Long Sunday

Geertz and interpretation

I first read Clifford Geertz's "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," itself published in 1973, in an interpretation seminar in the 90s. I benefitted a lot from this rereading, and here are a few points from it that struck me.

smoking or drinking together

My friend Richard Cavell is something of an evangelist for Marshall McLuhan. Whom, hitherto, I had thought to be little more than a one-note sixties media theorist with a gift for the soundbite. Now deservedly forgotten. I suspect that my assumptions are shared by others. But encouraged by Richard's enthusiasm, albeit in some shame that I am not going straight to the horse's mouth, I have started reading his book McLuhan in Space. Is it not worth trying to learn from that decade's counter-culture heroes?