore — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 10:58:41 +0000

I see that the Grauniad has just published an Italian phrasebook. Phew! Recession over.

By: mikeovswinton

mikeovswinton — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:20:20 +0000

In an ideal world they’d open them and find that they were actually Italian phrasebooks and that Spanish was a misprint. Re the credit crunch etc – dunno. But they were like autumn leaves on the pavements near the University in manchester today.

By: Francis Sedgemore

Francis Sedgemore — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:42:47 +0000

Is the provision of *Spanish* phrasebooks indicative of the credit crunch’s impact on Grauniadistas?

By: mikeovswinton

mikeovswinton — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:39:12 +0000

No, you are thinking of its Spansih phrasebooks, which contribute to society by dropping out of the paper and providing work for street cleaners.

By: Francis Sedgemore

Francis Sedgemore — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:10:05 +0000

“She was talking about how people buy the Guardian for the quality of its journalism.”

And here’s me thinking it was because of the Grauniad’s world famous wall charts on the wines of Tuscany.

By: mikeovswinton

mikeovswinton — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:05:31 +0000

OK. Forget Marshall McLuhan. Did you hear the chief exec of the Guardian on the Evan Davies business show on Radio 4, saturday tea time? She was talking about how people buy the Guardian for the quality of its journalism. I guess that she was talking about Seamus Milne.

By: mikeovswinton

mikeovswinton — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 12:18:08 +0000

Yeah, well he was a literature professor (in the days before postmodernism – if memory serves he didn’t rate what he read of some of the more popular French/Belgian thinkers of that ilk) and he was commenting on a legend, that might just have had an other than literal meaning. (Cf his point about sowing Dragon’s teeth and alphabets. I don’t think he actually believed that there really were Dragons that had teeth.) Or was Narcissus a real person who actually lived etc?

By: Francis Sedgemore

Francis Sedgemore — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 12:07:05 +0000

If a bird can recognise its reflection in a window or pool, then those human beings of old who built great libraries and spent their lives philosophising surely understood the concept of a mirror. The po-mo reference is to McLuhan’s abuse of technical, modernist language to illustrate what seems to me to be a vacuous argument. If I’ve misunderstood McLuhan, then maybe McLuhan has failed to make himself sufficiently clear.

By: mikeovswinton

mikeovswinton — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 07:19:30 +0000

McLuhan’s take on Narcissus was actually very straightforward. It was simply that because (in his view – I don’t know if he was right) the Greeks didn’t have mirrors, Narcissus genuinely didn’t know that the beautiful creature he had fallen for was really himself. On the other hand, most Narcissists today do have mirrors. Neologisms equals postmodernism? Its a point of view I suppose. I wonder if you aren’t falling into one of the traps many commentators – like Dwight Macdonald – have fallen into when dealing with McLuhan, who is often taken as advocating the exact opposite of what he was actually saying.

By: Francis Sedgemore

Francis Sedgemore — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 23:20:51 +0000

Mcluhan’s take on the Narcissus myth is pure po-mo contrarianism. “Autoamputation”, “servomechanisms”,… bollocks.