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Understanding McLuhan
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Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
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07079_Field_TCUM T644.txt
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1996-04-10
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16 lines
jazz in the twenties was a popular response to the highbrow
richness and orchestral subtlety of the Debussy-Delius period.
Jazz would seem to be an effective bridge between highbrow
and lowbrow music, much as Chaplin made a similar bridge for
pictorial art. Literary people eagerly accepted these bridges,
and Joyce got Chaplin into Ulysses as Bloom, just as Eliot got
jazz into the rhythms of his early poems.
Chaplin’s clown-Cyrano is as much a part of a deep
melancholy as Laforgue’s or Satie’s Pierrot art. Is it not
inherent in the very triumph of the mechanical and its omission
of the human? Could the mechanical reach a higher level than
the talking machine with its mime of voice and dance? Do not
T. S. Eliot’s famous lines about the typist of the jazz age
capture the entire pathos of the age of Chaplin and the ragtime
blues?