The 'medium is the message' is one of the world's silliest remarks. The message is the message, and it doesn't matter whether you send it by e-mail, a note in a bottle or on a picture postcard. The book, or the poem, or the play is what counts and it doesn't matter if it's written with a pen on a long sheet of ruled paper, as I am writing now, or on the most highly developed word processor. No machine can help with the rhythms of your prose, even if it can spell better than you can.

It's tempting to wonder how many of the inventions of the past century we might have been better off without. Take the aeroplane for instance. It has transform…

We wondered why we ever thought there was, during the Cold War, any serious danger of Russia conquering the world when they couldn't even deliver the scenery f…

In New York, crossing 58th Street from the Plaza Oyster Bar to the Wyndham Hotel, I came up against a huge black man in a long, dark overcoat who said, in deep…

The head-lines which do not head anything they simply replace something but they do not make anything. ~ Ch. 5

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

Written words differ from spoken words in being material structures. A spoken word is a process in the physical world, having an essential time-order; a writte…