1970s and 80s
To hell with the facts
Marshall McLuhan (1970s, age 60s). Violence and media go hand in hand.
The media’s power to incite violence is evident in the structure of our language. Did you know that the word violence is derived from the Latin word for crossroads?
Me (August, 2010, age 58). “Cross” roads, of course, are “angry” roads. And doesn’t anger frequently result in violence?
Unfortunately, if you look up the word violence in the dictionary, the Oxford, Mcluhan’s favourite dictionary, you will find that its origin is traced to the Latin word, violentia. Violentia does not mean crossroads. It means impetuous or furious, which is a shame because McLuhan’s derivation is far more interesting than the dictionary’s – at least to a student of media.
What was McLuhan thinking? McLuhan-biographer Philip Marchand says, McLuhan never allowed the facts to govern his ideas. And McLuhan is known to have defended his tendency to alter facts to suit his argument with the line – half a brick will break a window as easily as a whole one. Granted. But it is hard to escape the linear thought – however big the brick is it still has to hit the glass to cause damage.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The medium and the messenger, 1989, p. 62.
What’s the good word?
Marshall McLuhan (1973, age 61-62). “Dad, you’re in the dictionary!”
“Of course I’m in the dictionary, Eric, I’m looking up a word. Here it is, ‘corniche’ from the French – ‘a road along the edge of a cliff.’ Exactly where we are today, literally and metaphorically, don’t you think?
“No Dad, I don’t mean you’re using the dictionary, I mean you’re actually in it. There are now words based on you. ‘McLuhanism,’ McLuhanize,’ ‘McLuhanite,’ and get this ‘McLuhanesque.’
“Well that’s vurry satisfying. Northrop Frye isn’t in the dictionary is he? But hold on, which dictionary? the Oxford?”
“No, The Barnhart Dictionary of New English Since 1963, first edition, 1973.”
“What a shame. I’d have preferred the Oxford. After all, it is the Dictionary.”
Me (August, 2010, age 58). McLuhan would have been pleased
McLuhan did make it into the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which was published in 1989. Unfortunately he did not live to see it. However, it is safe to say that he would undoubtedly have taken great pride in this mark of the power of his influence on what he considered to be the most powerful of all mediums, our language.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989.
What’s art?
Marshall McLuhan (1970s?). Of course …
I was chatting with the artist Eric Wesselow. I asked him, “What is art? He started in on the fact that etymologically, art simply means something that is made.
“Actually,” I told him, “art is what you can get away with.”
He looked somewhat taken aback. So I asked him, “What is a portrait? “A portrait,” I said, “is the picture of a person where there is always something wrong with the mouth.”
Me (August, 2010, age 58). And yet …
I have always found these oddball definitions funny. And perhaps that’s all they are. However they also have a ring of truth. The second calls to mind the most iconoclastic portrait in western culture – the Mona Lisa – the first has crossed the mind of anyone who has ever walked through a gallery of modern art. At any rate the next time I go to an art gallery, I’m going to find it hard not to think of McLuhan’s definitions.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Barrington Nevitt with Maurice McLuhan, Who Was Marshall McLuhan, 1994, p. 222.
The importance of the unimportant.
Marshall McLuhan (December, 1970, age 59). Cavett’s right!
Today, Dick Cavett made a remarkable observation. He and I were talking on his TV show and he asked me why it was that when people come out of a movie it takes them a while before they start talking to one another. It’s as if they’re overwhelmed by what they’ve seen. Film is a private rather than a corporate affair. One does not have this kind of experience watching TV. TV is corporate rather than private. It encourages talk.
Me (July, 2010, age 58). But, does it matter?
The experience Cavett talks about of leaving a movie theatre at a loss for words is I think a common one. We’ve all had it. And it was the exactly this type of real world observation that fascinated McLuhan and which he loved to talk to people about. (Others being that radio is a visual medium, the telephone a non-visual medium, and children like to watch TV close up. Still others that radio as background “noise” at work is not visual. People tend to shout on cell phones. And listening to music with ear buds while running or biking can blind you to the visual.)
These seemingly unimportant experiences may be the keys to understanding the effects of media. At least McLuhan was drawn to them.
What do you think? Was McLuhan on to something.
Are there other seemingly unimportant media effects have you observed?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Listening for this post
The Dick Cavett Show, December 1970.
Memories.
Marshall McLuhan (June 16, 1975, age 63). My first memory.
I am in Edmonton. I can’t be much more than two years old. I’m looking out the window of a street car and I see horses on the river bank. I remember thinking they look so small they could fit in my nursery. Such is the magic of visual perspective. To me the horses in the distance not only looked small, they were small. I was a very perceptive lad.
Me (July, 2010, age 57). Too good to be true?
Philip Marchand writes in his biography of McLuhan that “in view of McLuhan’s later obsession with visual perspective as an invention of the print era and his almost visceral rejection of that perspective – in later years, the painter Harley Parker recalls, McLuhan seemed actually to believe that ‘things became smaller as they receded into the distance’ – the memory is almost too pat.”
Who can say? My first memory is from the time I was two or three. I’m in a long hallway. I look around and realize that I’m lost. Given that this blog in a way is an exercise in both discovery and self-discovery, a way of finding my way home, intellectually, perhaps this first memory of mine is also “almost too pat.”
What is your first memory? Does it reveal something significant about you?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Philip Marchand. Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, 1989 p. 8-9.
Perseverance
Marshall McLuhan (1974, age 63). I have doubts …
I don’t know perhaps it was late. I was tired. The Monday night seminar had just ended. Eric was driving me home and I said to him: “Is it worth it? All this effort to alert people, when they just attack the bearer of news and do nothing. Do I have the right to, am I supposed to, should I continue to keep investigating and making discoveries? Why bother, if the West is being discarded and no one will do anything about it or even listen.”
Me (July, 2010, age 57). But he never gave up
McLuhan had doubts about his ability to get through to people, to get people to think about, to comprehend, the power of media. He would have been a fool not to. His style insured him critics. But he never gave up. Today it is clear, as Douglas Coupland says, what with Google, Facebook, You tube, and everything else like this blog your reading on the internet, McLuhan “was right on the money four decades ahead of the biggest shift in human communication since the printing press.”
Am I getting through to McLuhan? What can we learn from him after all these years?
Like McLuhan I too have doubts. As we approach our 200th post questions come to me. What was I thinking when I committed to 300 posts? Should I keep going? It’s been great, but why bother? What good does it do to sieve through old ground? Is the medium a barrier to the message? But then occasionally there are discoveries …
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
W. Terrence Gordon. Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding, 1997, p. 275.
Hot’s not hot!
Marshall McLuhan (December 13, 1977, age 66). In a word, you need charisma.
Today, Peter Gzowski asked me if the age of the Sophia Loren woman – the movie star – was over. Of course it is. To succeed today you must be able to succeed on television. And on television you can’t succeed with that hot stuff. That’s what killed Senator Joe McCarthy. One appearance on television and his career was over. That’s what killed Nixon too. The key is you’ve got to look like a lot of other nice people. That’s charisma.
Me (July, 2010, age 57). The meaning of charisma.
If you watch the McLuhan interview on Gzowski’s show you can tell that Gzowski doesn’t really know what to make of McLuhan. 
Take for example McLuhan’s definition of charisma: looking “like a lot of other nice people.” Gzowski laughs. He isn’t sure what to make of this. But clearly there is something in that definition that rings true and yet is unexpected. The definition forces you to think in the way a typical dictionary definition does not. For example a typical dictionary definition of the word is: “A capacity to inspire devotion and enthusiasm.” (The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.) McLuhan’s definition explains how that power or capacity is conferred with different media. On television, he is saying, the power to inspire devotion and enthusiasm is given to people who we think look like us. In McLuhan’s language they have a corporate or social image. But in the movies things are different. There the people who inspire devotion and enthusiasm – movie stars – do not look like us. They have their own unique private image. This is not a theoretical position. It is an observation.
Is it true? Is it true today? Is the same true for social media?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Marshall McLuhan: Filmmaker.
Marshall McLuhan (1970, age 68/69). Let’s make a movie!
I have just spent a very productive day with Jane Jacobs. We have written a script for a movie, “A Burning Would.” (You will of course recognize the reference to Finnegans Wake, “A burning would has come to dance inane.”) If all works out this film will either be the final word on the nature of film or stop the Spadina Expressway dead in its tracks.
Me (June 2010, age 57) Lessons?
Jane Jacobs describes the chaotic and exhilarating day she spent with McLuhan writing a film script in Who was Marshall McLuhan. The word “script” is an exaggeration. Here’s how the day went: he persuaded her to give it a try, they talked about ideas, McLuhan’s secretary, Margaret Stewart took notes, and typed them up, and McLuhan made arrangements to meet with the filmmaker David Mackay to discuss the “script.” Jacobs describes the resulting “script” as “garbled and unreadable” but also as “dazzling sparks and fragments.”
Remarkably the film (12 minutes long) was made [and even more remarkably doesn’t seem to be posted on YouTube]. Jacobs says that the film was “good” but “the final product bore no relationship at all to our original script.”
Perhaps, the major lessons to be learned from this film are:
Don’t be afraid to try new things (neither Jacobs nor McLuhan had ever tried to write a script before.)
Get yourself good partners.
Don’t be afraid to fail.
What new things are you doing?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Who Was Marshall McLuhan. Edited by Barrington Nevitt with Maurice McLuhan, 1995, pp. 101-102.
For other inspiration see Julien Smith’s In over your head.
And thanks to Michael Edmunds for this interview of McLuhan on his plans for filmmaking originally published in Take One in the 1970s – Marshall McLuhan makes a movie.
What was Marshall McLuhan up to?
Marshall McLuhan (December 13, 1977, age 66). I’m stunned!
Peter Gzowski actually suggested on television today that I had failed grade six! The fact is – as told him – “I never failed any grade ever.”
Me (June 2010, age 57). What was McLuhan up to?
What Gzowski asked was whether ordinary people who hadn’t attained McLuhan’s academic stature (Full Professor Toronto, Cambridge Ph.D.) should be able to feel better knowing that McLuhan had failed grade six. An easy question. At least one would think so. At any rate, McLuhan’s response clearly surprised Gzowski.
Why did McLuhan deny he’d failed? It is a fact that he did fail. And you can read about it in the biographies of McLuhan by Philip Marchand and Terry Gordon. It is also a fact that his Mother persuaded the school to let him go on to grade 7 and prove he could do the work, which he did. So why didn’t McLuhan say this? What was McLuhan up to?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
PS: For something completely different see yesterday’s post
Reading for this post
W. Terrence Gordon. Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding, 1997, p. 10.
Philip Marchand, Marshall Mcluhan: the Medium and the Messenger, 1989, p. 17-18.
The McLuhan method.
Marshall McLuhan (Spring 1971, age 59). At work in the Coach House
Come in, come in. Watch your step. No it’s no bother. Glad you came. Mrs. Stewart, let’s continue this dictation later. Now let me explain what I’m doing. It may not look like it, but I’m writing a book. You see these piles of books each with a file folder on top? That’s how you write a book. Get yourself some file folders, fill them with clippings and quotations, and then comment on them. Commenting, by the way, is easier if you have a secretary to comment to.
Me (June 2010, age 57). Order out of chaos
Dictation probably worked well for McLuhan because he liked to talk ideas out. I don’t. I prefer to write ideas out. The file folder method, however, is very similar the one I have chosen as the method for this blog. Each blog begins with a book by or about McLuhan in which I mark passages and a sheet of paper on which I place other references, clippings and quotations, which I then comment on. How’s it going? As the man who jumped off the Empire State building, said as he hurtled past the 40th floor, “so far so good.”
What’s your method of work? Did you choose it or did it choose you?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Who Was Marshall McLuhan, edited by Barrington Nevitt with Maurice McLuhan, 1995, pp. 141.