Book Description

In the last twenty years of his life, Marshall McLuhan published a series of books that established his reputation as a world-renowned communications theorist and the pre-eminent seer of the modern age. It was McLuhan who made the distinction between "hot" and "cool" media. And it was he who coined the phrases "the medium is the message" and "the global village" and popularized other memorable terms including "feedback" and "iconic."

McLuhan was far more than a pithy phrasemaker, however. He foresaw the development of personal computers at a time when computers were huge, unwieldy machines available only to institutions. He anticipated the wide-ranging effects of the Internet. And he understood, better than any of his contemporaries, the transformations that would be wrought by digital technology -- in particular, the globalization of communications and the instantaneous-simultaneous nature of the new, electric world. In many ways, we're still catching up to him -- forty years after the publication of Understanding Media.

In Understanding Me, Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines have brought together nineteen previously unpublished lectures and interviews either by or with Marshall McLuhan. They have in common the informality and accessibility of the spoken word. In every case, the text has been transcribed from the original audio, film, or videotape of McLuhan's actual appearances. This is not what McLuhan wrote but what he said -- the spoken words of a surprisingly accessible public man. He comes across as outrageous, funny, perplexing, stimulating, and provocative. McLuhan will never seem quite the same again.

The foreword by Tom Wolfe provides a twenty-first century perspective on McLuhan's life and work, and co-editor David Staines's insightful afterword offers a personal account of McLuhan as teacher and friend. ... Read more

Book Description

with a new foreword by Neil Postman

"The best--I might say the only good--précis of McLuhan's thought I have ever read." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Beautifully written. . . . brings instant recognition of that weird, exhilarating vortex of ideas that McLuhan meant to us. . ." -- Globe and Mail

When communications thinker Marshall McLuhan gave us the phrases "the medium is the message" and "global village," he was ahead of his time. Now, in the age of the digital revolution McLuhan and his work cannot be ignored by any student of culture and technology. Interest in McLuhan has increased dramatically since this biography was first published in 1989 to stunning reviews. The author has extensively revised this new edition to include additional information provided by McLuhan's family and friends, and to present an even clearer and more absorbing personal picture of McLuhan. The book explains the relevance to today's society of a man who reached the height of his fame in the 1960s. The foreword by Neil Postman is original to this edition. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Must-read while studying McLuhan
Marchand and Postman do an excellent job with this biography on an unusual media prophet/quack. Reading about McLuhan's childhood, education, and work helped explain a lot about the man and his ideas. The book reads very well, and puts a lot of his ideas in a context that makes them easier to understand. If you're just starting to study McLuhan, this book is a great starting point. Also check out "McLuhan for Beginners" for a very quick and fun overview. ... Read more

Amazon.com

Sixties media theorist Marshall McLuhan understood the implications of emerging mass media on society. This book revisits McLuhan's insights in the wake of our digital communications and technological progress. How have his concepts held up? Very well indeed, apparently, as we see in this book, which presents excerpts of McLuhan's work and commentary from today's thinkers about media, including Lewis Lapham, Neil Postman, and Robert Fulford.McLuhan has been called the patron saint of the digital revolution, and this book is a testament and proof that he deserves the title. ... Read more

Reviews (4)

Now that you know, go use the knowledge.
Without trying to undermine the insights of McLuhan himself, I think that this book represents just another episode in the 'everybody loves Marshall' series. Similar to 'Digital McLuhan' by Levinson, this book is crawling with remarks stating how great and wonderful McLuhan was and that it is such a big loss for the world as we know that he's dead. I sincerely wish that - as McLuhan put it himself - the comments would engage more in a dynamic discours on his insights and thoughts and would try to make something out of it. But no, I find myself flipping through oodles of pages for the simple reason that it just contains one of those trival McLuhan-anecdotes/memorabilia. Supposedly McLuhan made it to the top ten of all-time thinkers - such as Nietzsche, Kant, Plato etc. Sure, the insights provided by him are pretty slick, but one has to look for them since most of the books concern the opinions of others that would also like to say a thing or two. It's like a bunch of groupies standing at the far end of a stage thinking that they now too are famous. As far the rest of the book is concerned, there are some nice quotes from McLuhan himself that could very well change your perspective on things happening in our world today. It provides some interesting insights and line of thought for further study. Respect goes out to the extensive bibliography that make it easier to trace back his work. It is truly 'McLuhan for the coffee-table', but mind you, there might be a lot of uninvited guests.

A Book, A Hot Medium
Forward through the Rearview Mirror: Reflections on and by Marshall McLuhan can be considered one of the greatest tributes McLuhan could have ever received. By preserving the particular organization, writing style, and design McLuhan used in The Medium is the Massage and Global Village, editors Paul Benedetti and Nancy DeHart are able to keep his soul and ideology alive. Insights not only from McLuhan himself, but also from many other media theorists who react and share their experiences about the readings, are the editor's elements to explain what was going on deeply inside McLuhan's mind.

As the MTV programming, this book has a continuous flow in which each chapter looks like a new video clip, which is totally related with the preceding, and flows directly into the following. However, instead of creating these connections with complete paragraphs and nice connectors, the editors choose to throw isolated pieces of pictures, paragraphs and quotations. It is the inner most meaning of every written and visual piece what makes a unified theory out of this book. A new way of communication which McLuhan would define as "Any new structure for codifying experience and moving information, be it alphabet or photography, has the power of imposing its structural character and assumptions upon all levels of our private and social lives" (106). Therefore, a chapter named "Violence and Identity" will start with a two-page-black and white picture of a Ku Klux Klan's ritual followed by a quotation: "Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence." On the next page, a picture of a ten-year-old child wearing latex gloves and a gun in each hand; then, McLuhan's theory is introduced with big blue letters: "IT'S WHY THEY HAVE TO KILL," and so forth. This continuous fluidity of meaningful images and writings, involves the audience in an exciting rhythm, making it interact and experience what McLuhan was trying to say by "The Medium is the Message."

Instead of having a defined introduction, body and conclusion, Forward through a Rearview Mirror is composed of three different types of writing: biographical information, writings by McLuhan, and writings on McLuhan. Each one of them is placed by the editors to ease the reader's understanding of McLuhan's speech. Information about his background, life, and surroundings is provided by a timeline that covers his most important years: his experiences at different stages of his career, the birth of his own family, and his social life. All these factors influenced his way of analyzing our culture. From interviews, speeches, and books, Benedetti and DeHart quote McLuhan to provide objective information about his insights. Because most of his citations are abstract aphorisms, the audience can read his words either superficially or deeply, stimulated by the adventure of discovering his hidden insights, always present in his works. However, the reader is not alone in this adventure. Other media theorists such as John Fraser or Lewis Laphom share their experiences when reading the philosopher. Moreover, as the biographical information, these media producers also help to guide the reader by providing him/her with different analysis and points of view towards McLuhan. Although the book doesn't follow the conventional three-part linearity, it seems custom made for the rushing reader of the nineties. It doesn't matter on which page we open Forward through the Rearview Mirror. It can always provide an interesting analysis of our own society.

However, Paul Benedetti and Nancy DeHart do not only keep McLuhan's organization and writing style, but also preserve his idea of convey insights using the visual medium. Therefore, Forward Through the Rearview Mirror is designed to the image of McLuhan's major works The Medium is the Massage and Global Village. These two books submerge the reader into a multidimensional medium of meaningful abstract and figurative visuals. For instance, the editors create the same type of metaphors that McLuhan employed in his publications, by explaining the world's current globalization with ten bottles of Coca-Cola all written in different languages. Moreover, as Marshall McLuhan's last works, the unconventional format of this book also stands out in the reader's library. While both the medium is the massage and Global Village are smaller than any standard size book, Forward through the Rearview Mirror is wider and shorter than any conventional book.

Forward through the Rearview Mirror shows the complete involvement of Paul Benedetti and Nancy DeHart in McLuhan's life and ideas. Following Marshall McLuhan's guidelines, they carefully place each element in their book to create an outstanding piece. From its outside cover to its inner most meaning, this book breaks all standards, thus, draws the attention from an audience willing to find a new and high-quality product. Guided by McLuhan's print media by juxtaposing significant images and phrases to create movement and rhythm. When experiencing this book, the reader combines the sound of his reading and the meaningful visuals inside his mind, creating an audio-visual medium out of Forward the through the Rearview Mirror. If this phenomenon is achieved, McLuhan's theory is confirmed: "It is man who is content of the message of the media, which are extensions of himself" DeHart and Benedetti understand McLuhan, preserving his thoughts alive, and honor him in their piece of art.

The Concice McLuhan
I think the reviewer below summed it well in his subject line saying "McLuhan for the coffee table." Essentially this book is a list of one-liners and ideas of McLuhans. Snippets and paragraphs from books and articles. Could very well be for the beginner, but without explanitory notes (but with pictures); while it could also be for the person already well versed in McLuhans thoughts. Either way, I found it a great book as I find his thinking fascinating, curious and many times humerous. Well presented in large paperback format with slick paper and color photos, this book is a quick and easy McLuhan treat.

McLuhan for the coffee table.
If McLuhan is new to you, and/or if you have a short attention span, this is the one to pick up. McLuhan's timeless insights into the evolution of man's synthesized environment are juxtaposed with in-your-face photographs and artwork that serve as indisputable evidence of the truth of his analysis. Reading this book at 30,000 feet, I was struck at just how clearly McLuhan is able to penetrate the distraction, distortion, and pre- conceptions endemic to modern technical civilization. The book is indeed like a high altitude surveillance flight over the electomagnetic infrastructure of our age. The combination of images and text have a synergy imploring the reader to understand the accelerating importance of man's media in shaping his behavior. Serve with "Propaganda", by Jacques Ellul, and "Manufacturing Consent", by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Fine intellectual biography
Mr. Gordon concentrates on Mcluhan's intellectual development and shows McL.'s work as a single work in progress built on a unique foundation. It is not as merely gossipy as Marchand's biography, and not for the reader unfamiliar with the world of ideas McL. dealt with. There is nothing of the pop celebrity here, but a serious presentation of the intellectual ground under all of McLuhan's work.

I Was Tempted To Escape Into Sleep Far Too Often
I purchased this book because I was interested in learning as much as I could about the enigmatic Marshall McLuhan. Unfortunately, Mr. McLuhan has failed to find his ideal biographer in this work. Marshall McLuhan was the media intellectual from Canada who wrote, taught and spoke presciently of the effects of media on ourselves and our culture. Much of his work was rather heady stuff, and out of the reach of the dillettante. Even his most famous phrase, "the medium is the message" is poorly understood by many, including some who are thought to be blessed with large portions of gray matter. And the author of this biography W. Terrence Gordon can't seem to find the formula for delivering palatable explainations of McLuhan's catchphrases. The book unevenly shifts from the recounting of McLuhan's life, to the development of his groundbreaking research and novel ideas on everything from the ancient Trivium to electronic media, and he never settles into a comfortable pace. One can sense that McLuhan's life was unique, compelling and interesting, but it is rendered dry and antiseptic in this telling, and our author fares even more poorly in attempting to school us in the intellectual legacy of McLuhan, never properly defining terms in some instances, jumping way over our heads in others, and most maddening of all, sticking 80-some pages of notes at the end of the book which would have served us far better as foot-notes or inclusions in the main text. All this having been said, the subject was interesting enough and the materials included specific enough, where I was able to find many interesting paths for further exploration, which made slogging through this ponderous book, worth the effort at the end... But as I said, this fascinating man's life is deserving of a far more interesting and organized writer's efforts. ... Read more

Book Description

A major critical discussion of the work of Marshall McLuhan. ... Read more

Reviews (5)

The Virtual Marshall McLuhan
A Review
The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, Donald F. Theall
McGill-Queens University Press, 305 pp.
(with a historical appendix by Edmund Carpenter)

Everything about Marshall McLuhan is paradoxical. He knew this about himself and made much of it as an attention-getting strategy even to the point of appearing to be a trickster, an artist of sorts. Like a Dadaist or Surrealist, who were antagonistic toward middle class society in the avant garde Bohemian tradition of épater-le-bourgeois, McLuhan 'twitched the burghers' of establishment values far and wide almost globally. McLuhan noticed first and best how electric process was changing society and individuals.
I know of no one who understands McLuhan's electric and eclectic vision better than Donald Theall. As McLuhan's first and most important Ph.D. student and close associate from 1950-54, Theall was let in on the complex developments that produced the Explorations Group, the Ford Foundation study that led to Understanding Media, and the establishment of the Centre for Culture and Technology at St.Michael's college in the early sixties. Theall was privy to the developing relations between Harold Innis, Tom Easterbrook, Edmund Carpenter, Dorothy Lee and the rest of this historically significant association.
Many commentators flirt with the ambiguities of McLuhan's vision but a true understanding of the coherence of this vision is extremely rare. Theall brilliantly links McLuhan's , at the time rather unseemly, popularity with his understanding of the very early virtualizing role of the intellectual in the electronic age:

Speaking about some remarks of the classical eighteenth-century father of capitalist economics, Adam Smith, ... McLuhan argues: "in this passage Smith does seem to sense that the new role of the intellectual is to tap the collective consciousness of 'the vast multitudes that labour.' That is to say, the intellectual is no longer to direct individual perception and judgment but to explore and to communicate the massive unconscious of collective man. The intellectual is merely cast in the role of a primitive seer, vates or hero incongruously peddling his discoveries in a commercial market. (Theall. 208)

This is an example of the deep understanding that only Theall can bring to McLuhan's work. After McLuhan has described himself, to Ezra Pound, as "an intellectual thug," the prophetic huckster gives his reason for being satiric and disinterested in society: "Everyman of goodwill is the enemy of society." (McLuhan, 1962, 269) This is a deeply conservative view of one's fellow citizens - original sin as politics.
Theall sees McLuhan as a new kind of artist, a sort of poet who produces what Theall calls the "essai concrete," a poetic prose that captures the multiplexed meanings of the electric worldview. McLuhan follows Joyce in his unrelenting punning ambiguities - a strategy for multiplying meanings. There is never anything linear, logical or definite in the "probes" that Dr. McLuhan injects into situations. But it is never a matter of listing either/or oppositions (even though he was maddeningly dichotomous in some of his statements), so much as learning how to follow a both/and approach to events that most interests McLuhan in his Joycean and satiric posture.
Theall, being one of the few people knowledgeable of the deep background of scholarship behind McLuhan's contemporary façade, is incisive in his understanding of McLuhan's profound ambivalence in the face of traditional intellectual categories. McLuhan is neither fish nor fowl, neither moralizing conservative nor countercultural guru. Being partly both, he transcended both in his electric odyssey, and planted the first oar in the side of post-modernism by becoming himself another virtual self.
What is almost always missed except by a very few and Theall foremost, is the perception of the darker side of McLuhan, his arcane knowledge which derives from his Cambridge Ph.D. studies in the hermetic tradition of the early grammarians - characters from Cicero to Blake through Cornelius Agrippa and Joachim de Floris. The Hermetic implications of the dissertation on Nashe show an earlier interest in such ideas.
In short, I know of no one better able to comment credibly on the multi-faceted genius of McLuhan: the artist, the satirist, the exploring pioneer of the electric world in all its complex diversity and amazing revelations.
Anyone who worked closely with Marshall McLuhan took their intellectual lumps. He was capable of great kindness and generosity but stood adamantly against any meddling with his work unless powerful new perceptions were presented to
him. Without mentioning Yeats and his famous reluctance to explain his poems because ("it tends to limit their suggestibility") McLuhan's position is deftly handled by Theall who worked very closely with the master. "My canvasses are surrealist, and to call them theories is to miss my satirical intent altogether. As you will find in my literary essays, I can write the ordinary kind of prose any time I choose to do so." (Theall, 67)
The quite deliberate difficulties in McLuhan's writing are rooted in his taste for paradox and rhetorical play. The artful ambiguities that arise from this approach Theall is better than anyone to convey. He produces a brilliant insight: "The power of ambiguity to imply more than can be said and the power of juxtaposing items without comment to intensify observation are two strategies McLuhan had learned from Pound, Eliot and F.R. Leavis. (Theall., 68)
Some of Theall's best observations deal with McLuhan's proclivity for an allusive and aphoristic prose style that goes way back and is rooted in classical literature. His knowledge of the obscurity of surrealism, modernist symbolisme, and high modernist post-symbolism ... reinforced and radicalized lessons he had learned earlier from Francis Bacon's observations about the advantages of a deliberately obscure, parabolic style - what Bacon called crypsis... . (Theall., 68)

The Virtual McLuhan has both scope and depth of understanding from perhaps the one scholar whose knowledge of McLuhan's genius is based on his own and his intimate almost filial relationship with the great men. The chapter "Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Modernism" is a first in bringing the darker McLuhan into fine focus. Fitted out in the robes of precursor it is possible to see McLuhan as Theall presents him as anticipating cyberspace, postmodernism and the Internet. His prescience is well marked and displayed by Donald Theall in this excellent, sine qua non, treatment of McLuhan the man and the multiplex and dynamic ideas which remain alive and are extended beyond the original in Theall's hands.

A Book From A Master's Apprentice
Biographies and accounts of the famous possess a certain fascination. Sometimes even flashes of illumination. But most are based on second-hand knowledge of authors attracted to the famous after attainment of fame. This is often too late because fame has a way of creating a type of trickster mythology obscuring its subject.

A rare few biographies are written by those who had close friendships with the famous before the hazy mythology of fame enveloped their subject. Here are the famous before they were "hijacked" and packaged by icon-making PR handlers, before their entrance onto world stages or tabloid pages. Reading these accounts is somewhat like watching scratchy old home movies that peek into the shadowy early years before later lives were illuminated by the bright flashes of the paparazzi cameras. These stories are often the most interesting, the most enlightening, the most instructive, and too, the most paradoxical and ambiguous.

These thoughts come to mind in reading the brilliant and fascinating book The Virtual Marshall McLuhan by Donald Theall professor emeritus, former president of Trent University and author of The Medium Is the Rear View Mirror. In the thick mythological haze which particularly surrounds the McLuhan legend, it is indeed a rare and insightful friendship.

With this in mind, Theall's book is still a funny hybrid genre not easy to place in traditional categories. Andrew Potter, a reporter for the Canadian National Post says it well in his March 24, 2001 review of the book "Rescuing McLuhan." Potter writes Theall's book "is not a biography of McLuhan, nor is it an application or elaboration of his views. It is perhaps best understood as an exercise in retrieval, an attempt to rescue McLuhan from McLuhanism and McLuhanites, from those who would portray him as the patron saint of the new corporate technotopia as well as from those...who would read him as an early voice in the wilderness, warning of civilization's demise."

* * *

In the summer of 1950, Donald Theall arrived at the University of Toronto as a graduate student. The director of Graduate Studies of the English Department attempted to warn Theall against doing a doctoral degree with an avant-garde, unorthodox professor at the University named Marshall McLuhan.

But Theall was not persuaded and decided to stay in Toronto to study under the iconoclastic professor rather than return to Yale. Theall writes "I felt that between the historically oriented University of Toronto Department of English and the avant-garde McLuhan I was obtaining a badly needed awareness of the study of literature in its historical context as well as within a new, broadly interdisciplinary context."

McLuhan embedded his teaching in literary history but also in the history of grammar, logic, rhetoric, and early theories of education. It was a history of inter-relationships between literature, the arts, and the everyday culture. Certainly a rare combination at the time and one that threatened the rather insular perspective of the English Department at the University of Toronto. When he arrived, McLuhan was the only lay member of the English Department, which primarily consisted of a handful of priests and three nuns.

The Marshall McLuhan that Donald Theall and his new bride Joan met in 1950 was a "charming, good looking, witty, fun-loving, highly intelligent devotee to the world of letters and traditional arts." More significant for what has come to be, notes Theall, McLuhan was a technophobe who often despised technology. In 1950 he did not own an automobile or a vacuum cleaner. And he did not type but used pen and ink and stored his notes in small boxes that had originally contained Laura Secord chocolates.

Toronto in the 50s personified McLuhan's technophobia. It was a boring, forgotten city of three-quarters of a million people. Theall calls it an "overgrown village" adding it was a "somewhat idyllic...still semi-colonial, marginally contemporary city...a sedate, stuffy city where on Sundays the major department store drew curtains across its windows, stores did not sell cigarettes, and people could not have wine or other alcoholic beverages with a restaurant meal ... There was no television; the only radio network, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)...was government owned."

Another close friend and collaborator of McLuhan in Toronto of the 50s was Edmund "Ted" Carpenter. In his short enlightening McLuhan memoir "That Not-So-Silent Sea" in the Appendix of Theall's book, Edmund Carpenter remembers Toronto as a "depressing" place, "not a joyous place at all." It had a meanness which was visible everywhere - in its architecture, its food. McLuhan once described it to Carpenter as the "cringing, flunkey spirit of Canadian culture" and "its servant quarter snobbishness." Leopold Infeld, one of Carpenter's friends, suggested it was "perhaps the finest city in which to die, especially on Sunday afternoon when the transition between life and death would be continuous, painless and scarcely noticeable."

* * *

Theall's book is a master memoir of a time and a person that no other McLuhan biographer can come close to. It is not an easy book and those interested in reading a McLuhan for Dummies are advised to steer clear of this book. But this book is the real thing. I wrote a 6,000 word review of the book which was scheduled for publication in a publication that went out of business. I would be happy to send this review to anyone if they simply write me at jfraim@symbolism.org. Judge for yourself about Donald Theall's book. For myself, it is a masterpiece from the apprentice of the master.

This is a Great Book!
Come on now, the title of the earlier review tells it all, except that Donald Theall isn't the one involved in the academic infighting.

It is also factually incorrect, since the entire sweep of McLuhan's work is more than amply covered in Theall's excellent biography.

As McLuhan's first PhD student Theall (along with McLuhan's first "partner" Ted Carpenter) presents a careful and nuanced perspective on the life and influences of McLuhan -- a rarity in a world where McLuhan has been used for everything short of selling pipe tobacco.

Let those who were outside McLuhan's life fight over him, Theall (and Carpenter) are clearly insiders and they give us the sharpest insight yet into the life of this towering intellect.

A Rare Look From An Apprentice of The Master
Biographies and accounts of the famous possess a certain fascination. Sometimes even flashes of illumination. But most are based on second-hand knowledge of authors attracted to the famous after attainment of fame. This is often too late because fame has a way of creating a type of trickster mythology obscuring its subject.

A rare few biographies are written by those who had close friendships with the famous before the hazy mythology of fame enveloped their subject. Here are the famous before they were "hijacked" and packaged by icon-making PR handlers, before their entrance onto world stages or tabloid pages. Reading these accounts is somewhat like watching scratchy old home movies that peek into the shadowy early years before later lives were illuminated by the bright flashes of the paparazzi cameras. These stories are often the most interesting, the most enlightening, the most instructive, and too, the most paradoxical and ambiguous.

These thoughts come to mind in reading the brilliant and fascinating book The Virtual Marshall McLuhan by Donald Theall professor emeritus, former president of Trent University and author of The Medium Is the Rear View Mirror. In the thick mythological haze which particularly surrounds the McLuhan legend, it is indeed a rare and insightful friendship.

With this in mind, Theall's book is still a funny hybrid genre not easy to place in traditional categories. Andrew Potter, a reporter for the Canadian National Post says it well in his March 24, 2001 review of the book "Rescuing McLuhan." Potter writes Theall's book "is not a biography of McLuhan, nor is it an application or elaboration of his views. It is perhaps best understood as an exercise in retrieval, an attempt to rescue McLuhan from McLuhanism and McLuhanites, from those who would portray him as the patron saint of the new corporate technotopia as well as from those...who would read him as an early voice in the wilderness, warning of civilization's demise."

* * *

In the summer of 1950, Donald Theall arrived at the University of Toronto as a graduate student. The director of Graduate Studies of the English Department attempted to warn Theall against doing a doctoral degree with an avant-garde, unorthodox professor at the University named Marshall McLuhan.

But Theall was not persuaded and decided to stay in Toronto to study under the iconoclastic professor rather than return to Yale. Theall writes "I felt that between the historically oriented University of Toronto Department of English and the avant-garde McLuhan I was obtaining a badly needed awareness of the study of literature in its historical context as well as within a new, broadly interdisciplinary context."

McLuhan embedded his teaching in literary history but also in the history of grammar, logic, rhetoric, and early theories of education. It was a history of inter-relationships between literature, the arts, and the everyday culture. Certainly a rare combination at the time and one that threatened the rather insular perspective of the English Department at the University of Toronto. When he arrived, McLuhan was the only lay member of the English Department, which primarily consisted of a handful of priests and three nuns.

The Marshall McLuhan that Donald Theall and his new bride Joan met in 1950 was a "charming, good looking, witty, fun-loving, highly intelligent devotee to the world of letters and traditional arts." More significant for what has come to be, notes Theall, McLuhan was a technophobe who often despised technology. In 1950 he did not own an automobile or a vacuum cleaner. And he did not type but used pen and ink and stored his notes in small boxes that had originally contained Laura Secord chocolates.

Toronto in the 50s personified McLuhan's technophobia. It was a boring, forgotten city of three-quarters of a million people. Theall calls it an "overgrown village" adding it was a "somewhat idyllic...still semi-colonial, marginally contemporary city...a sedate, stuffy city where on Sundays the major department store drew curtains across its windows, stores did not sell cigarettes, and people could not have wine or other alcoholic beverages with a restaurant meal ... There was no television; the only radio network, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)...was government owned."

Another close friend and collaborator of McLuhan in Toronto of the 50s was Edmund "Ted" Carpenter. In his short enlightening McLuhan memoir "That Not-So-Silent Sea" in the Appendix of Theall's book, Edmund Carpenter remembers Toronto as a "depressing" place, "not a joyous place at all." It had a meanness which was visible everywhere - in its architecture, its food. McLuhan once described it to Carpenter as the "cringing, flunkey spirit of Canadian culture" and "its servant quarter snobbishness." Leopold Infeld, one of Carpenter's friends, suggested it was "perhaps the finest city in which to die, especially on Sunday afternoon when the transition between life and death would be continuous, painless and scarcely noticeable."

* * *

Theall's book is a master memoir of a time and a person that no other McLuhan biographer can come close to. It is not an easy book and those interested in reading a McLuhan for Dummies are advised to steer clear of this book. But this book is the real thing... Judge for yourself about Donald Theall's book. For myself, it is a masterpiece from the apprentice of the master.

Academic in-fighting and whining
This is a bad book. The author seems determined gain significance by his past association with McLuhan, and defend some unflattering references to himself that appeared in T. Gordon's excellent intellectual biography. The book goes round and round the same points again and again, using the same quotes in chapter after chapter. Theall has not mastered the most elementary McLuhan material, or he would not use the posthumous 'Global Village' over LOM. Nor was McLuhan 'schizoid' as Theall characterizes him. This is exactly the sort of ivory tower politics that McLuhan abhorred. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Excellent Introduction to a Guru I Never Knew
Marshall McLuhan was a Wise Guy, a very wise guy. In some ways, he was a phrophet, coming from Canada, no less! It opened my eyes to him and I think Judith Fitzgerald will go down in history as being a great poet, thinker, and genius herself, like her mentor and favourite Canadian. I didn't know he was a McLuhanatic until she wrote about that and she proves he was anything but. I like her writing style in prose but I LOVE her poetry. I started reading her writing in my first year English course but after I read River, I found Iphigenia's Song and it was the best find I could have found. It made me soooo happy when I was very dpwm and feeling I could never be anything but a lonely girl. Judith showed me there is peace and joy, and she helped me stop hurting myself with her book. I never thought I would read about razor blades and scars and find it devastating and beautiful both. I know I am just a girl in Ottawa but I am very very happy to know that even a girl like me matters and I know she wrote this book to help others but it is mostly and the poetry that is so moving and beautiful, the poet is extraordinary and I love her writing.I will order more of her books when I have more money. I have already bought Given Names and Rapturous Chronicles but I am saving them to read them on my birthday because I am not really a published poet yet. All my friends know I am asking them for books by Judith Fitzgerald and I will give me these birthday presents when the time comes, too. I was born on Canada Day. I am truly a Canadian and I think Marshall McLuhan and Judith Fitzgerald are our greatest artists and poets and thinkers. Both are Genius! Awesome. I love them both. I also bought Understanding Media but I don't think I am smart enough to understand it all yet. I know I am not a narcissist in a narcotic haze. Other than that, buy anything you can by either Marshall McLuhan and Judith Fitzgerald. They will make you see the world with fresh eyes. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

An insightful, history of McL., background, and influence.
Mr. Cavell's McLuhan in Space is an important academic examination of Mcluhan's provenance and legacy; and that praise is also its chief handicap, for its style will please only those in the ivory tower. And that is too bad, because his assessment of McLuhan is accurate. If it fails to escape the formal dialectical style McLuhan eschewed, it does describe the method McLuhan used in sympathetic and insightful terms. The theme here is the resonant interval, in and between different sensory spaces, and between discordant, seemingly unrelated ideas drawn from physics and rhetoric. Cavell handles the first easily, and casts profound hints about the second. He does not leap himself, but traces the trajectory of many leaps McLuhan made; or, if you prefer, he solves the crime after it has been committed. For those who need proof of McLuhan's importance it is a valuable work. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

To the point of absurdity, but still true enough
McLuhan is a comic hero for me. What seemed mysterious about McLuhan's mirth, when I was merely reading his books, might be even worse, now that I can't stop thinking about how he topped everyone else, driven, as only a McLuhan fan would be, into trying to explain how Marshall McLuhan writing letters, attempting to explain his wildly radical ideas to the people of his world, ought to be understood as being comic, like a light-saber stab at grasping things that extended far beyond irony. Collapse might be the word that is used so often in this book that, if it had been listed in the Index, the Index would have been more than 15 pages.

To understand modern society as a comic society, it helps to get beyond the famous comedians, movie stars, and around the little kid characters of `South Park' who attempt, in a thoroughly juvenile manner, to create their own involvement in modern life. In the intellectual direction, Marshall McLuhan stands as a character possessing a level of thought which allows LETTERS OF MARSHALL McLUHAN to be a prime example of humor in action. This might not be the perfect book for every reader, but it coincides nicely with my appreciation of how entertainment values resonate with real life. This review is not an attempt to achieve some overall evaluation of this book. Out of spite, I will try the opposite approach, emphasizing the idiosyncratic abuse of intellect as a weapon used by Marshall McLuhan to attack everything which any superpower would attempt to do while disguising itself as ordinary.

There are several dozen references in the book to Canada, CBC, CBC-TV, and CRTC (Canadian Radio-Television Commission). McLuhan certainly felt enough at home there to enjoy himself by sending Pierre Elliott Trudeau a letter on January 5, 1973, which began:

Dear Pierre,
A one-liner that is very flexible in its use goes: "As Zeus said to Narcissus: `Watch yourself!' " (p. 461).

At a time when the major powers were moving towards signing a ceasefire agreement in Paris, McLuhan was trying to draw attention to Viet Nam as a resonant interval, where the action is, a gap, an interface, understood as the political game, which is considered a game because it "would seem to be rooted in the awareness of `play' as crux in all forms of social action. It is a basic feature of play that it keeps us in touch, and is also extremely involving of our facilities." (p. 461). One of the key failures of the United States in Nam was the lack of success in imposing the official American policy on the views of those who were totally involved. Policy was set by top officials in meetings in which the top priorities were more concerned about global geopolitics, which is bound to stumble in a world that McLuhan was trying to describe to Trudeau as being much more complex, especially to individuals:

"When we are using only a small part of our faculties, we are working. When we are totally involved, we are playing. The artist is always at leisure, especially when most intensely engaged in making." (p. 461).

What kind of an artist was Marshall McLuhan? The easier question is how comic was he? He could easily picture people sitting at home, within their own four walls, raging at the world outside, and he wasn't afraid to mention ongoing events to tell people what he thought. After going to a dinner in Washington, D.C., at which he sat next to Vice President Hubert Humphrey and "jokingly explained the advantages of living in a backward country like Canada." (p. 342), McLuhan sent Humphrey a letter on February 9, 1967, thanking him for "sending me that splendid picture of us both." In case Humphrey wasn't quite sure what people were thinking, McLuhan also wrote:

"Viet is our first TV war. TV creates an audience involvement in depth that automatically creates alienation of the public. The same news covered by the old hot media like press has a very different effect.

"While we are Westernizing the East by our old technology, we are Easternizing ourselves by the new technology. TV is an orientalizing force, taking us all on an `inner trip' that blurs the old idea of private identity altogether." (p. 342).

Calling attention to such forces, McLuhan expected radical changes to come about. In a letter arranging a discussion in Maryland in 1969, McLuhan even predicted:

"By the same token, if the slaughter houses were on all media every day, meat would disappear from our diet at once. Photographic news coverage killed public hangings. TV coverage makes the Viet business difficult to get on with. . . . The interface between print culture and electronic culture not only creates student unrest, it creates a collapse of all existing organizations in business and other establishments of the world. This has nothing to do with ideology or concepts." (p. 389).

Students certainly aren't as big an issue since the 1960s ended and they rested, whether it was because the draft ended or the philosophy of political change dropped into some hole that McLuhan thought was already there. Second guessing how McLuhan was wrong about some of our own current events merely avoids a larger question that no one is showing any willingness to face, if a comic society is finally going to realize that a few ideas have to make sense, after the economic collapse follows the financial collapse that may come if owning stock becomes worth less than having a job or social security. Imagining the doom of American policy in Nam produced more mirth than we are likely to feel at the ultimate demise of everything we face today, but McLuhan ought to get credit for making us think about going off in this direction. After the laugh, how many of us have really been there, done that? ... Read more