BY THE LATE JOHN BROCKMAN

by John Brockman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 15, 1969

Marshall McLuhan said that when the manuscript of Understanding Media was making the rounds, an editor remarked that ""seventy-five per cent of your material is new. A successful book cannot afford, to be more than ten per cent new."" That editor was clearly behind the times. Nowadays all sorts of futuristic gibberish, replete with the various jargons of communications theorists and computer gurus, wind up in print, are hailed as winners in the post-Einsteinian sweepstakes conducted by the weekly magazines, and then mercifully disappear from view until the next dernier cri. No doubt the trashiest specimen of this fashionably proliferating genre is By The Late John Brockman, a collection of non-linear pensees, sedulously regurgitating the most advanced thought, starting with the assumption that man is dead (""man, the masturbatory fantasy of the brain"") and ending with the celebration of the invisible (""the world of the invisible is a world of information""). The author, whose talents were previously employed promoting Head, the late unlamented film starring The Monkees, and who fancies himself as having passed through his first incarnation (1941-1968 are the dates given covering this period of existence), has read (or heard of) everyone from Bohr to Wiener, John Cage to Meher Baba (the recently deceased Divinity of the Buddhist world). But it is debatable whether he has understood a word of any of these impressive emissaries of the new consciousness, since his glib, gimmick-ridden, aphoristic style appears immune to logical connections (compared to him Buckminster Fuller is a classicist), and his portentously occult meditations on the altered conditions of modern life re the electric age (what he apparently wants is the marriage of Faustus and Orpheus, technology with mysticism) are wearying. Electronic Dada.

Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1969

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1969

Categories: NONFICTION