Essential McLuhan 166 cool prose. Writing in “methods” or complete packages, he contrasted with writing in aphorisms, or single observations such as “Revenge is a kind of wild justice.” The passive consumer wants packages, but those, he suggested, who are concerned in pursuing knowledge and in seeking causes will resort to aphorisms just because they are incomplete and require participation in depth. The principle that distinguishes hot and cold media is perfectly embodied in the folk wisdom: “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.” Glasses intensify the outward-going vision, and fill in the feminine image exceedingly, Marion the Librarian notwithstanding. Dark glasses, on the other hand, create the inscrutable and inaccessible image that invites a great deal of participation and completion. Again, in a visual and highly literate culture, when we meet a person for the first time his visual appearance dims out the sound of the name, so that in self-defense we add: “How do you spell your name?” Whereas, in an ear culture, the sound of a man’s name is the overwhelming fact, as Joyce knew when he said in Finnegans Wake, “Who gave you that numb?” For the name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers. Another vantage point from which to test the difference between hot and cold media is the practical joke. The hot literary medium excludes the practical and participant aspect of the joke so completely that Constance Rourke, in her American Humor, considers it as no joke at all. To literary people, the practical joke with its total physical involvement is as distasteful as the pun that derails us from the smooth and uniform progress that is typographic order. Indeed, to the literary person who is quite unaware of the intensely abstract nature of the typographic medium, it is the grosser and participant forms of art that seem “hot,” and the abstract and intensely literary form that seems “cool.” “You may perceive, Madam,” said Dr. Johnson, with a pugilistic smile, “that I am well-bred to a degree of needless scrupulosity.” And Dr. Johnson was right in supposing that “well-bred” had come to mean a white-shirted stress on attire that rivaled the rigor of the printed page. “Comfort” consists in abandoning a visual arrangement in favor of one that permits casual participation of the senses, a state that is excluded when any one sense, but especially the visual sense, is hotted up to the point of dominant command of a situation. On the other hand, in experiments in which all outer sensation is withdrawn, the subject begins a furious fill-in or completion of senses that is sheer hallucination. So the hotting up of one sense tends to effect hypnosis, and the cooling of all senses tends to result in hallucination. Reversal of the Overheated Medium A headline for June 21, 1963, read: