"Instead of scurrying into a corner and wailing about what media are doing to us, one should charge straight ahead and kick them in the electrodes. They respond beautifully to such resolute treatment and soon become servants rather than masters."
Plenty of insights throughout this capably-written biography of Marshall McLuhan. And the book really develops some genuine heft as it documents McLuhan's intellectual "gestation" as he turned away from the predictable life of an English Lit professor and instead began studying modern media. McLuhan would grow into one of the more idiosyncratic and controversial minds of the 20th century.
You'd never guess, but McLuhan was revolted by television, and utterly sickened by advertising. But he also believed that careful study of these domains enabled him to understand, and more importantly to resist, their influence. As the author puts it, McLuhan "was one of those men who, without any prompting, find observation of the world an excellent strategy for coping with life."
We can use this strategy too, of course. In fact, being a carefully observant student of modern media and propaganda might be one of the master keys to surviving the postmodern era. It's certainly a lot more effective than hand-wringing, despair, or free-floating anxiety.
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Taking this one step further, one comes away from this biography with an even more foundational insight: to really understand an environment (a media environment, a social environment, or a physical environment, it doesn't matter), you have to cultivate the ability to stand outside that environment, and thus perceive it differently. And McLuhan certainly saw reality in an unusual way. See for example how, when he was brought into a topless bar for the first time, he laughed out loud and said, "They're wearing us!" This story is even more unusual than it appears once you learn that McLuhan was a staunch and deeply religious Catholic believer.
McLuhan had amazing ideas; he had kooky ideas; he had horrible ideas. He made some of the most useful observations ever made about modern media, producing immortal phrases like "the medium is the message" and "the global village." But at the same time, he could hardly finish a book, and his writing ranged from inscrutable to unreadable It reminds me of Marvin Minsky, another important thinker unable to communicate his ideas.
Thanks to the fact that McLuhan himself was a tremendous interdisciplinary thinker, this book is also an absolute gold mine for further reading. I can't wait to delve into the works of Macauley, Trevelyan, Lewis Mumford, I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Wyndham Lewis, Harold Adams Innis and more. What a gift! At the very end of this post, under the "To Read" section, you'll find a (long) reading list, if you're into that sort of thing.
Takeaways:
* Cultivate the ability to see things differently.
* Connect unusual ideas; juxtapose ideas that don't seem to fit together at first.
* Be as interdisciplinary as possible.
* The best way to cope with and resist something is to become an observant student of it.
* If you are a genuinely original thinker, expect disdain, even abhorrence, from many of your peers. "No man is a prophet in his own country."
* Starting something isn't finishing something--not even close.
* Read those thinkers from the past who you're not supposed to read.
* Journal. It helps you assemble ideas and it helps you order your inner life.
Selected works by Marshall McLuhan:
The Mechanical Bride, 1951
The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962
Understanding Media, 1964
The Medium Is the Massage [with Jerome Agel], 1967
War and Peace in the Global Village [with Jerome Agel], 1968
Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting [with Harley Parker], 1968
City as Classroom, 1977
[Readers, as always, what follows are my notes and reactions to the book--they are here to help me order my thinking and better remember what I read. Feel free to stop here: the notes below are literally interminable and you have lives to live. But you might like to scan the "To Read" book list at the very end of this post, as this book unlocked quite a good list of reading suggestions. Enjoy!]
Notes:
Introduction
xiff The author first hears McLuhan speak in 1968 in Toronto, at the time he was a celebrity, but he was also dismissed outright as a charlatan by many academics and intellectuals. Note also the mention of Ezra Pound and his monetary theories [? sending this reader down quite the rabbit hole to discover that Exra Pound condemned usury as the root of societal ills, also and promoting "perishable money"--wild!] On how McLuhan was seen as interesting by the television generation of the Woodstock era, [basically young boomers]; on how his work and his reputation began to permeate the media in the late 1960s. On the the New Criticism, a revolution in literary studies which impacted McLuhan's thought; on his conversion to Catholicism, on a grisly operation McLuhan experienced in 1968 [which the author foreshadows quite well--this book already appears to be quite well-written; note that the reader will eventually learn McLuhan's surgery will be for meningioma, a benign tumor the size of a tennis ball in his brain that was causing him to have seizures.]
xiii On McLuhan giving advice to Richard Nixon's campaign to say as little as possible in the media, the author amusingly adds "it seemed excellent advice, but hardly something that required a media guru to formulate."
xiii "McLuhan's classes always held the promise of permanently altering one's appreciation of some aspect of reality. No one could predict what aspect it would be. This unpredictability was part of what made his classes an adventure..." His comments "seemed to suggest that the world was more interesting than any of us had previously thought it to be... McLuhan hinted that if the world really did seem to be dismal, it was perhaps because all of us were very far from perceiving it as it really existed."
Chapter 1: Childhood on the Prairies, 1911-1928
1ff On the homesteading era in Canada's history, which happened long after the American West had been settled; at the beginning of the 20th century you could get 160 acres of Canadian prairie for $10 if you cleared it, planted a crop, built a house, and lived there six months a year. "It was called betting the government ten dollars you couldn't be starved out." On Henry Seldon Hall and his daughter Elsie [McLuhan's mother], who developed a complicated relationship and feelings toward men as a result of her father's Christianity and violence; Elsie married Herbert McLuhan, "the pick of the local bachelors" who came to Alberta from Ontario with his parents after his grandparents had migrated from Ireland.
4 Elsie insists the family move to Edmonton after a brief attempt at farming; Herbert enters the real estate business, starting a company with three men. It's the 1910s and Edmonton, Alberta was booming; in 1912 alone the city's population increased 60%. On the birth of Herbert Marshall McLuhan on July 21st, 1911, followed by his brother Maurice Raymond McLuhan, born in 1913, Marshall's only sibling. Also interesting comments here on how McLuhan later came to think of the prairie landscape as a sort of "counterenvironment," it gave him a different view on reality than what he considered the artificial perspective of the print era.
5 McLuhan's father's Herbert firm loses everything in 1914 as the great Edmonton real estate boom ended; World War I bins and Herbert enlisted and was put to work as a recruiting officer; he sends the family to live in Middleton, Nova Scotia, but then Herbert is discharged after just a year for unclear reasons; the family then moves to Winnipeg, Manitoba.
6 Interesting comments here on the children's culture of this era: not highly-organized, children weren't told what to do, they played together on their own in the 1920s, the same sort of thing you hear about the upbringing of Gen X children.
7 Comments here on how Elsie, Marshall's mother, looked down on her husband.
8ff On the McLuhan family's discovery of phrenology; on McLuhan's mother teaching elocution for supplemental income, which rubbed off on her sons; these elocution lessons included memorization of large quantities of poetry, and also literary analysis of a sort. [What an enormous gift to him to grow up in this kind of amateur literary environment.]
10ff On Herbert McLuhan's pasttimes with his children, including looking up obscure and interesting words in the dictionary (a habit Marshall inherited) as well as memorizing three new words a day and using them in conversation; also on Elsie spending longer and longer periods away from home; quarreling between Marshall's parents; outbursts of the mother's rage; Marshall was closer to his mother than to his father, but also severely critical of her and her "boundless egotism" in his teenage diary.
13 Finally on McLuhan's intellectual precocity; as a teen winning debates at the dinner table with dinner guests--even distinguished dinner guests--making mincemeat of their arguments; note he was initially not a good student, and he failed sixth grade, but was still admitted to seventh grade thanks to his mother's persuasion.
Chapter 2: University of Manitoba, 1928-1934
14ff McLuhan goes to college at the University of Manitoba, which in 1928 was a collection of Quonset huts with 3,500 students. "It was not entirely mediocre." Commenting later, McLuhan said "All I knew was that I was not getting an education." Thanks to one professor he was exposed to Plato and found it a great source of spiritual gratification; he was also inspired there by a history professor from Cambridge, Noel Fieldhouse, who introduced him to history.
16 McLuhan's "thoughts took shape most easily when he could talk them out." Also how he was sort of a cross-domain learner, interested in astronomy and geology because it inspired him with thoughts of great cycles of human and divine history; he also had a lot of curiosity about engineering, even though he was not at all mechanical; engineering inspired in him an interest in structure and design.
17ff Comments here on Thomas Babbington Macaulay: McLuhan's adolescent intellect was "besotted" with Macaulay, he made constant references to him, wearing on his professors; also on Trevelyan's "classic" biography of Macaulay, which seems like it might be worth reading; McLuhan was a throwback in his own era: he had an obsession with the great men of the century before and thought his own era was sorely in need of a second Macaulay to inspire other writers; also he recorded in his diary a quote (that he'd heard from someone else) that "a busy man could ignore anything written after 1842 with no hurt to his intellect." [!!!] Also how he felt fearful that he wasn't working hard enough, that he was wasting time; he set the output of the 19th century "great men" as his standard and saw himself as inadequate relative to them; also comments here on his Christianity; he's seen as serious by the other students. The author quotes one of McLuhan's classmates saying, "I certainly went to a lot of parties and he wasn't at any one of them."
20ff Comments on his innocence around girls, even during college; disgusted by the vulgar talk of some of his male acquaintances; he noted in his diary that he made it through "the worst period of youthful lusts" thanks to "his elevated perspective on sexual matters"; he thought he would be married at age 30 to a wife who was an intellectual, although he had not yet met any women of real intellectual stature by the age of 19; "He also realized, with some prescience, that the woman he would marry would not have a very easy time of it."
22ff Interesting comments here about McLuhan speaking of his good luck in going to the university during the depression because nobody was tempted to go job hunting in the summer, so they "made huge progress intellectually." The author ironically actually disputes this, calling it a bit disingenuous because McLuhan was always looking for work during his entire college years. Also on a summer trip to England where he got to see the homeland of all of his favorite writers and poets; on McLuhan seeing poetry and literature as "a noble protest of the human soul against the mechanical and the commercial, against the vulgarities of modern life." [My kind of guy!]
23ff Also on McLuhan stumbling on the book What's Wrong with the World by G.K. Chesterton, which changed his life; on how Chesterton's "mannered prose repels as many readers as it attracts"; note the anecdote here where he defended the book and recommended it to a friend in 1974 as more relevant and instructive than ever; on Chesterton's impact on his thought, also his brilliant one-liners which later became McLuhan's own specialty; also on Chesterton's disdain for experts, something McLuhan also would have agreed with wholeheartedly. "As far as McLuhan was concerned, what the expert did not know, the questions he had not asked, were the most important aspects of his expertise; once one knew those, it was possible to arrive at some real insights." Also Chesterton pointed McLuhan to Roman Catholicism.
25 Interesting interjection here about the analogical reasoning of G.K. Chesterton being a throwback to Aquinas: "Such was the analogical reasoning of St. Thomas Aquinas, which was replaced in later Western thought by the logic of Descartes and the dialectics of Hegel. There was never any doubt about which kind of reasoning Marshall McLuhan preferred." On how McLuhan spoke, wrote and reasoned by analogy.
25ff McLuhan falls in love to Marjorie Norris in 1933 during his last year at the University of Manitoba, he poured out his feelings in his diary, assessing his own character, his internal views and emotions and his morals.
26 Mention here of George Meredith, the subject of McLuhan's master's thesis: Meredith was a 19th century literary figure "whose reputation, immense at his death, has shrunk dramatically." [Which probably means he's worth looking up and reading!] "McLuhan was convinced he was a figure of great significance." Also note the reference here that his thesis was "remarkably polished, especially in light of the fact that the author's later prose was almost universally deplored as unreadable." [Is this what's in store for me if I read McLuhan's works?]
27ff Finally on the articles McLuhan wrote for the school newspaper, The Manitoban: he wrote articles decrying capitalist industrialism and how it distorts human life, also articles ridiculing the notion of progress based on science and technology. Also note this quote, from later in his life, where he said as a youth he considered the 20th century as "unfit for human habitation." [He's a throwback!]
28-9 He goes to Oxford to study English, financially assisted by loans from his aunt; he and Marjorie Norris break up while he's there.
Chapter 3: Cambridge, 1934-1936
30ff During his two years at Cambridge, McLuhan "virtually unlearned everything he had absorbed about English literature at the University of Manitoba." "One advantage we Westerners have is that we're under no illusion we've had an education. That's why I started at the bottom again." Suddenly he wasn't the brightest student. Also his exposure to "modern" [for that era] literary criticism.
32ff On McLuhan absorbing ideas of I. A. Richards and his ideas on words having basically halos of meanings, connotations, ambiguities, etc. "Words won't stay put." Also note the odd coincidental mention here of William Empson and his book Seven Types of Ambiguity [!] Empson had been student of Richards as well; McLuhan said that Empson' book "taught him, finally, how to read poetry."
34 "Richardson and Empson together were the godfathers of what would become known as the New Criticism; in his later years McLuhan marveled that he was the only student of their work to perceive its usefulness in understanding electronic media." Also on McLuhan's idea that the content of a poem is the reader, and then extending that to mean "the content of any medium or technology is its user."
34ff On the influence of F,R, Leavis, a student of Richards and an enormous influence on McLuhan, who employed his ideas on practical criticism to the analysis of advertisements and journalism. McLuhan had been intrigued by advertising as early as 1930 and his first book The Mechanical Bride from 1951, "consisted almost entirely of an analysis of advertisements." His work with Leavis helped "nudge" McLuhan "to becoming a student of society and eventually of the media." Also on the idea of the audience as a "cause" of a work of art, and the idea that the audience of a world of art should be studied as carefully as the work itself.
36ff Comments here on Leavis and his 1936 work Revaluation, which intended to change people's minds about which poets were worth studying and which were not and that poets such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound should be in the literary canon. After his first year at Cambridge McLuhan "had decided that Eliot far surpassed other modern poets." He credited Eliot with being the real inspiration behind his media studies, also drawing on influence from the French Symbolist poets of the 19th century, who had in turn been influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, in particular Poe's essay "The Philosophy of Composition" on poetry. Also on the notion here of examining a poem not in what it had to say, but in terms of what it did, as well as comments here on the role of sound in poetry: see Yeats and his quote "I have spent my life in clearing out of poetry every phrase written for the eye."
37ff On Mansfield Forbes, another major influence on McLuhan; the first Forbes lecture he attended was "his most exhilarating intellectual encounter yet."
39ff On some of McLuhan's other observations of Cambridge: that every student was either Roman Catholic or Communist; that it was full of homosexuals--both of these were exaggerations but still with a grain of truth in them. He came back from the experience "with even more self-confidence than when he arrived" and it "set the foundation for almost all of his subsequent intellectual work."
Chapter 4: Apprentice Professor 1936-1940
42ff McLuhan returns from Cambridge in 1936, gets a job as a teaching assistant in the English Department of the University of Wisconsin, earning $895 a year; he rethinks the United States. "I found there was probably more culture in that town of Madison [Wisconsin] than in the whole of Canada. I had to jettison my views of the United States and do it in a hurry." He also describes a "language barrier" with the students; he adopts their idiom and even teaches a course on media rather than boring them with symbolism in Hawthorne or "wrangling with students over subordinate clauses."
43 The author foreshadows some of McLuhan's statements from much later: "I find most pop culture monstrous and sickening. I study it for my own survival," McLuhan declared in the 60s.
44 On informal debates McLuhan had with other teaching assistants in Madison; also on his use of "Chestertonian paradoxes" and pithy summaries of great intellectual questions; he was interested in ideas. "His attitude seem to be that nobody knew anything anyway, so one might as well play with ideas."
44ff McLuhan converts to Catholicism in 1937. His mother Elsie was upset because she thought it would hurt his career; interesting quote here from the author, "...he remained circumspect about his religion in public; in private, however, he was as Catholic as only a convert from Protestantism can be. He said the rosary, went to Mass almost every day, prayed to Saint Jude (patron saint of lost causes) in exceptionally trying circumstances, and was particularly devoted to Mary, the Mother of God." The author makes a comment here about how McLuhan didn't really talk about theology after his conversion, but rather "leaving theology to the professionals" as if the subject were solved for good now. Also on how McLuhan thought the church should use hell and damnation more effectively, that it should play the "supernatural trump card" more often; just like in media where you need bad news (read: real news) to sell good news (read: advertising), churches should use hell to sell the gospel.
47 McLuhan then moves to St. Louis University, a Jesuit institution, to take a job as an instructor in the English Department in 1937; this school was inferior, starved for money, but there were other Cambridge graduates there. On Bernard Muller-Thym, a philosophy scholar at St. Louis who had a major intellectual influence on McLuhan, over their many philosophical and theological discussions he exposed McLuhan to the philosophy of the Middle Ages, teaching him that that period was far richer and more complicated than he thought.
50 On McLuhan and showing up to parties with copies of Shakespeare for all the guests, arranging parts and having a group reading of a play. One of his colleagues at the time said, "He had the leading part, of course."
50ff McLuhan goes to Los Angeles to do research on Thomas Nashe, an Elizabethan-era writer and ultimately the subject of McLuhan's PhD thesis; he meets Corinne Keller Lewis, born in 1912 in Fort Worth, Texas. Corinne's mother was hostile to him, the family didn't approve of daughters having male friends unless the families were personally known to them, worse, McLuhan was also a Northerner and a Catholic. Corinne was at first ambivalent; McLuhan pressed his case and also threatened that if she didn't marry him before he left England he would end the relationship: she agreed to marry him. Also note this cute anecdote: they're on an ocean liner bound for Italy for their honeymoon in 1939, poor and with not much in the way of worldly prospects, but they were young and handsome, so the captain of the ship, "struck by their elegance," invited them to sit at his table during the voyage. "It was an auspicious start for a marriage."
53ff September 1939: World War II breaks out just as Marshall and Corinne settled in Cambridge as McLuhan begins work on his PhD; these turned out to be some of the happiest years of his life: no faculty animosities, he worked with adult students, he was happy to be back at Cambridge, etc.
54ff On McLuhan's decision to write his thesis on Thomas Nashe; on McLuhan's fascination with Nashe's rhetoric, satirical writing and his "literary horseplay"; on how it opened up the world of the so-called "trivium": grammar, logic and rhetoric; comments here on the intellectual quarrel between Renaissance followers of rhetoric (going back to Cicero) and the so-called "schoolmen" of the Middle Ages, who were followers of dialectics: wisdom as pure logic; note that this quarrel originated with Socrates versus the Sophists. "Each of the three branches represented a different way of looking at the world. Dialectics, or logic, was the employment of critical reason, a highly abstract form of argument. Rhetoric was the fivefold persuasion, of moving the human imagination to accept truth. Like the Sophists, the rhetoritician had his certainties, his truths, already in hand before attempting to convey them to others. McLuhan later termed this attempt 'putting on the audience' and considered himself an expert at it."
The five forms of rhetoric. Thanks Google AI!
55 On "grammatica" which fascinated McLuhan the most: see the Stoics seeing the universe in the logos or divine word; also on McLuhan's fascination with etymology: categorizing figures of speech, learning new words as well as their etymological roots; also on the potency of names: see this quote from Understanding Media: "the name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers."
Chapter 5: In Search of a Home 1940-1946
57ff The McLuhans return to St. Louis University; McLuhan begins working on ancient rhetoric and grammar in the world of Cicero, Quintilion, Seneca, and the Greek and Roman Stoics; this turned out ultimately to be "the dreariest period" of his academic life; "He was incapable of doing what most academics do: staking out a manageable section of intellectual turf and then working it to death." Discussion here of Francis Bacon and his use of aphorisms, and how the aphorism is useful precisely because it did not explain itself; rather its incompleteness and suggestiveness caused one to inquire further into it; and then on McLuhan's fascination for and facility with aphorisms himself. [Note also footnote #2 for this chapter on page 58: "At the University of Toronto McLuhan kept huge stacks of index cards in Laura Secord chocolate boxes, each card containing an idea for a thesis. Students who inspected these cards were amazed to see hundreds of ideas in subject areas other professors thought had been exhausted." The point here is to illustrate yet again how McLuhan was a relentless source of interesting ideas for further study.]
58ff On McLuhan's need to talk and work out his thinking, and his inability to listen; one quote here was "What Marshall always really needed was a stooge... I think he liked to have someone else in the room while he thought aloud." Also on how McLuhan's PhD students got incredible value from him--not directly on their theses--but just from listening to him talk.
59 On how the best students really appreciated McLuhan, but a lot of students were bewildered or even hostile towards him; also on how he passed on to his students his discovery that some of the techniques of the Renaissance rhetoreticians had been appropriated by 20th century advertisers. Also on a general dispute over "great books"-style literature courses which focused on what the author is trying to say and the author's biography, versus understanding how a writer achieved the effects of his text.
60ff On the birth of McLuhan's son Thomas Eric McLuhan in January 1942; on his vexation with his "perpetually crying, squirming" son when he was an infant; on how Marshall wasn't really into children--despite ending up having six kids! Also comments on McLuhan's lack of taste for luxuries "except for the choice brand of tobacco for his pipe." Interesting comments here also on how McLuhan wanted to shelter children from the influence of the media: he advised his son Eric when Eric had his own son and daughter to limit their time in front of the TV, calling television a "vile drug which permeates the nervous system, especially in the young." [Holy crap, I wonder what he would think about the amount of screen time people get today...] Comments also on how he lacked the gallantry and romanticism that his wife wanted; he wanted her to be happy of course, but dedicated most of his attention to his work.
62 Intriguing blurb here on Dagwood Bumstead and McLuhan's obsession with him: how he represented a bumbling man led around by a perfected wife, and basically arguing that modern culture was destroying traditional family life, as well as destroying traditional masculine pride in work. He analyzed Dagwood in The Mechanical Bride this author says showing "a great deal of brilliance." [Once again, if you look at modern media today you get literally buried in constant tropes about how husbands are just total dopes who would barely survive if it weren't for their brilliant daughters and wise wives. The trope is ubiquitous today and just as tiresome--McLuhan surely must be spinning in his grave.]
65-6 McLuhan has an article published called "Dagwood's America," discussing the feminization of men in modern media; comments about his concern about the cultural influence and prominence of homosexuality [once again these two themes have been carried much further today than McLuhan could ever have imagined in his era]. Also on another article submitted to Esquire magazine called "Is Postwar Polygamy Inevitable?" which discusses the breakdown of monogamy in modernity at the hands of various forces: sexual promiscuity, prevalence of divorce, artificial insemination, as well as the dynamics of industrial and commercial life, which reduced men and women to wage slaves and consumers; this resulted in "making the traditional monogamous family an economic luxury." Esquire promptly rejected the article, and the author goes on to say "It does reveal, however, an uncanny anticipation of our present era."
67ff Another unpublished article that McLuhan never finished was a 1939 essay "Dale Carnegie: America's Machiavelli," "a scathing analysis of How to Win Friends and Influence People, seeing it as a textbook on cynical manipulation; also an article "Footprints in the Sands of Crime" which cited Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey and other sleuths as part of a "gentlemanly and erudite tradition of Cicero and the Renaissance rhetoreticians and humanists." McLuhan didn't like the style or substance of detective fiction per se: rather he had a fascination with the sleuth figure and "saw his own work with the media as an example of sleuthing, the relentless search for the telltale clue."
68 Another major theme/metaphor in McLuhan's career comes from this same article "Footprints in the Sands of Crime" as he refers to the short story "The Maelstrom" by Edgar Allan Poe, in which a sailor caught in a giant whirlpool saves himself by detached observation of the whirlpool; for McLuhan, this detached observation became a metaphor for freeing yourself from social change through the process of observing and understanding it. [This is certainly true in modern media and modern geopolitics, also with the seemingly incoherent behavior of clown world elites: everything makes a lot more sense if you understand the history, the techniques, the various artifices used, the history of various nation-states and civilizations over time, and so on. It helps somehow to de-emotionalize and abstract away alarming and stressful current events if you can place them in the context of centuries or millennia of history. Somehow it allows you to abstract away the ideas and principles rather than get engrossed in emotional reactions to the actual events themselves. It really is a superpower to be able to abstract away things that are designed to alarm you.]
68-9 McLuhan begins to develop a bit of a following in a couple of minor publications; at this point he had written very little about media or technology. Then, while in St. Louis, he was exposed to Lewis Mumford and his 1934 book Technics and Civilization as well as the Swiss architect Siegfried Giedion and his book Mechanization Takes Command. Note the comment here about Mumford, who thought that widespread use of electricity and communication would decentralize society, once again reversing urbanization and restoring something like a community-based, artisan way of life. [Talk about being one billion percent wrong!] And then regarding Siegfried Giedion, who helped McLuhan grasp the idea that there's much more to advertising than the literary and intellectual world realized; Note Giedion's quote that "the secrets of a whole society could be discerned" in a single advertisement, as well as his commentary on the increasing mechanization of human life.
70 On various projects McLuhan was working on at the time, many of which remained unfinished, but also including beginning work on the book that would come to be named The Mechanical Bride; on McLuhan's creativity in coming up with new projects but lack of "determination to see them through. This characteristic never changed."
70ff Interesting blurb here about McLuhan coming into contact with the English novelist, painter and critic Wyndham Lewis; on Lewis' great 1927 polemic Time and Western Man from 1927, which McLuhan read with much excitement as a Cambridge undergraduate; later he learned that Lewis was living in Windsor, Ontario, so he went to meet him; McLuhan went on to attempt to find portrait painting clients for him among the wealthy people in St. Louis, and this is how McLuhan indirectly found out that he could handle wealthy people and social elites relatively easily. Lewis would eventually pick fights and be obnoxious with McLuhan, but McLuhan remained faithful to him, defended him, and corresponded with him until his death in 1957. Note also it was a sentence from Lewis's 1948 book America and Cosmic Man which inspired McLuhan's phrase "global village."
73ff McLuhan then takes a job at Assumption College in Windsor, Canada; the experience there continued to feed his harsh perspective on Canada as a "mental vacuum"; the author also describes an unpublished article that McLuhan wrote around this time called "Canada Needs More Jews," claiming that if Canada imported two million or so Jews it "might liven the place up."
75ff McLuhan "was one of those men who, without any prompting, find observation of the world an excellent strategy for coping with life." "Even if it's some place I don't find congenial, like a dull movie or a nightclub, I'm busy perceiving patterns." On asking what did these things mean; on seeing things in a new way; also note how McLuhan viewed any alternative to this type of observation as a sort of waking sleep; McLuhan also took to heart Lewis's comment "The world is in the strictest sense asleep, with rare intervals and spots of awareness. It is almost the sleep of the insect or the animal world." [Note that the author took this quote from Jeffrey Myers' biography of Wyndham Lewis called The Enemy, which appears to be very much worth reading.] McLuhan also used to tell his students that they were all in hypnotic trances, and he felt like if he were able to wake up one student per year this was more than successful. [Wow!]
76 Note the offhand comment here about a negative influence Wyndham Lewis had on McLuhan: viewing those who were intellectual antagonists as part of a vast malignant conspiracy against the truth; the author gives an example "where McLuhan went overboard in perceiving patterns" in the US Justice Department incarceration of Ezra Pound in a mental institution.
76 Another interesting offhand comment where McLuhan gave a lecture series "Delinquent Adults Behind the Super-Comics" pointing out the emotional and mental delinquency that mass media was fostering in adults, saying that "the educational system was helpless against the powerful onslaught of such daydreams, that children received their real education from the media and not from their schoolteachers, and that the only hope of educators was to bring the media within the classroom and try to encourage students to conduct some sort of rational analysis of it."
79 The chapter ends here with McLuhan accepting a position at the University of Toronto, escaping the intellectual backwaters of Windsor, Canada, and where he would spend the rest of his life teaching and living.
Chapter 6: Twilight of the Mechanical Bride
80ff On McLuhan's early frustrations working in St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto, which was a sort of conservative Catholic educational oasis inside the greater university; interesting blurb here on how academics and students at St. Michael's had to get permission from the college librarian to obtain any books were placed on the Vatican Index of Forbidden Books: they were kept in a locked closet. On St Michael's college with its sense of inferiority to the other colleges at the University of Toronto; on the intellectual frictions and antipathy that McLuhan had with other professors at the University; on McLuhan's feelings of being stuck in the Roman Catholic educational system; and then on his realization that the "escape" would be to pursue not conventional English studies, but to pursue some subject that would win him much larger audiences than other fellow academics; also some of the sour grapes from some of his peer academics who framed him "as a man desperate to get out of poverty and obscurity."
85 Good example here of academics being so vicious "because the stakes are so low" as professors would act out their hostility to McLuhan through graduate students: other professors would discourage grad students from taking courses with McLuhan, making little remarks like "Is this the kind of serious subject you want to pursue?" which functioned as subtle derogatory hints at McLuhan and his subject matter. The author mentions that only seven PhD theses were completed under McLuhan's supervision in his 30 years at the University of Toronto.
85ff On McLuhan's unusual teaching methods: he didn't give canned or recited lectures, he had no notes, he would show up to a class with a pile of books and maybe would refer to them, or maybe not; he tended to point out fertile areas to students to dig around, in but didn't tell them exactly what they needed to know. [This sounds like a wonderfully "non-ludic" style of teaching, but later we're going to learn that he often frustrated students in his classes, especially later in his career.] McLuhan was also a generous grader, he rarely failed students, thinking that "it was the job of the admissions department to keep out poor students, not his job to flunk them." Further, on how McLuhan would grade graduate student papers: saying "one new idea" or "two new ideas" or, most pejoratively, "zero new ideas"--even for a well-written paper that was well-researched but just a rehash of current literature.
87 Interesting discussion here about how McLuhan would talk to his students about "the rhetoric of exams." As the author writes: "When a student mastered this rhetoric, he had no need to study for exams, McLuhan assured them. The key was to play with exam questions. One could talk about the question, break it down into subquestions, respond to it by inventing two contrary opinions and then comparing and contrasting them, and so on... These lectures were meant both to satirize exams--McLuhan believed that they paralyzed independent thinking--and to reassure his students that they did not need to fear them."
88 On the birth of McLuhan's fourth, fifth and sixth [!] child in 1947, 1950, and 1952; again the author comments on the limited assistance McLuhan gave his wife Corinne in raising and caring for their children, and "his inability to understand and sympathize with their emotional lives."
89 McLuhan grudgingly has to buy a car, he chooses a 20-year-old Plymouth "that he habitually patted on the hood as a kind of fetishistic gesture to prolong its life." [What a relief it is to know I'm not the only person who does this with my old car...] The author describes him as charmingly naive towards his finances, even when he became wealthy in the late 1960s: he gave all the money to his wife, and she doled out pocket money to him; he continued to "keep a sharp eye out for bargains, however trifling." Also comments here on his astonishing generosity, helping friends and charities, he would also go to a nearby nursing home to read to patients every Sunday.
93ff On graduate student Hugh Kenner, who became a McLuhan disciple; he took over McLuhan's old job at Assumption College; the author quotes Kenner talking about McLuhan exposing him to I.A. Richard's book Practical Criticism as well as Leavis' book New Bearings in English Poetry, and saying, "So many windows opened!" [It's beautiful and literally priceless when someone does this for you intellectually.] Kenner actually led McLuhan to his own "window": the work of James Joyce; McLuhan became obsessed with Joyce's work in the 1950s, seeing it as a puzzle, and seeing the impenetrable text of Finnegans Wake as "the ultimate mystery."
96 Comments here on McLuhan's media studies, emphasizing the sensory effects, but not as measured by, say, a psychologist, but in more analogical or metaphorical terms, see for example McLuhan's "baffling insistence" that the television is a "tactile" rather than a visual medium; using the Aristotelian and Medieval theories of sensation where the senses are working as a sort of "collective" to recapture reality. [Very interesting ideas here...]
96ff McLuhan and Kenner visited Ezra Pound in 1948 while he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeth's Hospital; McLuhan and Pound correspondended for several years afterward; mention here of two of Pound's critical books that impressed McLuhan: ABC of Reading and Guide to Kulchur, "in which Pound promoted works he believed would provide a student with crucial standards of taste and perception." Every sentence in those books sent McLuhan "scurrying to fifteen books." "Both men had a certain horror of popular culture but defended themselves against it in very different ways: McLuhan by studying that culture, Pound by resolutely ignoring it." [The comments here comparing Pound to McLuhan are interesting: they both saw patterns; they felt they could change the world if they could just get to the right people; they were occasionally subject to paranoiac interpretations of the world; they would jump from point to point without visible connection and then "toss off huge ideas in a few brilliant sentences."]
97ff Certain frictions developed between Kenner and McLuhan; McLuhan later said "I fed him too much off my plate" thinking that Kenner was plagiarizing or using some of McLuhan's insights without adequate acknowledgment; the author argues here that the two men actually needed each other, because Kenner actually understood the mental world of McLuhan, and he communicated it much better than McLuhan himself did. [One way to think about this would be the use the "originator-popularizer" paradigm, where you have Darwin (uh, actually Alfred Russel Wallace) originating an idea like natural selection, and then lesser minds like Richard Dawkins popularizing it with lyrically-written books that are easier to understand. The two skill sets need each other.]
100ff On McLuhan's mixed feelings about movies: he loved them but also quickly lost patience sitting through them; on his intuitive understanding of movie structure and organization, of shot sequence, etc. He spoke to his students about the works of the Soviet filmmakers Pudovkin and Eisenstein. On the fact that in the 1950s when television appeared the McLuhan family was the last on their block to get a set; McLuhan was captivated by The Bob Newhart Show in the 1970s, talking about how this program was the only one that understood the nature of the elevator and the spaces it created; he also loved Tom Lehrer and his comedic music. Comments on McLuhan's obsession with the epyllion, the little epic; [note also the quote here from Northrop Frye, which sent me down a rabbit hole to discover an incredible lecture series on the Bible and English Literature, as some works very much worth reading that I've listed at the end of their monstrously long post in the "To Read" section]; also on McLuhan's interest in secret societies like the Masonic Order and the Rosicrucians and the lore from these groups that persisted from the Renaissance to the 20th century; this obsessed him in 1952 for a full year; on how he enjoyed constructing the world as a conspiracy; also his views that "black masses" were being celebrated all around the world, basically rituals of the secret societies; he actually thought that the Civil War in the United States was a struggle between the northern and southern branches of the Masonic Order [that might explain a few things, but it's probably not true...]; he felt the Masons controlled book reviews and important periodicals [this is sort of sobering to think about in the current era of pharma-captured medical journals], although he had sense enough not to express these views in public. McLuhan was also appalled at Vatican II and thought that the church's changes were secretly driven by Masons inside the church; his strained personal relationship with Northrop Frye over time and his belief that Frye was a Mason.
106ff More discussions here of advertising, and certain articles McLuhan published illustrating his hatred for the effects of advertising--as well as his respect for the artistry of advertising--and on the critical need to understand it. "Although in the sixties McLuhan was often accused of glamorizing the advertising industry when he pointed out these realities, he never lost sight of his central thesis: that the power of ads could be defeated only when their victims stopped 'ignoring' them and started paying serious attention to them."
107ff Finally, comments here on McLuhan's 1951 publication of The Mechanical Bride, his first book, and was the culmination of his examination of advertising. McLuhan characterized the present era as "the age of the mechanical bride," that our technological life vitiated family life, human expression and human feelings. The book had a slide-and-lecture format, with clipped-out advertisements accompanied by essays; funny blurb here about a young editor's reaction pulling the manuscript out of the box: she was appalled by a 500-page manuscript with hundreds of yellowed newspaper and magazine clippings attached with paper clips, but yet she found that "there was something intriguing about it." The book was seen on some level as an expose of advertising, but also it was a tour of the illusions behind deodorants and Buick ads. [The reader also can't help but feel a bit appalled at how badly McLuhan treated the team publishing his book, complaining that they were "castrating" his text, making the editorial process very difficult, and transforming the whole thing "into a melodrama."] "Years later he felt this book 'appeared just as television was making all its major points irrelevant.'... Despite McLuhan's disclaimer, The Mechanical Bride remains the most delightful of his books. The dissection of North American culture in the late 1940s is accurate, merciless, and curiously high-spirited." But note this quote: "The book received respectful reviews but sold no more than a few hundred copies." And then yet another ironic twist: later the book became a choice collection item in the antiquarian book business.
Chapter 7: The Discovery of Communications 1951-1958
111ff On McLuhan discovering an interest in technology thanks to a fellow professor at the University of Toronto, Harold Adams Innis, a professor of political economy, who had written two important books on Canadian economic history, The Fur Trade in Canada and The Cod Fisheries; later he was to see the media of communication as a much more important "staple" or commodity in its effects on society; he and McLuhan had discussions on the various [meta-]characteristics of press and radio that were separate from what they actually printed or broadcast: see for example how they "fostered a concern with the immediate at the expense of any sense of continuity." [Holy crap is that ever the case]; see also how radio, because it necessitated a central authority to regulate airwaves, fostered government centralization, etc.
112ff Also on Innis' book The Bias of Communication, published in 1951, a year before his death, discussing idea that the medium of communication used in a civilization defines that civilization: the Sumerian clay tablets did not allow for wide-ranging communication over space and their communication dealt with highly stable things like religion; whereas papyrus and paper, used in the Roman Empire, did allow for communications about changeable, secular domains like administration, law and politics, while as well these actions could be performed over much a wider territory. [It's an interesting framework] This work was the "extra boost" that got McLuhan to study media.
114 Interesting comment here about Harold Adams Innis being a classic liberal who could who abhorred McLuhan's conservatism and "could hardly abide McLuhan's support of such figures as [Spain's] General Franco."
114 Comments here about the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, regarding the form of the newspaper: the way a newspaper juxtaposed news items "placed a weird symbolic vista before the reader." Also comments on Ezra Pound and his idiogrammic method of composing poetry and works of criticism by condensing ideas from his reading and juxtaposing them freely, thus "revealing a multitude of relationships between items."
115ff on Edmund Carpenter and his collaborations with McLuhan: Carpenter was an anthropologist and had the same style as McLuhan; his lectures were popular and notorious; Carpenter quotes McLuhan talking about their colleagues at University of Toronto: "We've got it made here, there's so little talent." Carpenter as an "intellectual thug" just like McLuhan; they collaborated on a research proposal (that ended up getting $44,250 in funding from the Ford Foundation) to study how changes in the media resulted in vast social, political and economic changes, and that a new language of languages was being created with all these changes in these media; also at this point McLuhan had discovered work of the linguists Sapir and Whorf, and their paradigm that human beings perceive reality through language and language shapes the way we experience reality.
118ff Interesting comments here regarding intellectual differences among the group of intellectuals McLuhan gathered together to work on this grant program: criticism of McLuhan being fast and loose with the facts and never letting a fact interfere in a good story, the author writes McLuhan "had a rather different approach to reality." McLuhan also made a decision to launch a magazine, Explorations, to publish articles related to this group's efforts; Edmund Carpenter was the driver of this publication, doing the editing, the design and also getting a lot of interesting contributions from all sorts of people including Hans Selye, Jean Piaget, Jorge Luis Borges, even e.e..cummings.
120 Discussion here of a specific article in Explorations by McLuhan called "Culture Without Literacy" that the other calls "brilliant." [this is probably an essay worth reading].
121 Comments here on how McLuhan looked for patterns, and looked for insight: he described it as inferring what's in a safe; also on his desire to eliminate approval or disapproval for technological changes, "he asserted that and moral and emotional indignation was simply an indulgence on the part of those powerless either to act or to understand. If there really was any human villainy or stupidity involved in the changes McLuhan studied, it would be better exposed, he felt, through understanding than through the expression of futile rage." [In other words, figure out the boundaries of your circle of control, and stay inside them. Learning more about something to better understand it is an act inside your circle of control. Effete handwringing and futile rage is pointless and debilitating and it shrinks your circle of control. I couldn't agree more with McLuhan here.] See also the intriguing comments here about how when you study advertisements they start to become ridiculous looking, it's almost a satire, and this satire gave McLuhan himself great joy. [In other words study them rather than shake your first at them; this is a cheat code to deal with media that would otherwise frighten us or attempt to control us.]
122ff McLuhan also for the first time began to speculate on the nature of television, first in this article and then in other works to follow; on McLuhan saying that television penetrated the head of the watcher in a way that photographic images and the movie screen never did. On his discussions of visual space and acoustic space, or what he called audile-tactile space.
125 Comment here on an experiment by this group where they divided up students such that one group heard a lecture delivered on television, another group attended the lecture live, a third group listened to it on the radio, and a fourth group read it in a transcript. The group watching the lecture on television scored the highest in a comprehension test afterwards--and the print group scored the lowest.
126 [Useful comments here on academic behaviors here]: Note once again the backbiting among the different academics on this project as it wound down a year later; McLuhan concludes that the more each academic in the group looked into another discipline the more they feared and desperately clung to their own expertise--and the less they were able to understand others; essentially people seemed to climb back into their intellectual silos. Also McLuhan concluded from this that "all ignorance is motivated." Also Note as the author puts it, most people simply do not want to expand their awareness." [I guess it's egoically scary: it shows how little you know, especially when you're the "expert" who's already supposed to know everything.] The members of the seminar never really communicated with one another, the participants often were talking past one another, and it appeared that this seminar if anything just confirmed McLuhan's "outcast status" at the University of Toronto.
127 Good quote here from a Toronto newspaper publisher named John Bassett, who helped fund the Explorations magazine when the Ford Foundation grant money ran out. "McLuhan was a terrific fellow, enormously stimulating, with a great sense of humor. Funny man. Brimming over with energy. He couldn't sit still for very long. He'd jump up and down enthusiastically--oh, he was a hell of a fellow. The only problem was, I couldn't understand a goddamn thing he said. I used to laugh at his ideas and say, 'For Christ's sake, Marsh, what are you talking about?' And he'd just go on and on."
127ff Comments here on how Explorations magazine led a lot of people to discover McLuhans' work. Also comments here on McLuhan's voracious multidisciplinary reading: how he would run through 35 books in a typical week; also on McLuhan as an intelligent "browser" of books, using an interesting process to figure out whether a book was worth reading or not: he would turn to page 69 and page 70, and then the table of contents. "If the author gave no promise of insight or worthwhile information on page 69, McLuhan reasoned, the book was probably not worth reading. If he decided the book did merit his attention, he started by reading only the left-hand pages. He claimed he didn't miss much with this method, since there were so many redundancies in most books."
130-1 Comments here on McLuhan's opinion on gadgets and technology: he thought things like television were dangerous because they caused their users to become dependent on them. "They are for dissatisfied people." He was an old-school guy who preferred a changeless environment, but yet he wanted "to study change to gain power over it." Also on his temporary enthusiasm in the late 50s/early 60s where he was hopeful that there might be an enriched interplay of the old visual print culture in the new acoustic electric culture, a type of Renaissance like the 16th century, which was sparked by the interplay between old manuscript culture and emerging print culture.
132ff McLuhan giving a talk at Columbia University, where he obnoxiously responded to criticism from the "heavyweight" sociologist Robert Merton. McLuhan retorted: "You don't like those ideas? I got others." McLuhan "could not bear to have his thought cross-examined." On his influence on the National Council of Teachers of English in Canada, arguing that the book had been taken over by the new media and the job of teachers was to train students in media literacy; also a cute blurb here quoting Neil Postman [author of the book Amusing Ourselves to Death] who shared a hotel room at a conference with McLuhan in Cincinnati: the lights were out, it was 2:00 a.m., and McLuhan kept on talking, generating all kinds of incredible ideas, with only the lit end of his cigar visible in the dark room. Everyone was telling him "we have to go to sleep" but he kept nattering. Postman was enthralled with McLuhan.
134 Cute comment here on other offbeat works that McLuhan sketched out that was never finished [throughout this book the reader will learn about a LOT of works that McLuhan started but never finished...] including a musical comedy called The Little Red Schoolhouse where the government of Washington invited Russians to try their hand at running the United States. "The Russians, seduced by their love of Elvis Presley, agreed."
Chapter 8: The Electronic Call Girl 1958-1964
136ff On McLuhan's growing reputation inside and outside academia by the late 50s and early 60s; on McLuhan's first use of the phrase "the medium is the message" in a public address to National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) at their annual convention in Omaha in 1958. The expression conveyed the underlying idea that all media including human language "have effects on the human psyche quite apart from the explicit bits of information they might convey." The NAEB hired him to develop a syllabus for 11th grade classrooms for the study of media, so that McLuhan could "teach the 'grammar' of the new languages of television, radio, and other media."
139ff On McLuhan breaking out of the academic world, speaking to the corporate/executive world; the author describes this world as "another class of semibarbarian he was equally keen to enlighten."
140 On the idea--partly derived from Francis Bacon's concept of the vestigia communis--of the latency of every sense in every other sense; the human senses react with each other and translate inputs into their own mode of perceiving; for example talking on the telephone, which is a low resolution or low definition communication medium, the other senses are less able to get into the act of perceiving the image of the person you are talking to; whereas with radio--a much higher definition medium--your brain easily could create visual images with its own fantasy like response. Also on how McLuhan helped a Toronto businessman who got nervous talking to his boss over the phone, but was not nervous with him in person: McLuhan's suggested he visualize his boss as he spoke, this solved the problem.
142 Brief discussion here of McLuhan's multidisciplinary mind: although he had huge gaps and didn't know many domains well, he would easily appropriate that domain's terms in sort of a poetic or metaphorical sense, although he did not have a precise technical understanding of those terms. Examples here where he's talking to someone from a given field who mistakenly believes he's using the precise meeting. McLuhan defends himself here by saying the terms themselves are metaphorical in the first place. [Technically he's right: all words are essentially metaphorical representations of the underlying thing or idea...]
143ff On some of the sources that shaped McLuhan's theories about television: see for example the art critic Adolf von Hildebrand and his book The Problem of Form in the Figurative Arts [I think the author means here The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture], also Andre Gerard, a painter who had cone experiments with film and television, and who cited the French artist Georges Rouault, who painted his paintings as if they were stained glass windows, and as if there were light coming from within--strangely like the television image. Also McLuhan was influenced by the French impressionist painter George Seurat and his pointilist method, which reminded McLuhan of television images; see also comments here on McLuhan's idea of "light on" art (like a Renaissance portrait) and "light through" art (like stained glass or television). See also this interesting insight from McLuhan on Hitler: "Hitler was made by radio and would have been undone by television." [One incredible rabbit hole to explore: take a look at all US presidents before television, and then all US presidents after television and see what that medium ahs done to American politics.] Comments on how radio was an emotive organ that stimulated the ear and encouraged fantasy, whereas television held people in a state of passivity and even mental vacancy. Also on his comments of the powerful people who owned and controlled modern media: McLuhan would say "it was futile to know who wielded power without knowing what the nature of that power was." Further comments on how modern media imposed assumptions on people using them, and then unless people understood the nature of media they will lose not just traditional values of literacy but possibly even lose Western Civilization itself.
146 Note that the NAEB had no idea what to do with McLuhan's report, his graphs and charts were baffling, the material was too hard for 11th grade students, "McLuhan had no notion of what high school students could do." It ended up the organization never used the syllabus at all and this work remains of interest only to students of McLuhan's work.
147 Interesting inside here about how McLuhan believed that photography inspired an "extrovert" generation, but television inspired an "introvert" generation [Note that this didn't actually play out with the Baby Boomer generation but if you think about "screens" in the current era you can make an argument that it did had such an impact on the Millennial generation.] [Also I think the reader can take away certain meta-insights from McLuhan's report to the NAEB: see for example the idea of observing the effects of things and thereby perceiving these things in fresh ways.] See for example where the author here describes McLuhan, while still at Cambridge, casually noticing that central heating caused English people to be more interested in windows [Odd but interesting], or on the idea of considering what a photocopier did to change the life of a school would be much more useful than understanding any description of what the photocopier did or even what was copied on it. Also on his statement "War now consists not of the moving of hardware but of information." This is an insight that turned out to be unbelievably prescient, much more today even than it was in the decades that followed when McLuhan said it.] Many of the ideas from this project ended up in McLuhan's book Understanding Media.
148 On McLuhan's playfulness with media but also see this see this quote: "It's vital to adopt a posture of arrogant superiority. Instead of scurrying into a corner and wailing about what media are doing to us, one should charge straight ahead and kick them in the electrodes. They respond beautifully to such resolute treatment and soon become servants rather than masters." [I think we can argue that understanding, seeing, having playfulness, and also a mindset of anti-servility is important in the face of any kind of technological change. You have to become a student of it just to navigate it, but also to resist it; it also gives us an opportunity to think about things, observe things, on many levels all the time. This gave McLuhan great pleasure, maybe it can be the same for the rest of us.]
149 The reader learns that McLuhan had a health event here due to the strain of overwork on this NAEB project: he was hospitalized with what turned out that it had a stroke, which was serious to the point where his employer and confessor Father John Kelly was summoned to give him last rights. He recovered totally and never alluded to the incident again. [Note that this was in 1960, so McLuhan was only around age 50 at the time].
149 Comment here from a research paper from Stanford, taking note of McLuhan's NAEB report, saying McLuhan was a thinker "whose rate of idea generation is so great that, by chance alone, some pregnant insights are predictable." The author calls this an "ambiguous compliment." [But if you think about, ideas, good or bad, really are your currency, you want to generate ideas, as many as you can, and then take the good one and work with them; it's understandable and necessary that some of the ideas will suck.]
150 On McLuhan's savvy ideas about the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy: he understood "that North American politics had become a branch of the entertainment industry." Comments here on how McLuhan found himself working more with the corporate world, joining for example the staff of a school GE had created for its executives under the influence of Peter Drucker.
152 On the death of McLuhan's mother Elsie in 1961; she had had a serious stroke in 1956 and lost the ability to speak, she was a difficult parent but McLuhan was grief-stricken when she died. His father would die five years later [notably the author doesn't make any comment about the father at all later on in the book].
153 On The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan's next book: mostly conceived in 1955 but he only started to write it seriously in 1961; commentary from the author on how McLuhan and "found writing tedious and awkward"; also on McLuhan realizing "what most writers come to realize sooner or later--that one small book does more for a writer's reputation than a hundred articles." Comments here on his prose having, in McLuhan's own words, an "oral, noisy brashness"; the author goes on to describe it as a "hodge-podge" and a "curious volume." [I guess I'll have to read it to see]. Later, McLuhan used the technique of dictating to his wife or secretary instead of sitting down and writing himself.
155 "Unlike The Mechanical Bride, The Gutenberg Galaxy was not ignored." Reviews in various important publications, the book won an award in Canada, and McLuhan's fame started to spread in the United States. He was profiled in Fortune magazine (and then was commissioned by Time-Life help with long-range planning, although his advice was ignored by management); also this work made him much more well-known among influential media executives in New York.
158-9 McLuhan began receiving offers from all sorts of other universities, especially in the United States, some offering him to three or five times as much money at the University of Toronto, so Toronto gave him free reign to work, they dramatically reduced his teaching duties, augmented his salary and gave him his own interdisciplinary research center on campus. Amusing anecdote here: it was in a seedy old Victorian house, and McLuhan hung a sign on the front door that said "SLAM GENTLY"--a very McLuhan-style oxymoron. [Interesting how you can be hated by most of the faculty in a University, but you can still get famous enough that the leadership will do nearly anything to keep you.]
159 Note this very odd typo on page 159--one of the strangest typos I've ever seen in any book ever--in a paragraph discussing some of the pushback from the academics at University of Toronto against McLuhan's new interdisciplinary center [see photo, fourth line]:
162 Comments on Mac Hillock, an IBM executive and friend of McLuhan; Hillock encouraged McLuhan to charge ten times his standard $100 or $200 speaking fee, saying it would attract even more clients; these seemed like astronomical fees to McLuhan, but by 1964 he was asking $500 a day.
164ff On various projects that McLuhan worked on at his new center, including looking at effective use of typeface, layouts and color in newspapers and magazines; studying people's sensory preferences (this product devolved into an ownership dispute between McLuhan and a professor of psychiatry, Daniel Cappon); also studying dyslexia, a condition McLuhan believed was a consequence of watching television; also comments here on how "businessmen with intellectual leanings seem to gravitate naturally to McLuhan."
166 Interesting insight here on a technique that McLuhan developed to encourage students to read poetry aloud: he would have three or four students take turns reading a single line each of a poem. This "removed the element of self-consciousness and encouraged group cohesion." Then he would have the students listen to tapes of their readings. They became excited about analyzing the poem, and arrived at highly competent interpretations.
166ff On McLuhan's most important event of 1964: the publishing of his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. The author describes how the book was only "seemingly tidy": it had chapters that conveyed some sort of structure, but the book was much like The Gutenberg Galaxy, a collection of notes and ideas; one critic, citing instances of blatant repetition and factual contradictions in the book, observed "Sometimes it seems that he has written the book without reading it." And of course it was actually true that McLuhan hated to review or revise anything he had written.
167 Discussion of the phrase "the medium is the message" and McLuhan's attempts to come up with a good way of expressing the central idea behind the phrase: every new medium created its own environment, which acted on human sensibilities in a ruthless fashion; the medium did not add itself to what existed already, it transformed whatever already existed, because the medium was not just a physical object but it also included aspects and responses to itself as well as the "vortex of energy" it created. See for example the automobile, which had to be perceived in the context of highways, gas stations, signs designed to be seen while being passed by at speed, etc. The automobile couldn't be perceived without all the innumerable changes and altered habits that it brought along with it.
167 More on the "medium is the message" idea: The new transformed environment had "very curious properties" including that it was virtually invisible, unnoticeable and subliminal because "its saturates the whole field of attention" [invisible because it's too obvious], and to the extent that people did notice fragments of the new environment they perceived them as disagreeable or even corrupt--like the way romantic poets viewed steam engines. At the same time the new environment actually made old technologies and their environments more visible forcing them "into a tidy art form." The author also gives McLuhan's favorite example: how television turned old movies into an art form by showing them as late night programming; also how the Edwardians viewed machinery as a type of art form just as electronic technology was beginning to replace the machines they worshiped. And also it explains why the old textile mills of Massachusetts became exhibits in a national park for tourists "as if they were ruined medieval abbeys."
168 Going still further on this theme: artists were the people who could see this invisible environment (see Ezra Pound's comment that artists are "the antennae of the race") and art served as an "advanced warning system of the effects of the new media on society." On other ideas in the book: how gadgets and artifacts reduce their users to the status of a servo-mechanism (see for example the automobile); on how McLuhan attributed animistic qualities to media, claiming they mayed with each other, produced offspring, and even attacked and cannibalized each other.
169 Also on the idea that many critics thought that McLuhan was much more enamored with the new electronic era then he actually was; they confused his desire to understand with a desire for that thing itself. Once again, McLuhan actually hated new media, especially television.
170 Another quote from Understanding Media: "To resist TV one must acquire the antidote of related media like print."
170 Understanding Media sold nearly 100,000 copies and made McLuhan a subject for serious debate, although he was hurt deeply by a negative review in Time Magazine. The author calls this book review "casually obtuse" and then goes on to write "McLuhan was going to have to learn to live with this kind of response. In a very short time he would be the object of more public abuse--and adulation--then he had ever dreamed possible."
Chapter 9: Canada's Intellectual Comet 1964-1967
171ff On the incursion of pop art, conceptual art and Warhol-type works into the middle class, to the point where newspapers and magazines decided they'd better have somebody on their staff "who knew the difference between Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg." On McLuhan's theories being "sufficiently supple" [nice phrase!] to provide useful commentary in this world as well. Also on a fun exhibition that some of McLuhan's colleagues threw at the University of Toronot's armory building, using slide projectors, with dancers dancing thought the crowd, with perfumes creating an olfactory experience, strange noises for an auditory experience, and a "sculpture wall" made of fabric where people could grope the dancers through the fabric, etc. McLuhan had no interest in this sort of thing, but the author claims that this was a signal that "The McLuhan craze was about to commence--and artists would be foremost in helping to spread it."
175ff On McLuhan doing way more speaking, charging much higher fees, taking consulting work for ad agencies, having quite a lot more income. Also on Tom Wolfe's profile of him in New York Magazine in 1965: note that Wolfe created a tagline for the McLuhan phenomenon with the title of his article: "What if He Is Right?" The phrase stuck. More coverage in Harper's and the New York Times. Also Jerome Agel, a popularizer-type writer who collaborated with Carl Sagan and Buckminster Fuller to write accessible books on their work, collaborated with McLuhan on two books The Medium Is the Massage and War and Peace in the Global Village.
177ff Funny section here on McLuhan's dress: he would wear mismatched socks or an awful tie that didn't match; also when his hair started thinning his wife Corinne insisted he wear a toupee [!!], but it kept falling off; McLuhan saw clothing as a type of uniform and had no interest in it; also on McLuhan's technique of telling jokes before presentations and in dead spots in a conversation; one of his colleagues sent him a file of 2,500 cross referenced jokes. He also loved bad puns; on his knack for contradicting himself during a single talk; the fact that he never used qualified statements--his point was to get under the audience's skin and get them to look at the world differently.
181 Good comment here on how McLuhan would handle hecklers, or people who interrupted his talks: he would call them down to address the audience themselves, or he would act as if that person were an authority and then ask a question on a totally unrelated topic; either of these things "took the wind out of the heckler's sails."
182 On McLuhan's growing pleasure at the scorn of his academic colleagues, "taking it as proof that he still possessed intellectual vitality."
184 Another good quote on how one executive looked at McLuhan's insights: "I don't pretend to understand him, but I want him around just in case he's right."
186ff Comments a little bit out of the blue here where McLuhan had blackouts or would lose consciousness briefly, something he began experiencing in the late 1950s, also his coloring and taken on a pale hue and worsened along with these blackouts during the 1960s. The author describes an example in 1966, where McLuhan appeared before a class and was asked a question, but did not respond, and his head rolled back; he essentially passed out in front of the class. Nevertheless McLuhan kept putting more demands on himself. "He was determined to capitalize on his sudden vogue before it disappeared. To that end, he worked simultaneously on at least six books. [Also note this insight] McLuhan considered [working on multiple books] to be a perfectly sensible procedure, feeling that the insights derived from working on one subject stimulated related insights into other subjects."
188ff On McLuhan pouring out a series of articles for all kinds of publications, ranging from TV Guide, McCall's, Playboy and the Saturday Evening Post. More comments here also on his poor writing and McLuhan's dependence on his wife and secretaries for help untangling his prose. Even McLuhan himself "was not very proud of his books."
189 Sobering comments here about how McLuhan was poor at establishing priorities, how he lost control of his schedule, he could not cut down on distractions. This became a bigger problem as his schedule was far more active in the 1960s as "the demands on his time increased tremendously."
190 More on McLuhan's detractors, especially among the academic and intellectual world. See for example this quote from the editor of the Journal of Existentialism: "An obscure professor of English from the Canadian provinces has succeeded in perpetrating a hoax so gigantic that it shows every sign of becoming an international intellectual scandal." According to the author complaints like these drew from the fact that McLuhan's "prose style was deplorable," from claims that he was ignorant and fanciful "as proved by his cavalier treatment of facts," and from the fact that "he was complacent about the phenomena he described and indifferent to matters of social justice." [Some things in academia never change...] McLuhan never attempted any counter-attacks to his critics, he basically ignored the criticism and "he knew that if he took it seriously he would end up paralyzed by it."
190ff On family life in the McLuhan household, which was difficult at this point: McLuhan had 24-year-old and three teenagers still living at home, while his the 21-year-old twin daughters had left home to pursue their careers; also on his son Eric, who had been the rebellious one, but who came to work with his father and essentially adopted his love of James Joyce; the two of them enjoyed each other's company immensely, and Eric acted as his father's assistant and "companion-at-arms"; although McLuhan also was known to be very impatient and even condescending to his son at times in public.
192ff On McLuhan's close collaboration with Jerome Agel on the book The Medium Is the Massage: "McLuhan recognized that it was an effective sales brochure for his ideas." Note also that seventeen publishers turned down the book before Bantam Books took on the project; the author describes it as "McLuhan Made Easy. "Anyone could read it in an hour." It was the only one of McLuhan's books that sold very well, nearly a million copies worldwide. Finally on a one-hour NBC documentary on McLuhan which aired in 1967 using the fast-cut video edits and pop art. McLuhan detested the film, calling it "grotesque trash." The author writes "He had reason to be concerned. It was a sign that he was now being processed by the great North American publicity machine, just like any other sensation of the decade..." [The machine always chews you up and spits you out--even if you think you stand separate and apart from the machine and think you understand it.]
Chapter 10: New York City 1967-1968
194ff On Fordham University "luring" McLuhan to The Bronx for one year: McLuhan received a New York State government grant for research facilities and staff, he hired two friends and his son Eric as members of a research team that would teach a course entitled "Understanding Media" as well as work on different projects; McLuhan moved to Bronxville, NY and actually lived in the house next door to Jack Paar's home; but then the NY State Attorney General blocked the grant (there was a ban on aid to sectarian schools) so Fordham had to make up the difference out of its own funds. The author calls this "a portent of an unsettling year in the making." McLuhan comes under more criticism in academic circles for selling out.
196ff On McLuhan's deteriorating health; also his increasing frustration with and lashing out at students; he's increasingly prickly, increasingly tone deaf to his audiences as well as his students. Note also the sad anecdote here about a speaking collaboration he did with the advertising wizard Tony Schwartz: they appeared together at a couple of lectures in New York, but Schwartz's presentations were much more lucid and made more sense than McLuhan's, and so people would come up to speak to him instead of McLuhan afterward. Soon McLuhan stopped asking Schwartz to speak with him anywhere after that. [A few takeaways here: is life gets difficult if you're already a little bit prickly and then you become famous even more prickly, fame seems to bring out the worst in difficult people; likewise your health can really decline rapidly too if you're already having some issues to begin with and frustrating things happen to you that make you more stressed, more prickly and more disagreeable. And it is not good for these types of transitions to happen late in middle age, either: you're at an age where you don't yet know your limitations and you loose just enough neuroplasticity to struggle to adapt to these changes. I think a final takeaway here is do not become famous.]
198ff On "McLuhan Product": basically an excessive commercialization of McLuhan during this period.
200 Stanley Kubrick arranged a private screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey for the McLuhan family; McLuhan wanted to walk out some ten minutes into the movie (he detested science fiction), but his daughter Teri stopped him, he snored through part of it.
200 Interesting discussion here about structuring TV shows in a nonlinear way and without linear exposition, where the viewers had to figure out what was going on; this influenced TV producer Norman Felton, who created The Man from U.N.C.L.E. as well as other shows. He wrote them "the way he thought McLuhan would envision them."
201ff on McLuhan's blackouts growing more severe and his "fabulous energy" beginning to wane. [Note: this is 1967 so McLuhan is only 56 at this point.] It turns out he had a tennis-ball sized meningioma in his brain, although it was benign and operable; McLuhan was incredibly intransigent here about the surgery: he shoved the doctor when he heard the word operation, and also when he was scheduled for surgery he just checked himself out of the hospital and went back to his classes at Fordham! Finally his wife and some others persuaded him he had to do the procedure or he would be suffer blindness and perhaps insanity within a few months; McLuhan was terrified of the surgery, which turned out to take 17 hours. (!) "It had been the longest neurosurgical operation in the history of American medicine." And when the surgeon asked him how he was feeling after the surgery, McLuhan replied "It depends how you define "feeling.'" This remark--and the presence of mind that he had under the circumstances right after major neurosurgery--"endowed him with almost heroic stature in the eyes of the neurosurgical personnel at Columbia Presbyterian." Sadly the pain after the surgery was unimaginably bad, to the point where McLuhan said he never would have had the operation if he had known; even though the pain went away eventually, he would suffer effects of the operation for the rest of his life: he became hypersensitive to sound and smell, it affected his memory--which had previously been photographic--he found himself obliged to reread many books that he no longer remembered; he also "dealt irrational, and uncharacteristic, abuse to students and colleagues."
205ff Discussion here of some of McLuhan's frustrations with his son Michael's Jesuit education, on the theological positions of various Catholic thinkers, in particular the Canadian progressive theologian Gregory Baum, who McLuhan referred to as a KGB agent; also note this interesting comment McLuhan made to a friend: "The Prince of this World is a very great electric engineer." Also his various painful frustrations with the Catholic church after Vatican II: he considered it the "Protestantization" of the Catholic Church, he hated the fact that masses were no longer held in Latin, and he detested the microphone hanging around the priest's neck; other theological changes like de-emphasizing purgatory and playing down the invocation of saints disgusted him. It's interesting to hear his perspective on Latin masses: he considered the non-amplified Latin speech an "audio backdrop" a subliminal element that gave participants the ability to meditate or pray during the mass.
207ff Interesting comments here on politics: McLuhan didn't advocate any position on Vietnam; he said he "had learned from Joyce that oracles don't take sides." Comments on Pierre Trudeau, who was a McLuhan-style media-savvy politician in Canada.
208: The author quotes McLuhan here: "'The politician will only be too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be so much more powerful than he could ever be" before adding in his own voice: "McLuhan did not quite live to see the Age of Reagan and the full vindication of that statement."
208ff In 1968 McLuhan publishes two new works: First, War and Peace in the Global Village, again with his collaborator Jerome Agel and graphic designer Quentin Fiore; according to the author it was "full of fascinating and perceptive comments... as well as his famous dubious details." And then another co-authored work with Harley Parker: Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting, which discussed "the spaces created by each of the senses--visual space, acoustic space, and so on." The book was "ignored by the press" and "received virtually no reviews."
Chapter 11: Unsold Books 1968-1972
212 Note the introductory quote to this chapter, which captures perfectly McLuhan's problems with finishing his various books and projects:
"To have ideas is paradise, to work them out is hell."
-Maurice Maeterlinck [Belgian playwright]
212ff McLuhan makes two moves: his family moved to a new house in a nicer neighborhood in Toronto, and also his research center at the University of Toronto was moved to a better building. He felt comfortable in both quickly. Also on his increasingly erratic behavior: in his talks he would talk about subjects that had nothing to do with the audience's expectations, puzzling everyone; he was misplacing things around his office and acting the part of the absent-minded professor, neither of which had ever been part of his nature.
215ff On various frictions that McLuhan had with some of his staffers and assistants. They were nicknamed "McLuhan's wives": see for example Harley Parker a research assistant who used to genuinely exchange ideas with McLuhan during the 50s, but by the late 60s McLuhan turned brusque and irritable with his old friend. Also McLuhan's younger brother Maurice worked as one of his assistants, but lasted only three years, famously saying, "nothing grows under an oak tree." Also on the breakdown of his friendship and business agreement arrangements with Tony Schwartz especially after their newsletter collapsed; they also had money disputes over a conference they put on together.
217 Note McLuhan complaining here of Alvin Toffler recycling McLuhan's ideas in his book Future Shock.
218ff Another abortive book project McLuhan had agreed to do with in collaboration with Wilfred Watson, a Canadian poet "of great wit, erudition, and virtuosity" per the author. The book was supposed to be based on joint conversations that they had but McLuhan either forgot what they had talked about or simply ignored the "joint" aspect of the conversations; over time he seemed less and less tolerant of Watson's participation; his secretary Margaret Stewart was supposed to take down dictation of their conversations but she was bewildered by the whole process. The "dialogue" was essentially two monologues. The transcribed notes were given to McLuhan's son Eric to revise into a manuscript, which was called From Cliche to Archetype. The author comments: "there are hints of brilliance in the text... but for the most part, it is unreadable." A few years later in his diary McLuhan called the project stupid and pointless and blamed Watson for derailing it.
220 Also on the release of the book Culture Is Our Business which also came out in 1970; it was also bad book, the author describes it as "the pronouncements of a man who was talking to himself." McLuhan blamed it on the publisher, McGraw-Hill.
220ff Here the author basically talks about how McLuhan's fifteen minutes of fame had more or less ended, magazines stopped writing about him, "there seemed nothing more to say."
223 On McLuhan's friendship (sort of) with Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, on their correspondence, also the fact that McLuhan thought that Trudeau didn't understand anything he said. McLuhan also wrote letters to other eminent people, ranging from Henry Ford II, to King Carl Gustav of Sweden, Hubert Humphrey, Jimmy Carter and Ann Landers. But his correspondence with Trudeau "was the closest McLuhan ever came to an ongoing relationship with someone in power." He didn't lobby Trudeau on any specific issue, he was careful to avoid that, he would just give advice on things like how to use television, "much of which was very shrewd" according to the author.
225 On McLuhan's growing isolation at the University of Toronto, full of younger professors he barely knew; McLuhan was dismayed at the growth and bureaucratization of the university, "the university around him was becoming unrecognizable." Also on the deterioration of his wife Corrine: she was losing her hearing; on his son Michael turning into a hippie and actually being sent to jail for two months for selling hashish in Toronto; also on McLuhan's own distress at what he thought was coming race war as well as "epidemics" of mass murder; this was all in marked contrast to his optimistic statements to the media at the time. [It sucks getting old on every level. Your body betrays you, your mind betrays you, and the world betrays you...]
228 On some of McLuhan's political collaborations, like finding an ally in Jane Jacobs in his effort to preserve neighborhoods: McLuhan was outraged by new high-rise apartment buildings and expressways built in the heart of Toronto.
230 McLuhan attempts yet another commercial project that fails: a deodorant called "PROHTEX" which actually would enhance legitimate body odor. [???] [The reader can't help but see--for the zillionth time--the enormous chasm between theorizing about a domain and practicing in a domain. Practitioners need to run profitable enterprises, they need to successfully sell products into a marketplace. It's interesting that this guy who "knows" so much about the media can't seem to get out of his own way when it comes to running a business--or for that matter actually finishing a book. Also, per the quote at the beginning of this chapter: "To have ideas is paradise, to work them out as hell."]
231 Still further deterioration in McLuhan's health: possibly minor heart attacks, also an intriguing event [for Confessions of a Medical Heretic-type readers, that is] here where it was discovered he had constricted internal carotid arteries, and he went in to have surgery, but it doctors found that his external carotid arteries had formed huge connecting channels throughout the base of his skull to compensate and bring enough blood supply his brain [The human body knows!] thus he did not need surgery after all.
233ff On McLuhan's increasing "obsolescence" in intellectual circles, in the mass media and among the business world, "as if people were no longer interested in hearing from him or about him." Also, in 1971 McLuhan, in collaboration with Barry Nevitt, turned out yet another unreadable book, Take Today, which was cobbled together out of transcripts of years of their conversations as well as hundreds of pages of notes and essays they wrote together; once again, the author says there were insights in the book, "but the reader trying doggedly to follow the argument of the book from cover to cover simply gets lost." It sold only 4,000 copies, and McLuhan once again blamed his collaborator. Per the author, this basically represents the end of an era of when corporate executives felt they had to listen to what McLuhan had to say.
Chapter 12: The Sage of Wychwood Park
237ff On McLuhan anticipating "apocalypse" in multiple senses of the word: he was expecting a binge of violence in the 1970s, also even a second coming of Christ. He thought the world was going to end very soon, interpreting Israel's victory in the Yom Kippur War as apocalyptic
238 Note McLuhan's concept of the "discarnate man": man talking over the phone to other dematerialized humans hundreds of miles away; having his living room invaded by TV and technology invading his nervous system; a man hypnotically involved in a world part fantasy and part dream, and "swamped by the barrage of images and information in a phantom electronic world."
240ff Still more book projects that McLuhan never finished: one was supposed to be a survey of artistic and scientific achievements; another was supposed to formulate laws of the media.
241 [I think it's actually worth going through McLuhan's "laws of the media," they struck me as quite interesting]: His first law: any major artifact enhances or accelerates a certain process or thing. The second law: that major artifact tends to render obsolete some other process or thing [the example given here is how money as an artifact enhanced trading but also rendered process of barter obsolete]. The third law [which the author considers genuinely original] was an attempt "to articulate the process whereby those cliches retrieved from the scrapheaps of the past became archetypes of the present. In other words, the third law stated any major artifact retrieved some process or thing that had once been obsolete. Money, for example, retrieved the spirit of conspicuous consumption. The fourth law: any major artifact when pushed to the limits of its potential flipped into something entirely new. [In this case an example would be money eventually flipped into credit].
241ff "Briefly stated, then, McLuhan's laws of the media, when applied to any major artifact, posed four questions. What did it enhance, what did it make obsolescent, what did it retrieve, and what did it reverse or flip into?" Note that McLuhan called these four questions--his "tetrad" as he phrased it--to be his greatest achievement. "McLuhan's Laws of the Media" was published in the journal Technology and Culture in January 1975. The author talks about how this framework "could not be disproved, only endlessly argued," although there was a lot of intellectual life compressed into this framework. And once again McLuhan never finished yet another book on the topic. [Once again, just like there's an enormous chasm between theorizing and practicing, there's an equally enormous chasm between having lots of great ideas and actually completing works.]
243ff More projects McLuhan fiddled with: he picked away at a rewrite of his thesis from back in his Cambridge days, wanting to incorporate the five divisions of rhetoric; a project on the future of the book, which eventually morphed into another unfinished book about the future of the library. Also comments here on McLuhan's anxiety about all of these unfinished works, and his realization that except for Understanding Media, nothing he had written really made much of an impression on the intellectual public.
245 [Good couple of sentences here]: "As it was, McLuhan realized that his insights were being virtually ignored in the seventies. The times were partly to blame. In the sixties the world changed suddenly and everyone wanted to know why; in the seventies change continued, but in much grimmer and duller fashion, and everyone wanted only to cope. [This quote is interesting on a few levels: it kind of captures the zeitgeist of the 2020s as well: it feels like people likewise don't really want to understand the changes happening today, and it also somehow feels equally grim and dull. Fascinating.]
246ff On McLuhan going "bonkers" over the concept of the split-brain, left/right hemisphere of the brain framework that was coming into fashion in the late sixties; he began weaving it into his views on perception, but in a way that wasn't consistent with scientific research. See this quote from Marcel Kinsbourne, a professor of pediatrics and psychology at the University of Toronto, who met with McLuhan to discuss the subject. Ironically, Kinsbourne later described McLuhan as a very "left brained" person because he would shut out anything he didn't want to hear and couldn't incorporate alternative interpretations. [Note Kinsbourne's very faint praise here:] "I enjoyed him as a terrific personality. After all, how many eccentrics do you mean in Canada?"
248 Just as the "left brain" and "right brain" became sort of a mental shorthand for McLuhan, he also would use the concepts of "figure" and "ground." See for example the car is the "figure" but the network of gas stations, road signs and altered habits and perceptions that arise out of the existence of the automobile are the "ground," and people tend not to notice the ground.
250ff On various problems with McLuhan's adult children: his son Eric had trouble getting his academic career off the ground; his daughter Mary, who gave birth to his first grandchild, got divorced and couldn't handle her financial and relationship problems; his kids didn't seem to like each other; only one of his children, his son Eric, had a marriage that endured. McLuhan himself "lamented the fact that none of his children seemed happy."
256 Comments here on Watergate and McLuhan's perspective: per the author, he thought "hatching plots was impossible under the conditions of the electronic age." [Holy cow this turned out not to be true by light years: if anything it seems easier than ever to hatch plots these days.] Also McLuhan seeing politics as a new branch of show business and viwing Watergate as a "ritual degradation of tribal leaders mounted for the delight of television viewers."
257ff Now 1975: McLuhan takes a sabbatical year, spending the first month at the University of Dallas, where his son was working on an MA in English; then working on a revision of Understanding Media (which never was completed); then musing about creating a musical after seeing A Chorus Line; then Woody Allen asked McLuhan to appear as himself in the movie Annie Hall. The filming was exhausting for him, and he had a minor stroke a few days afterward. Ironically his role in the film fixed him in viewers minds "to a surprisingly lasting degree."
261 Comments here how during the middle and late 1970s and McLuhan, according to one associate became like "'an adult playing in a garden of delightful ideas' rather than making a serious bid for immortality by preparing a body of work that would survive him. When his obsolescence came, he was unprepared for it." At the same time he was "hindered by increasing lapses" in his ability to handle audiences "with the deftness of previous years." "The reality was that McLuhan's physical, if not mental, powers were wearing thin." McLuhan then has a somewhat serious heart attack in 1976, hospitalizing him for almost a week.
263 Finally on work that he actually did publish: a textbook written together with his son Eric and a schoolteacher named Kathryn Hutchon called City as Classroom. This would be his last book published in his lifetime. Note this interesting quote: McLuhan hoped the book might be an answer to radical educators like Ivan Illich [see his book Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health], "who McLuhan believed had purloined almost all of his insights." Unfortunately this book also "once published, disappeared from view, a fate that seemed to await all of McLuhan's books published in the seventies."
Chapter 13: Silence
270ff September 25th, 1979, McLuhan suffers a severe stroke, causing major physical damage, but deeply ironic cognitive damage: he lost the ability to read, write and speak except for a few odd words (although he was still able to sing, so at church he could still belt out hymns he knew by heart). "So began McLuhan's stay in an earthly purgatory in which he understood everything but could say nothing. For a man who lived to talk, it was the ultimate torment." He also lost his emotional guard, crying helplessly at moving passages in a book being read to him for example.
271 Note the blurb here on 271: someone was reading to him from Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach (the author describes it as "a witty and poetic work about mathematics, music, and computer intelligence, among other things.") [Holy cow that is one of this book's great understatements.] McLuhan became extremely agitated after hearing two or three pages from the book, he grabbed it and, as fast as he could move, went over the neighbor's house, thrusting the book into his hands. "McLuhan could say only 'Wuh, Wuh, Wuh,' but the neighbor understood."
273ff McLuhan's wife Corinne tried unsuccessfully to keep the news of the stroke quiet. "He was defenseless now in almost every respect... He knew he would never recover." The future of the McLuhan center at the university was suddenly in great doubt; the University of Toronto at the time was hard-pressed for cash, and a decision was made to close it down--over the protests of well-known people like Buckminster Fuller, Woody Allen, and Tom Wolfe. McLuhan went over to the center before it's closure to get at some of his documents, and it looked like somebody had deliberately trashed the files there; McLuhan wept as he was going through his papers before leaving the center for the last time.
276 McLuhan dies some fifteen months later, on January 31st, 1980, at age 69. This chapter is surprisingly mournful, it's very well done; I respect a biographer that can capture this kind of interest and affection in the reader for his subject. Despite McLuhan's many faults and shortcomings, he ultimately is a sympathetic figure. The author completes this book quite skillfully.
286 Final comments here about how "McLuhan could never quite convey in print his own vitality and the free play of his mind" but yet his body of work "will probably be mined for years to come by clever prospectors hunting, as he did, for bits of invaluable ore."
Vocab [once again, one measure of a good book is the number of new words it teaches you]:
Aperçu: lit: "perceived"; a comment or brief reference that makes an illuminating or entertaining point.
Amativeness: the feeling or tendency towards romantic or sexual love; a term used in phrenology to describe the brain's center for love and sex drive.
Coruscate: to flash or sparkle with light (literal) or to be brilliant/witty (figurative)
Jansenist: a practitioner of Jansenism, a 17th- and 18th-century theological movement within the Catholic Church, based on the ideas of Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638).
epyllion: "a little epic"; a narrative poem that resembles an epic poem in style, but which is notably shorter
Flush profile: a reference to a method of measuring viewer response to radio and television programs by gauging the incidence of toilet flushing. [!]
To Read:
F.R. Leavis: Culture and Environment
G.K. Chesterton: What's Wrong with the World
Lewis Mumford: Technics and Civilization
Thomas Babington Macaulay: Critical and Historical Essays (vols 1, 2)
Thomas Babington Macaulay: Machiavelli
Thomas Babington Macaulay: Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches (vols 1, 2)
***George Otto Trevelyan: Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay
Matthew Arnold: Essay on Marcus Aurelius [starts on p217]
***I.A. Richards: The Philosophy of Rhetoric
I.A. Richards: Practical Criticism
***Walter Ong: Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue
Edgar Allan Poe: "The Maelstrom" [short story]
Karen Horney: The Neurotic Personality of Our Time
Wyndham Lewis: Time and Western Man
Wyndham Lewis: America and Cosmic Man
Wyndham Lewis: Rude Assignment [autobiography]
***Jeffrey Myers: The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis
Jane Howard: "Oracle of the Electric Age" [Life magazine article, February 25th, 1966]
***Timothy Materer: Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis
James Joyce: Finnegans Wake
Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson: Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake
Ezra Pound: ABC of Reading
Ezra Pound: Guide to Kulchur
Hugh Kenner: The Pound Era
Hugh Kenner: The Poetry of Ezra Pound
Hugh Kenner: The Invisible Poet [on T.S. Eliot]
Sergei Eisenstein: Film Form: Essays in Film Theory
Vsevolod Pudovkin: Film Technique and Film Acting
Northrop Frye: The Great Code: The Bible and Literature [see also his lecture series on the Bible and English Literature]
Northrop Frye: Anatomy of Criticism
Northrop Frye: Words with Power
Harold Adams Innis: The Fur Trade in Canada
Harold Adams Innis: The Cod Fisheries
Harold Adams Innis: The Bias of Communication
***Harold Adams Innis: Empire and Communications
Siegfried Giedion: The Beginnings of Architecture
***Jerome Agel and Buckminster Fuller: I Seem to Be a Verb
Pierre Trudeau: Federalism and the French Canadians
Ernest Gellner: The Psychoanalytic Movement
Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
K.M. Elisabeth Murray: Caught in the Web of Words
Gerard Manley Hopkins, poetry
Works of George Meredith
Works of the anthropologist Edward T. Hall