I was quite a fan of McLuhan's during my undergraduate years at Brandeis, and I read nearly everything he wrote. I went on to study with him in a graduate program at the Univ. of Toronto in the early 70s. His "Center for the Study of Culture and Technology" was an elegantly restored carriage house where he delivered lectures and led semi…
I was quite a fan of McLuhan's during my undergraduate years at Brandeis, and I read nearly everything he wrote. I went on to study with him in a graduate program at the Univ. of Toronto in the early 70s. His "Center for the Study of Culture and Technology" was an elegantly restored carriage house where he delivered lectures and led seminars. His lectures were essentially train-of-thought, free associations, and when he found himself saying something that he found interesting, he would ask a designated student to make a note of it. Out of our class of 12 or 13 students, he knew only one student by name, and this was the student who took the notes and was apparently repeating the course on "Cliche and Archetype" for a second time.
I remember when a fellow student, (Scott Ziegler was his name, I believe), was delivering his term paper on "Spatio-Temporal Concepts in Joyce and Mallarmé " when McLuhan interrupted to share his recollection of a dream he'd had where his dentures had frozen in a glass on his night table. After sharing this tidbit, he invited Mr. Ziegler to continue, and he went back to jotting notes. A few minutes later, he interrupted again to say, "Now I get it. It was so cold on that trip to the Bahamas: that's why the dentures were frozen!"
I was scheduled to present my own paper the following week and I decided not to. It was the only course I ever took where I chose to receive an "incomplete" rather than submit to being treated with such utter indifference.
So, in summary, I would have to say that as a classroom teacher, McLuhan was probably the worst I ever had. On the other hand, as a thinker, he was quite remarkable. His insight that we were moving into a post-literate era seemed almost preposterous at the time, and today is becoming a terrifying reality. He was certainly among the first to point out that the media reproduction of events was now far more important than the events themselves, e.g., Al-Dura. One of his insights which will never grow old is that every new technology subsumes what it replaces and adopts it as its content: the Homeric epics recount the myths, the Greek theater draws on the Homeric epics for its material, radio makes music performance and theater its content, movies are based on novels, television features movies and theater, and the internet makes all of reality its content. Heady stuff. It's nice to see that McLuhan's work is receiving the well-deserved attention of a new generation.
I was quite a fan of McLuhan's during my undergraduate years at Brandeis, and I read nearly everything he wrote. I went on to study with him in a graduate program at the Univ. of Toronto in the early 70s. His "Center for the Study of Culture and Technology" was an elegantly restored carriage house where he delivered lectures and led seminars. His lectures were essentially train-of-thought, free associations, and when he found himself saying something that he found interesting, he would ask a designated student to make a note of it. Out of our class of 12 or 13 students, he knew only one student by name, and this was the student who took the notes and was apparently repeating the course on "Cliche and Archetype" for a second time.
I remember when a fellow student, (Scott Ziegler was his name, I believe), was delivering his term paper on "Spatio-Temporal Concepts in Joyce and Mallarmé " when McLuhan interrupted to share his recollection of a dream he'd had where his dentures had frozen in a glass on his night table. After sharing this tidbit, he invited Mr. Ziegler to continue, and he went back to jotting notes. A few minutes later, he interrupted again to say, "Now I get it. It was so cold on that trip to the Bahamas: that's why the dentures were frozen!"
I was scheduled to present my own paper the following week and I decided not to. It was the only course I ever took where I chose to receive an "incomplete" rather than submit to being treated with such utter indifference.
So, in summary, I would have to say that as a classroom teacher, McLuhan was probably the worst I ever had. On the other hand, as a thinker, he was quite remarkable. His insight that we were moving into a post-literate era seemed almost preposterous at the time, and today is becoming a terrifying reality. He was certainly among the first to point out that the media reproduction of events was now far more important than the events themselves, e.g., Al-Dura. One of his insights which will never grow old is that every new technology subsumes what it replaces and adopts it as its content: the Homeric epics recount the myths, the Greek theater draws on the Homeric epics for its material, radio makes music performance and theater its content, movies are based on novels, television features movies and theater, and the internet makes all of reality its content. Heady stuff. It's nice to see that McLuhan's work is receiving the well-deserved attention of a new generation.