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.

He looked even more like himself than usual, a combination of tired and exuberant.  He cradled his chin on one of his hands.  On the other, the ever-present cigarette dangled, with just the faintest smoke and ash.  He leaned over and pushed a thin manuscript across the table to me. “Ah, Paul, what do you make of this?” he asked, in that gravelly almost basso-profundo voice that was also one of his trademarks.

I looked down, and did something more than a double-take.  At the bottom of the front page, under the title, “Laws of the Media,” was the name “H. Marshall McLuhan”.

I looked back up at Neil.

“Please read it, and tell me what you think,” he said. “Can you make any sense of it?”

I read it, quickly. I must have been having a good day.  “I think it’s brilliant!”

Neil asked me to explain, and I did.  He finally puffed on his cigarette.  “Could you put that in a Preface?  If McLuhan likes it, I can publish it in et cetera along with the article.  Take your time, there’s no rush.”

Email was still a few years away.  I was back in Neil’s office the next day.

He still had the cigarette in his hand – I would’ve believed it was the same one as the day before, if Neil had told me it was.  He read my Preface, a scant few pages.  He looked at me.  “Let me think about this,” he said.

I said ok – what choice did I have? – and went on to talk about my dissertation.

Several weeks went by.   I was back in Neil’s office.   It was now closing in on May, and a nice sunny day.   Neil looked happy.  “I sent your Preface up to McLuhan,” he began—

Now, he had said in our previous meeting that he needed to get McLuhan’s approval before Neil published my Preface with his essay, but it still came as a surprise that he had actually sent it up to McLuhan.  I’m about as arrogant as they come, but I couldn’t shake the thought that my career, not yet even really started, could now well lay in ruins – a know-it-all graduate student, having the gall to write a Preface to Marshall McLuhan’s essay…

“He liked it,” Neil said.  “He’d like to meet you – but no rush to do that.”

McLuhan, through Neil, asked me to join him for lunch at the midtown hotel in New York City where he was staying, about two weeks later.  “You don’t have to go, if it makes you uncomfortable,” Neil said.

I would’ve flown across the country – or up to Toronto – for the chance to have lunch with Marshall McLuhan.

I can’t remember what I ordered – maybe a tuna sandwich – but that lunch remains the most extraordinary professional encounter I’ve had in my life.  I’ve had lunch at Karl Popper’s home in England, shook Isaac Asimov’s hand at a AAAS conference, interviewed John Glenn in Ohio, that sort of thing.  But my head is still spinning, to this very day, because of that lunch with Marshall McLuhan.  The number of ideas that came out of his head at that table were wild multiples of the number of minutes we were together.

We became friends.  My wife Tina made dinner for Marshall and Eric the night before the Tetrad Conference that I organized for and with McLuhan the next year.   I soon after finished my doctoral dissertation and sent a copy up to McLuhan.  When Tina and I came home from a summer vacation, there was a message from Marshall on our primitive answering machine.  “I’m enjoying the dissertation very much … and hope to have a chat about it with you, soon.”

Our many times together were all too short, but they were worth all the world.

Bibliography

Levinson, Paul (1977) “Preface to Marshall McLuhan’s ‘Laws of the Media,” et cetera, June, pp. 173-174.  https://www.academia.edu/28948299/Laws_of_the_Media_by_Marshall_McLuhan_with_Preface_by_Paul_Levinson

McLuhan, Marshall (1978) Message on Paul Levinson’s telephone answering machine, about Levinson’s doctoral dissertation, August.  http://paullev.libsyn.com/voice-mail-from-marshall-mc-luhan-1978

New York City, 24 December 2019

Paul Levinson

Communications and Media Studies, Fordham University | + posts

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