Essential McLuhan 196 About 1830 Lamartine pointed to the newspaper as the end of book culture. THE BOOK ARRIVES TOO LATE At the same time Dickens used the press as base for a new impressionist art which D.W.Griffiths and Sergei Eisenstein studied in 1920 as the foundation of movie art. Robert Browning took the newspaper as art model for his impressionist epic The Ring and the Book; Mallarmé did the same in Un Coup de Dés. Edgar Poe, a press man and, like Shelley, a science fictioneer, correctly analysed the poetic process. Conditions of newspaper serial publication led both him and Dickens to the process of writing backwards. This means simultaneity of all parts of a composition. Simultaneity compels sharp focus on effect of thing made. Simultaneity is the form of the press in dealing with Earth City. Simultaneity is formula for the writing of both detective story and symbolist poem. These are derivatives (one ‘low’ and one “high”) of the new technological culture. Simultaneity is related to telegraph, as the telegraph to math and physics. Joyce’s Ulysses completed the cycle of this technological art form. LET the sun and moon go! let scenery take the applause of the audience! let there be apathy under the stars! Let nothing remain but the ashes of teachers, artists, moralists, lawyers, and learn’d and polite persons! Letchurches accommodateserpents, vermin,
