McLuhan: Literally, the essays of the Spectator Essays of Addison and Steele were newspapers. That’s the form of the first newspapers. Essays. But they’re editorials. The news came later. By the way, simultaneous, that’s a right hemisphere thing, is acoustic, whereas lineal is visual. Now, remember the alphabet translated the acoustic, translated Homer who had been recited and performed for centuries— they translated him into visual terms, lineal terms at which point you could read him but you didn’t need any more sound effects. So, Homer became very abstract, he became a literary figure, whereas up till the time of the alphabet, he had been performed, operatically, and a gentleman in Greek times was a person who could perform Homer, who could sing him from one beginning to the end of the Iliad and the Odyssey . And by the way, it would be interesting to go into the nature of those poems, but they were very practical
