A book is a beginning. In the last decade, when some might have said the book was dead, books have really come alive for me. Some may be inclined to say that books are not living things—but I know differently: books, libraries, are not inert, and there is more than meets the eye. There they sit,
When Marshall McLuhan mentions Henri Bergson at all, it is in a dismissive tone. The reasons why are simple enough. McLuhan was a Thomist inspired by Jacques Maritain, a fellow convert to Catholicism and student of Bergson at The Sorbonne. Bergson’s philosophy of Creative Evolution(1907 in French)—of a rising spirit of change and time coursing
I met Marshall McLuhan when he replaced me as a guest lecturer at Fordham University in September of 1967. That’s the story I’ve been telling all these years, and it’s mostly true. John Culkin, S.J., who had an uncanny talent for keeping his ear to the ground, learned in the spring of 1967 that I
In a May 1946 letter to Felix Giovanelli, McLuhan points out the poetry in the placement of an experimental atomic reactor pile mentioned in a scientific report. That it should be situated symbolically in a football stadium is too perfect. American sport, the artistic imitation of American business. Our great emotional educator and indicator. You
It was a drizzly day in New York in the Spring of 1977, if memory serves. I was more than halfway through with my PhD in the Media Ecology Program at New York University, and Neil Postman was my doctorial dissertation advisor. I went up to see him in his office off Washington Square Park.
In his unpublished work The New American Vortex, Marshall McLuhan included in the first book a piece entitled The Case of the Missing Anecdote. The first three pages of its ten-page typescript are crossed out in pencil, and scribbled across the top are instructions to “Skip to the top of page 4.” It’s funny to
I first met Marshall McLuhan in 1974 at the Coach House on the campus of St. Michael’s College, the University of Toronto. I was a professor of physics carrying out research in theoretical elementary particle physics, lecturing undergrad and grad courses and supervising grad students. In addition to these straight forward duties of a physics