A tribute to and a lament for Marshall McLuhan. Five days a week, Tuesday through Saturday, I present one of McLuhan’s observations and talk about its relevance today. 300 ideas. 300 days. 300 posts.
Jokes
More than funny stories!
Marshall McLuhan (April 14, 1969, age 57). A grievous thing happened to me on my way to the studio
I am indebted to Steve Allen who observed that all jokes are based on grievances. That is why I collect funny stories. Jokes provide a sensitive measure of what is bothering people. For example drugs are one of the big grievances of our age. Not surprising then that these two jokes have recently become part of my collection. A reporter doing man-on-the-street interviews asks one man, “What do you think of LSD?” The man replies, “He’s a great President.” Then he asks, “What do you think of marijuana?” The man says, “My wife and I spent a week there on holidays and found it absolutely delightful.”
Me (April, 2010, age 57). What are the jokes about now?
Even when he’s joking, and Marshall McLuhan loved jokes, it’s wise to take him seriously. If McLuhan is right jokes are measures of what is bothering people. Perhaps this is why so many old jokes aren’t funny. They’ve outlived the grievances that gave them birth.
Judging by the comic strips in my morning newspaper, a commonly held current “public grievance” is the business presentation. For example
“How was the presentation?” says one co-worker to another in Real Life Adventures.
“Very meaty,” she replies.
“As in ‘informative?’”
“As in ‘baloney.’”
What jokes do you think reveal our current public grievances?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p. 367.
My earlier blog also on this topic.
Store house or slaughter house?
Marshall McLuhan (March 7, 1969, age 57). Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one
The college President was overheard saying that the reason universities are such great store houses of knowledge is that students enter them knowing so much and leave them knowing so little. That one always cracks me up.
Me (April 2010, age 57). What is the role of the university?
At this time of year, when students at colleges across the country are busy studying for and writing final exams, it is worth thinking about the role of the university and what it is that students learn at them. The serious side of the joke Marshall McLuhan tells is that what students learn at university is that a good deal of what they thought was true actually isn’t. And as a result they leave the university knowing less, but knowing more.
What did you unlearn at college or university?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p. 362.
Douglas Coupland’s Marshall McLuhan [cont’d]
Marshall McLuhan (March 20, age 98). I failed!
Corinne went out shopping – heaven’s not what I thought it was going to be – which gave me the opportunity to take that test in Douglas Coupland’s book about me. For the record my score was 21, which is a delightful result, particularly because it is divisible by three.
Me (March 2010, age 57). So did I!
As I promised to do yesterday, I took the test, too. My score was 19, which, sadly, is not divisible by three, but is a prime!
The test as Coupland explains in Marshall McLuhan was devised by psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues at Cambridge. It is called the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, or AQ, and is ‘a measure of the extent of autistic traits in adults.’ According to Coupland ‘in the first major trial using the test, the average score of the control group was 16.4. Eighty percent of those diagnosed with autism or a related disorder scored 32 or higher.’
Coupland suggests that to understand Marshall McLuhan it is helpful to view him as autistic. What does that mean? It does not mean, as Coupland says, that McLuhan couldn’t function in the world. He clearly did and so do many people who are autistic. It means in living his life he displayed particular traits. According to the test, someone with autism is more likely to prefer to do things on their own, do things the same way over and over again, and when imagining something, find it hard to create a picture in their mind. People without autism are just the opposite. Moreover the autistic tend to notice small sounds when others do not, are fascinated by numbers, and don’t particularly enjoy reading fiction.
But looking through this list I find it hard to see Marshall McLuhan as ‘autistic’. For example: He was fascinated by some kinds of numbers (numbers divisible by three – he was superstitious) but not all numbers (he thought of himself as a word man not a number man); and reading fiction was both his passion and his profession as a teacher of English literature at the University of Toronto. Admittedly, however, he did love his routines and often claimed to dislike change of any kind. The question is does the profile of someone with autism give us a quick and dirty way to profile Marshall McLuhan? Douglas Coupland says it does. I say no. I never met Marshall McLuhan. My understanding of him is based on my reading (including 4 biographies, his letters and books, and papers held at the National archives) and interviews with some people who knew him (including Professor Abraham Rotstein – who was part of McLuhan’s discussion group on media and technology at Toronto in the 1960s -and Dr. Michael Easterbrook – who is the son of McLuhan’s closest and oldest friend – Tom Easterbrook.
To profile Marshall McLuhan as ‘autistic’ makes for good tabloid reading. McLuhan did have some of the characteristics of autism. His hearing – like Coupland’s, apparently – was preternaturally acute. But many of the traits of autism seem to me to be wrong or smudgy ways to understand him. For example, the autistic, it is said, are often the last to understand the point of a joke. Marshall McLuhan was an irrepressible punning wise guy.
At bottom, my view is that to profile him as autistic is wrong on two levels. First, and most basically, it is wrong because the traits of autism mislead as much as they help in understanding McLuhan. And second, more fundamentally, it is wrong because it suggests, falsely, that McLuhan can be understood in one simple step. The messy reality of McLuhan is that he was an eccentrically unique complex individual who can and cannot be understood simply. A man of extraordinary gifts – creative genius, a photographic memory, the ability to make profound associations between people and events that at first sight would seem to be unrelated – he was a brilliant and unstoppable talker and a horrendous listener, oblivious social niceties and the needs of others. To label him as ‘autistic’ is not to know him better but to know him less.
Did you pass the test?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan, 2009
Now for something completely different, part 5 …
This week’s blogs are very different from those of previous weeks. The standard format of two short letters, one from Marshall McLuhan and one from me, is abandoned. Instead I am posting, in 5 parts, an essay which explains the single most important thing you need to know to understand Marshall McLuhan.
Previously, in part 1, posted Tuesday, I asserted that Marshall McLuhan lost his genius as a result of surgery to remove a brain tumor. In part 2, posted Wednesday I explained why it was necessary and how it was carried out. In part 3, posted Thursday, I explained why the operation was so damaging to McLuhan. Did McLuhan lose his genius as a result of the operation? I think so but you may want additional evidence. Yesterday, in part 4, I talked about two other pieces to this puzzle. Today, in part 5, the final chapter of this story, I talk about the meaning of it all.
Cordially, Me
Genius has brain surgery and loses his mind: The untold story of Marshall McLuhan
By Michael Hinton
In the final chapter of classic detective fiction, the crime is solved when the great detective – Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, for example – gathers all the suspects gathered together in the same room, lays out the evidence, and identifies the guilty party. Before I make my attempt to play the great detective, I want to say something briefly about what genius is and what it matters whether or not McLuhan’s genius was lost.
Genius the Romans thought was the essence of our character or personality. There is no doubt that in this sense, McLuhan’s brain surgery killed his genius. All his biographers I think would agree on this. He was a different man after the operation. But this is not what I mean by genius. I mean that “inborn exalted intellectual power” that “extraordinary imaginative, creative or inventive” spark that allows some minds to work faster than anyone else, for a longer time, and come to different conclusions. How many geniuses are there? Dr. Del Maestro told me that he believes the answer is something like one in six billion and that he had no doubt that McLuhan was a genius. How many lose their genius? Some; certainly Churchill did and so did Dr. Johnson, as a result of illness and possibly dementia. How many have lost their genius as a result of brain surgery? Possibly, only McLuhan, the numbers of true geniuses being small.
Understanding Media which was published 45 years ago is clearly the work of a genius, but not one who is easy to understand. To understand McLuhan you need to know that: (1) his greatest ideas can be found most vigorously expressed in his speaking and writing before his brain surgery in 1967; (2) the spoken word is the vehicle of his genius; and (3) his earlier work is generally speaking easier to understand than his later work because in his earlier work he was less concerned with presenting his ideas in mosaic form.
You can listen to McLuhan speak in his letters, his interviews, and his speeches. His writing before Understanding Media and the Gutenberg Galaxy can be found in his essays from the 1950s and 1960s in McLuhan Unbound, and his Report on Understanding New Media, 1960. Even so he is never easy to understand for several other reasons. His thought is densely packed with new ideas, in chapter 14 of Understanding Media, for example he identifies 100s of ways money can be thought of as an extension of our mind, bodies, or spirit. He delights in decorating his ideas with references to writers from all disciplines. In chapter 1 of the same book in the space of 6 pages (pages 9 to 14) he calls for support from the writings of Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida), Hans Selye, General David Sarnoff, W.W. Rostow, John Kenneth Galbraith, David Hume, E.H. Gombrich, Cardinal Newman, de Tocqueville, Gibbon, E.M. Forster, and Walt Whitman.
He uses a special vocabulary that does not mean what you might think it does; hot and cool, for example. His terms are often value-loaded; fragmented and visual bias, for example. His primary goal is often to jolt his readers and listeners out of their complacencies rather than to lead them to particular conclusions; his speech [this blog] at the Museum of the City of New York, in October 1967, he outraged his audience with the notion that the invention of the fire engine caused the proliferation of slums in 19th century western cities. Before this, of course, as the history of Paris and London shows, but McLuhan does not bother to explain, fires were responsible for the regular clearing away of slums and the re-building of newer and better-designed cities, although at great cost in terms of loss of life and misery for the urban poor. And, he loved to joke around; the medium is the massage, for example, making it difficult to tell when he is joking and when he is not.
Now, to deal with the difficult question of causality, a question McLuhan wrestled with a great deal. Who killed McLuhan’s genius?
Was it Dr. Mount? (Aristotle would have called Mount the efficient cause.) Was it the art and practice of brain surgery? (Aristotle’s formal cause.) Was it the length of the operation, the copper or nickel lifts, and the bruising of brain tissue? (Aristotle’s material cause.) Or was it McLuhan’s desire to live rather than die from the growth of the tumor? (Aristotle’s final cause.)
I prefer a final cause solution. That McLuhan killed his own genius. But this is not the most important question. The case of Marshall McLuhan is not, after all, a “who done it.” It’s a “what got done.” What happened to McLuhan? Did he lose his genius at the same time he lost his tumor? If so a great deal about McLuhan which was mysterious now becomes clear. Why his books after 1967 were never again as good as the ones before. Why he can be read and understood more easily in his writing before 1967 than after 1967. Why he was lionized in the 1960s and looked on as bit of a joke in the 1970s. Why he is so poorly understood today.
McLuhan’s real tragedy was not the stroke that took away his power to speak in 1979. His tragedy was that in choosing life in 1967 he had to let his genius go. If there is a happy ending here it is that the real McLuhan, the genius, lives on in all that he did before November 1967. And that is a legacy that will never die, and one we can return to whenever we wish for inspiration and enlightenment.
Now for something completely different, part 4 …
As you know if you’ve been following, this week’s blogs are very different from those of previous weeks. The standard format of two short letters, one from Marshall McLuhan and one from me, is abandoned. Instead I am posting, in 5 parts, an essay which explains the single most important thing you need to know to understand Marshall McLuhan.
Previously, in part 1, I asserted that Marshall McLuhan lost his genius as a result of surgery to remove a brain tumor. In part 2, I explained why it was necessary and how it was carried out. In part 3, I explained why the operation was so damaging to McLuhan. Did McLuhan lose his genius as a result of the operation? I think so but you may want additional evidence. Today, in part 4, I talk about two other pieces to this puzzle.
Cordially, Me
Genius has brain surgery and loses his mind: The untold story of Marshall McLuhan
By Michael Hinton
Did McLuhan lose his genius as a result of the operation? Was he greatly changed? Beyond the facts of the surgery itself, consider these two other clues. First the first clue. “Corinne [McLuhan] was very sharp and lovely and graceful,” historian Nicholas Olsberg, wrote me from his home in Arizona. “Always seemed odd that she made her match with such a clumsy guy [Marshall].”
In the winter of 1981, not long after Marshall’s death, Nicholas Olsberg spent his days valuing McLuhan’s papers ($1 million Canadian was the final figure) and his evenings chatting with Corinne, as a guest in Marshall’s house, at 3 Wychwood Place – sleeping in his study, surrounded by his books. It was during these conversations, undoubtedly, that Olsberg heard about Marshall’s clumsiness. The answer to Olsberg’s puzzlement about why a beauty, a 10, like Corinne would marry a clumsy, a 5, like McLuhan, of course, is that Corinne didn’t marry a clumsy guy. She married a tall powerful guy who won his rowing oar at Cambridge and missed a Rhodes scholarship, not for physical clumsiness, because for intellectual arrogance. The clumsy guy was created I submit by seizures, strokes, and most of all by a surgical operation to remove a brain tumor and the medication he needed to take in recovery to deal with the pain. The Marshall McLuhan Corinne talked about to Nicholas Olsberg was not the pre-1967 genius, but the post-1967 diminished, clumsy-guy.
The second clue is in the jokes that are told about McLuhan, and, in particular, one specific joke. Jokes, McLuhan liked to say, borrowing the observation from Steve Allen, are based on grievances. Jokes about McLuhan are based on the grievance, the complaint, that no one can understand him. That was the joke on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. That was the joke in the famous New Yorker cartoons on McLuhan of the 1960s. That was the joke in the famous bit of doggerel by A.J.M. Smith, “McLuhan put his telescope to his ear; What a lovely smell, he said, we have here.” And that was the joke about McLuhan in Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall.
Canadians who were twenty somethings in the 1970s, as I was, probably remember McLuhan best from his walk-on role in Annie Hall. The joke in the film, made in 1977, ten years after the operation, has been misunderstood by his fans. His biographers Judith Fitzgerald and Terry Gordon, for example, talk about his performance as an example of what a funny guy McLuhan was and how Woody didn’t get him. (The camera’s rolling.) A Communications Prof. from NYU is talking to his girl out front of a movie theatre. He’s talking about McLuhan. TV’s a hot medium, he says, blah, blah, blah. Woody hears this and gets irritated, (McLuhan said TV is a cool medium) and gets McLuhan. And McLuhan tells the guy off, ad-libbing: ‘You know nothing of my ideas. You think my fallacy is all wrong?” This breaks everyone up. Woody gets irritated again. (This time for real. McLuhan’s up-staged him.) Woody demands the scene be done over, and over again, which tires McLuhan. (Who does look tired and very thin.) He insists McLuhan say his lines differently – say focus not fallacy, and don’t say it as a question. In the end fallacy stays but the joke, one of McLuhan’s favourite lines which he likes to use with hecklers, is spoilt.
The truth of course is different. Woody not McLuhan knows best about comedy. They re-shoot because that’s how movies get made. McLuhan’s ad lib is not a brilliant performance. The guy he tells off isn’t a heckler, he’s a misinformed fan. McLuhan’s line is a solution for the wrong problem. The genius McLuhan would never have done this. He might have said “With friends like you, who needs fallacies,” or “You have my fallacies all wrong.” McLuhan is funny in the film because the joke does not hinge on words; the joke is McLuhan. The joke is his very presence.
[to be continued…]
Now for something completely different
Tuesday, February 23, 2010 will be my 100th post. To those of you who have been following this blog, especially, I should say something, now, by way of explanation and introduction, because this week’s blogs will be very different from the previous ones. Previously, each blog has consisted of two short letters. The first is from Marshall McLuhan, and introduces a particular idea or event in his life. (Perhaps I should make it clear – on the off-chance you have any doubts about it – these letters were not actually written by Marshall McLuhan, but by me as I have imagined him writing them. I have, however, based them on things he actually did say or write in letters, interviews, essays, speeches, or books, and have tried as far as I can to imitate his style without parodying it.) The second is from me talking about what Marshall says in his letter. (These letters I assure you are all actually written by me.) Hence the name of the blog: “From Marshall and Me.”
Today, I am posting the first part of a five-part essay on what I believe is the single most important thing you need to know to understand Marshall McLuhan. Here is part one. I hope you find it interesting and useful in making sense of one of Canada’s most extraordinary and perplexing minds. If you have any comments I would like to hear them.
Cordially Me
Genius has brain surgery and loses his mind: The untold story of Marshall McLuhan
By Michael Hinton
Thirty years ago, on September 26, 1979, Marshall McLuhan collapsed in his office, a book-strewn, file-piled, upstairs room in the Coach House at St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto. A short walk away from where he lay was the basement cafeteria of the old ROM, his former office on St Joseph Street, his first two homes in Toronto, at 81 St Mary’s Street and 29 Wells Hill Road, and all of the other places he had made his breakthroughs in communications and media studies. The cause of his collapse was a stroke that robbed him of the power to speak, read, and write for the last fifteen months of his life.
There’s a joke – an anecdote in McLuhan-speak about this: it probably didn’t make him any harder to understand. McLuhan’s wife Corinne once said, I’m paraphrasing here, that Marshall had three passions in life God, work, and her. But she ran a very distant third. After the stroke he still had God and Corinne, but the work was gone. Walking, but only just, barely able to move his hands, the man who rocketed to international stardom in 1966 with his dumbfounding eloquence – observing most famously that “the medium is the message” and that media had made the world “a global village” – was unable to communicate in any other way than by shrugging, grunting, grimacing, and forcing out an occasional “oh boy, um, ah, [and] yes.” Once looking out the window on a rainy day, Patrick Watson says, a bit of a poem came out, ‘April is the cruelest month.” A story that always moves me because he spent 40 years of his life teaching English literature, and what he must have been trying to say to his friend by quoting this first line from “The Wasteland.”
The wonder is not that poetry came out of his mouth. Aphasics frequently may sing more easily than they can speak and speak poetry when they cannot speak prose. And McLuhan loved poetry. At one time he had committed most of the Oxford book of English verse to memory. The wonder what he meant by this quotation. It could have been idle word play. This is April, it’s raining, here’s some poetry that loosely fits. But that I think is unlikely. What is more likely is that McLuhan was well aware of the dark meaning of that line of poetry, and of the darker meaning of the epigram that introduces the poem. April, Eliot is saying, is cruel because it wakens the world from its painless sleep to the misery of life in the wasteland. To McLuhan his current life of sharply constrained communication must have felt like a wasteland. The epigram of the poem is a passage from The Satyricon by Petronius. A scene is played out in the town square of ancient Cumae where the Sibyl – a prophetess – is imprisoned in a cage and is being taunted by a gang of children. “What do you want, Sibyl, they cry.” And she says,“I want to die.”
I wrote to Patrick Watson about the story of “April is the cruelest month.” He didn’t want to speak to me about this over the phone. Instead he asked me to send him questions by e-mail. I asked him a two-part question: Was the story true, that McLuhan had actually said this particular line of poetry, and what did he (Patrick Watson) say after McLuhan said it. He wrote me back the next day, to confirm that the story was true and add a question of his own, but unfortunately he left the second part of my question unanswered. (His e-mail reads: “Yes, I think that’s true. Do you know the source of the line?”) Too bad. I’d hoped to be able to discern from his answer something about McLuhan’s state of mind and his at the time. Wonder? Joy? Amazement? Foreboding? Sorrow? Indifference? Or what? Perhaps he couldn’t remember, or didn’t want to. But it doesn’t matter all that much now because McLuhan’s stroke and what happened afterward is not my concern. It was tragic, but it did not cause McLuhan to lose his genius.
That happened I believe a dozen years earlier in New York City, in November 1967 in the course of a long and harrowing operation McLuhan underwent to remove a brain tumor. Saying this I know will anger and upset many people, not only his surviving family and friends, but thousands of his followers around the world bound together by the internet. (The truth McLuhan liked to say, quoting Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot “is whatever upsets the apple cart.”) My intention however is not to upset people, especially the people who loved him, but to tell a story that needs to be told. A story that provides the best answer to a question that appeared in a New Yorker cartoon in 1970 when McLuhan’s celebrity was clearly ebbing: Says she to he on leaving a party “Are you sure it isn’t too early to ask, ‘Whatever happened to Marshall McLuhan?’ ” The story explains much about his life and work that otherwise would remain a mystery. In particular the decline in the quality of his work and the decay of his reputation after 1967. McLuhan you will discover did not die a genius tragically trapped inside a body that didn’t work. He died more tragically as a man who used to be a genius trapped inside a mind he found increasingly hard to recognize and to be reconciled with.
Part 2 tomorrow
Logic: The magic number 2
Marshall McLuhan (May 1959, age 47). Producers are becoming consumers
What an inauspicious day, Friday the thirteenth. Thank God my flight was yesterday. I flew in from Winnipeg where I spoke to the Winnipeg Ad and Sales Club. I led off with one of my favourite anecdotes, “Whenever I fly, I always carry a powerful bomb with me. This absolutely insures my safety, the probability of there being two such bombs on the plane being infinitesimally low.” They also liked my Newfie joke: “What’s written on the bottom of a Newfie beer bottle? Open other end.” Liked is a strong word, let’s say they were appreciative.
The ad men did a double take when I told them in the electric age, which is the age in which we live, things are moving so fast producers are becoming consumers. It’s a complex phenomenon, but basically a simple idea. Things are changing so fast producers have figured out ways to speed up, to go faster than the wave, and one way to do that is to understand consumers so well that you know them better than they do themselves. And when you do that you can anticipate their wants. That’s why the Russians launched Sputnik and why Prime Minister Diefenbaker is making a serious error in canceling the Avro Arrow. The biggest investment business is making today is in research and development. They do this not to create a lot of new machines, products, services but to speed up to stay ahead of all the change that’s built in to the system.
Michael Hinton (2009, age 57). The rule of 2
If Marshall McLuhan believed in the magical power of 3, he also believed in the logical power of the number 2. Pairs of concepts, the end points of a single dimension, opposites, either ors, this and that’s run through his work. Hot and cool, high definition and low definition, figure and ground, right brain and left brain, cliché and archetype, medium and message, visual and acoustic, eye and ear. So that even in his doctoral dissertation which he described as a history of the Trivium, the 3 disciplines of grammar rhetoric and logic which dominated schooling in the middle ages, for analytical purposes he reduced to a battle between 2 forces over time, the grammarians and the rhetoricians.
Twos are powerful precisely because they exclude grey middle possibilities. They force you to make clear distinctions, to make decisions, to avoid weaseling and waffling. All media he taught are hot or cool, not hot, warm, or cool. This bias for black or white bothered his quibble-prone academic readers, even those who viewed his work positively. For example, in his review of The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media in the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, Kenneth Boulding argues that to McLuhan the key dimension on which hot and cool media differed was “involvement.” But surely he argued other dimensions mattered too – such as “demandingness or effort,” “range in time and space,’ and,” “density or capacity.” These quibbles it’s worth noting all implicitly reject McLuhan’s starting point that what matters is the medium not it’s content.
For McLuhan, however, the power of a single dimension with 2 possibilities only was greater than the power of safer equivocating and qualifying multidimensional thinking. He believed in absolutes. Qualifications were for the intellectually weak of heart.
What other examples of 2s in McLuhan’s work are there? Which is the one you have found most stimulating?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, p. 252-255.
Boulding, Kenneth E. “The Medium and the Message,” reprinted in McLuhan: Hot and Cool. Edited by Gerald Emanuel Stearn. New York: New American Library, 1967, pp. 68-75.
Superstition: The magic number 3, or is it 2?
Marshall McLuhan (1968, age 57). The rule of 3
I’m told I’m so famous now I need an agent. People are making money off my name and I mean to get my share. My agent is Matie Molinaro. I asked her if she was a secret agent. She seems to like my jokes, obviously a woman of good taste, says if I’m going to do movie work I have to be a member of ACTRA and AFTRA. Corinne says she hopes the films will all be talkies. I said, me too, silent film will not do me justice, and I’m also hoping for a predominance of black and white. Colour is an unnecessary technical change and in my case not an improvement. Not incidentally, I asked Matie to make sure my ACTRA and AFTRA numbers are divisible by 3. I’m convinced, no, I’m persuaded by experience, that the number 3 and numbers divisible by three are lucky. Consider: I have 6 children; I live at 3 Wychwood Park; and Corrine and I were married in 1939. Q.E.D.
Michael Hinton (2009, age 57). The rule of 2
Marshall McLuhan was adamant about the luckiness of the number 3 and numbers divisible by 3. As a result the number 3 works its way through almost everything McLuhan touched. For example, he often said that the best place to test-read a book was on page 69. If that page was interesting then he said the book was worth reading, if not then you should move on. Understanding Media: The extensions of man, (6 words) is comprised of 33 chapters. The Gutenberg Galaxy (3 words, 8 if you count the subtitle) is a bit more complicated example. In manuscript the book consisted of 399 pages. The book is comprised of 111 mosaic bits – ‘Prologue’, plus ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’, the 107 ‘chapter glosses’, ‘The Galaxy Reconfigured’, and ‘Bibliographic Index’. 112, however, if you count the ‘Index of Chapter Glosses.’) In setting up this blog you will see that the magic number 3 has played a role. For example, I’ve promised to do a total of 300 ideas, 300 days, and 300 posts. And the headline for this blog is 9 words.
The power of 3 on the mind of Marshall McLuhan notwithstanding, a strong case can be made that Marshall McLuhan felt the number 2 was as powerful if not more powerful than 3. (To be continued tomorrow.)
What are you superstitious about? Certain numbers? Avoiding black cats and walking under ladders? Do you have a lucky shirt, lucky shoes, or a lucky colour? Any other 3s in Marshall McLuhan’s life and writing that you would like to add?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Molinaro, Matie Armstrong. “Marshalling McLuhan,” in Marshall McLuhan: the man and his message. Edited by George Sanderson and Frank Macdonald. Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum, 1989, pp. 88.
W. Terrence Gordon, Marshall McLuhan: Escape into understanding, 1997, pp.185-190.