Rick Roderick, 1993, Duke University

“Anyway, that’s rationalisation, and then the third – and this is sort of one of my own if you will forgive me – is what I’ll call banalization. And it’s always a danger when you do lectures like the ones I am doing now, and that’s to take these fundamentally important things like what does my life mean, and surely there must be a better way to organise the world than the way it is organised now, surely my life could have more meaning in a different situation. Maybe my life’s meaning might be to change it or whatever, but to take any one of these criticisms and treat them as banalities. This is the great – to me – ideological function of television and the movies. However extreme the situation, TV can find a way to turn it into a banality.” - Rick Roderick in 1993

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… This is the great – to me – ideological function of smartphones and social machines and twitter-length reaction pot-shots and memes. However extreme the situation, social media users can find a way to turn it into a banality. Or digital comic artists from Canada who were educated by Joycean Marshall McLuhan’s works and students. Fanny fan art.

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“Because all the troubles that such a life involve are just reduced to banality, just the common rubble of little one line joke, you follow me? It’s made banal by it. It’s banalised that way.” - Duke University Professor, Rick Roderick, 1993

“Interesting how the shallowest Joyce readers are always so aggressively obsessed with his sexuality” - https://old.reddit.com/r/jamesjoyce/comments/1jl24mt/found_in_another_sub/mk0evmb/

Isn’t that true for ANY form of art when it comes to shallow consumers? The very people who would avoid the David Foster Wallace notes / James Joyce cross-references in shallow understanding also attracted to the most shallow rumors of HCE (We continue our journalistic investigation into the HCE Affair)? “Finnegans Wake is the greatest guidebook to media study ever fashioned by man.” - Marshall McLuhan, Newsweek Magazine, p.56, February 28, 1966 (University of Toronto professor)

“We continue our journalistic investigation into the HCE Affair. The last ten pages of Chapter 3 comprise an episode known as The Battery at the Gate. Following his condemnation in the court of public opinion―as expressed in the Plebiscite―HCE takes refuge within his tavern. But he continues to be abused both verbally and physically.”