The only entry in the series to rouse critical attention so far is "Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work," an appraisal, or reappraisal, of the prophet of this digital age, by Douglas Coupland. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Pico Iyer notes "how many unsettlingly accurate descriptions of our media-saturated, passive, and opinion-driven world came from Marshall McLuhan, and were coined over half a century ago. McLuhan was able to look so closely at the froth of the culture around him that he could seem to make out the future."
But all the above is just working around to this story: sometime in the 1970s, according to Cornelius Burke, a friend of his unknowingly parked in McLuhan's reserved space at the University of Toronto. This happened a second time, and McLuhan left an angry note on the man's windshield: "Sir: You have parked your car in a space reserved for mine. Should this happen again, I will be forced to have your car towed away. M. McLuhan."
Corny's friend took pains to avoid the space, but when he saw McLuhan's car parked there, he left a note of his own on the windshield: "Professor McLuhan: Thank you for your message. It is the first thing you have written that I have found possible to understand."
Marshall McLuhan's writing was a great deal more interesting than his conversation.
ReplyDeleteBut Cornelius Burke! There indeed is the subject of a fine, head-spinning biography.
Highlights would include, among many, a 20-something Cornelius in naval uniform arriving at Buck House to be decorated for unsafe patrol-boating in the Adriatic, and a genteel elder statesman cycling from the north tip of Scotland to subtropical Cornwall in the company of a supreme court judge.
The fly fishing alone deserves a book of its own.