What are you reading?

Well, hi, it's Tom. I was just realizing on this very interesting foggy, uh, Martin Luther King Day afternoon that, um, I've made a lot of friends here on YouTube. And I also realized that I haven't done something with you, my friends, that I do with all of my friends, which is to ask you a question: What are you reading? What are you reading right now? My friends and I often will ask one another that question. What are you reading?

Oh, I'm reading—

oh, I'm reading this. I'm currently reading a couple of books, which is something I unfortunately do a lot— read a couple of books at the same time. Sometimes more than a couple, sometimes a lot at the same time, kind of tasting and testing and sampling and having a little of this and a little of that. I know it's not what we were taught to do. We were taught to read the books linearly from beginning to end, cover to cover. I don't do that. I hyperlink myself from book to book and from idea to idea. It might not be the most efficient way of going about things, but you know, efficiency is overrated in the 21st century, I think.

So anyway, I'm reading a couple of books, and I'm reading—

I wrote a blog the other day about how, you know, all the books that you were supposed to have read when you were younger that you haven't read. You know the ones I mean, right? There's a lot of them. So I'm currently reading Marshall McLuhan. I've never read Marshall McLuhan. 1964, Marshall McLuhan's magnum opus, his real amazing work, Understanding Media, which I've never read, is incredible. It's incredible. Every page has amazing ideas on it that have stopped me in my tracks. And just, you know, I'm also a writer. I also write and take notes and underline and do all this stuff in my books. I don't care if it's a book that, you know, it doesn't matter. It can be a coffee table, you know, beautiful art book, and I write in it. People look at me, you know, as if I've defaced the Sistine Chapel or something, but it's my book, and I make it mine by writing in it as well as reading it. So I'm also reading, at the same time I'm reading that McLuhan book, I'm also reading this McLuhan book, which is The Medium is the Massage. You know, he was very clever, and this book was written in 1967. And another amazing, another amazing book.

And I just want to read you a couple of quick passages from this one, and maybe you will do the same.

You'll talk about what you're reading and maybe give us all a bit of a flavor of what it is that you're reading so we understand, you know, why you think it's worthwhile for you to read and maybe for us to read.

Here's McLuhan, you know, he's talking about the changes that have taken place in the world by 1967, and he starts off the book you know, with an explanation of media and how media have changed things. And then he has a quote in here by Alfred North Whitehead in which he says, "In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling." as it were, a mist cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings, our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.

You know, there's a great quote from my perspective because I believe that clarity is enormously overrated in our culture today, trying to strive for clarity when there are times when only metaphor and poetry and allusion will suffice, and that clarity, you know, the kind of clarity that we yearn for, which is numerical clarity, right? 4 places to the right of the decimal is, you know, gives us that sense of comfort, what he calls the sentimental feeling that we're trying to gain.

So there's an idea.

I mean, all he did was quote Whitehead.

Here's another one quickly: the family circle has widened, the whirlpool of information fathered by electric media, movies, Telstar—

that tells you when he wrote it—

flight far surpasses any possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Oh, by the way, this is called Your Family. Character is no longer shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage.

1967, he wrote that.

One more, one more, um, um, well, uh, oh, about your government, your government, um, uh, it's too long to, to go into to, to read completely, but, um, what he says is, nose counting, a cherished part of the 18th century fragmentation process has rapidly become a cumbersome and ineffectual form of social assessment in an environment of instant electric speeds. The public, in the sense of a great consensus of separate and distinct viewpoints, a consensus, is finished. Today, the mass audience, the successor to the public, can be used as a creative participating force Of course, politics offers yesterday's answers to today's questions. Doesn't that just capture it? Yesterday's answers to today's questions. Anyway, one more paragraph from this: A new form of politics is emerging, and in ways we haven't yet noticed, the living room has become a voting booth. Participation via television in freedom marches, in war, revolution, pollution, and other events is changing everything. Participation in 1967.

So, um, anyhow, that's what I'm reading right now, and I'd be real interested in hearing what you're reading. So take care, see you again.

Bye. We have got to get it together now.