#MAELSTROM RIDE NO WATER HOW TO#

But more importantly, it is a parable of how to respond to and perhaps survive times of great chaos. On the surface, it is a story about a seafaring man and his successful avoidance of a shipwreck. 5ĭespite now having been long familiar with the gist of Poe’s story, I hadn’t actually bothered to read it until quite recently. One such theme that he continually returned to was the use of the short story, A Descent into the Maelstrom, by Edgar Allen Poe, first published in 1841. The overall effect is that of a continual circling around something of seeing it from different angles of highlighting various aspects depending on the context all in an attempt to illuminate the ever-shifting, illusive meaning of our technological society-and its deep and often unseen effects on us. He continually returns to the same ideas, inspirations, and even the same exact quotes. One of the things I quickly discovered was that McLuhan’s writing is a set of ever-shifting themes and variations. So now I too, like father like son, spent the two-hour round trip commute reading McLuhan. At the same time, I had gotten a job at a post-production commercial editing house doing pickups and deliveries around Manhattan. Over the course of that summer, with McLuhan's oeuvre before me, I immersed myself in his thought. 4 This was the summer before my junior year in college. So it was a pleasant, though hardly unexpected discovery that I found nearly the whole catalog of McLuhan’s writings amongst the bookshelves of my family home. 1 One of the thinkers I know he read was Marshall McLuahn 2 -a man whose work revolutionized media studies. He typically spent the two hours roundtrip in relative silence reading. Over the course of his career, he would take the train into the city from the suburbs where we lived. My father worked in advertising for nearly 40 years-in his case literally on Madison Ave.

Maelstrom ride no water