Roast Beef, Medium, is not only a food. It is a philosophy. Seated at Life's Dining Table, with the menu of Morals before you, you...r eye wanders a bit over the entrées, the hors d'oeuvres, and the things à la though you know that Roast Beef, Medium, is safe and sane, and sure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Printed prose is historically a most peculiar, almost an aberrant way of telling stories, and by far the most inherently anestheti...c: It is the only medium of art I can think of which appeals directly to none of our five senses. The oral and folk tradition in narrative made use of verse or live-voice dynamics, embellished by gesture and expression--a kind of rudimentary theater--as do the best raconteurs of all times. Commonly there was musical accompaniment as well: a kind of one-man theater-of-mixed-means.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An actor must communicate his author's given message--comedy, tragedy, serio- comedy; then comes his unique moment, as he is confr...onted by the looked-for, yet at times unexpected, reaction of the audience. This split second is his; he is in command of his medium; the effect vanishes into thin air; but that moment has a power all its own and, like power in any form, is stimulating and alluring.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medi...um in which dead cities lie interred.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Unlike Freud, Jung did not believe that a dream is a mask for a meaning already known but deceitfully withheld from the conscious ...mind. In his view, dreams were communication, ideas expressed not always straightforwardly, but in the best way possible within the limits of the medium. Dreaming, in Jung's psychology, is a constructive process.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Alive today he would undoubtedly have written and directed motion pictures, plays and God knows what. Instead of saying "This medi...um is not good," he would have used it and made it good. If some people called some of his work cheap (which some of it is), he wouldn't have cared a rap, because he would know that without some vulgarity there is no complete man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The child receives data through the sense organs; the child also has some inborn processing capacities--otherwise it would not be ...able to learn--but in addition, some "information" or "programs" are built-in at birth (for example, the child does not have to learn how to suck, for this is an innate reflex); there is a working memory, in which the child keeps those items of knowledge that are being used at a particular moment; and there is a permanent memory, which is, in Locke's terms, largely a "blank tablet" at birth, but which has a storage capacity that makes a hard disk pale into insignificance. The child gradually builds up a symbolic representation of the world around it, so there must be some inner "language" or medium of representation; even a newborn baby is starting to see and taste and smell and hear and touch, and to remember the more striking of its experiences, so the internal medium by which it represents and stores these impressions cannot be the native language (of which it is still ignorant. Jerry Fodor [in The Language of Thought] has discussed this inbuilt "language of thought," which is similar conceptually to the "machine language" that is built into the personal computer and about which most users remain completely ignorant).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
TV's exploration of the game of consumption and sociability is, by the nature of the medium, on a far more subtle level than anyth...ing ever done by the movies. It can dramatize and expose and suggest ways of transcending social banality that are impossible to the screen, largely because of the very "actuality" and "interview" format of TV that at the same time produces so much of its rubbish. It is terrible but true that TV has probably elevated ten times as many family conversations in Sourwater, Georgia, as it has degraded there.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Television was far more pervasive and radicalizing than printing had been. It was massive. When Riesman and others spoke of books,... magazines, and radio as mass media, they could not imagine the size and shape of television. There never had been a medium that could reach everybody, and reach them with images of behavior as behavior without the rationalization of words. The audience for its programs was drawn from every social class and every social element. By the mere act of watching television, a heterogeneous society could engage in a purely homogeneous activity. Television images are more rapid and transient than the printed word. They make no demand on us to remember or reflect on them. This impermanence and the time of consumption cause us to spend extended hours with the medium but significantly less time with any one image or sequence of images. Television is instantaneous and simultaneous: Everyone gets the message at the same time and, at the same time that an event is happening. There is no lag time between a reporter witnessing an event and reporting it, and no time for reflection and analysis.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »