Last week we wrapped up the main body of Maelstrom Escape Strategies with some suggestions of things to pay attention to, changes you might make in your daily life to have measurable positive impact in the quality of your life.
My hope for the Strategies was for it to be a pocket book, a guide book, something useful that you can carry with you both literally and metaphorically. Because of the nature of the publishing industry today, it isn’t looking very promising for publishing this project as a physical pocket book which is why I decided to publish it this way, serialized in a virtual newsletter.
I once again have to thank my friends at Eternal whose financial support made the time I spent assembling the Strategies possible. My thanks and admiration to them for their support of my work in particular and their general mission in empowering artistic research and expression. I’m forever grateful.
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You may have noticed that the Maelstrom Escape Strategies relies heavily on McLuhan quotes. Mainly Marshall, one or two from Eric, and I even threw one or two of my own in there. I’m a bit of a stickler for citation – I think it’s important to know where things come from, the roots of things. Especially given that the times we live in make it difficult to trust information, I strive for accuracy and want people to know that when I put a McLuhan quote up, they can be confident that it’s accurate. As we know, not everything you read on the internet is necessarily true, and just because someone makes a meme and puts a quote and attribution on it, doesn’t make it historically accurate. Sorry if this comes as a shock to you. <wink>
I have the benefit of being custodian of my family’s archives that I can consult to verify information against hard copies. Primary sources. These archives are a collection started by Marshall McLuhan, inherited and added to by my father Eric McLuhan, and now by myself following Eric’s death in 2018. It is my mission, and what I founded The McLuhan Institute, to not only preserve and build these collections, but to fill in any gaps and add to them. Ultimately I want to have them open to the public so that researches can come and immerse themselves in this incredible library and archive.
For all the benefits of digital in terms of speed and access, there are qualities of a library and archive such as ours which cannot be digitized. My goal is that The McLuhan Institute will eventually be a self-sustaining non-profit which can support visiting researchers, scholars, and artists to make use of this work and take it forward.
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For this week’s newsletter, I wanted to share the reading list, the source of all the quotes used in Maelstrom Escape Strategies. I had been thinking about the ideas behind the work for years, and collecting bits and pieces from McLuhan work to support those arguments and ideas.
I apologize that not all the sources I use are easily available online, or even offline. Despite being director of this thing I call The McLuhan Institute, and even though I am a grandson of Marshall McLuhan, I don’t have any special rights to the work of Marshall McLuhan. Copyright of Marshall McLuhan’s work is with either the publishers or with the Estate of Marshall McLuhan, and I do have a certain amount of latitude (for which I am grateful) but no special license. What I’m getting at is that I can’t necessarily provide digital copies of the harder to access things I’ve used in this work, but I’m able to provide enough information that you can track it down for yourself if you care to go deeper into this work.
For the same reasons, though I’d love to use this newsletter platform to resurface things like Marshall McLuhan’s DEW-Line Newsletter, issues of which are very difficult to find but remain great reading today, I can’t just scan or transcribe them in their entirety without getting in trouble. What I can do is essentially ‘review’ them here and publish some of the more interesting quotes linked together by summary and commentary to fill in the blanks. That is what I’ll likely do for future editions of this newsletter.
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Thanks for your interest and support of this project! The McLuhan Newsletter is intended to be at least monthly, usually weekly, though not always. For example, I’ll be attempting to be in vacation next week so I won’t post a newsletter next Friday.
I don’t believe in paywalls. I don’t do patron-only content. If you can afford to pay for a subscription or join my Patreon page, I’d appreciate it — I have a lot of work ahead of me that I can’t finance on my own. Thanks so much to all those who support this mission!
WORKS SIGHTED
‘A Historical Approach to the Media’
Teacher’s College Record, Volume 57, Number 2, November 1955
Untitled
speech to BC Association of Radio Broadcasters, May 6, 1958
‘Report on the Project in Understanding New Media’
1960, National Association of Education Broadcasters, Washington, D. C.
Portions can be found in the 2003 edition of Understanding Media.
‘The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man’
1962
‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’
1964
‘for Dot Zero Magazine’
unpublished, 1964
letter to Harry Skornia
October 3, 1964
‘The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment’
November 1965
‘A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan’
John Culkin, 1965
Interviewed by Robert Fulford, 1966
letter,
Life Magazine March 1, 1966
‘Education in the Electronic Age’
Speech given to the Provincial Committee on the Aims and Objectives of Education in the Schools of Ontario, January 19, 1967.
‘The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects’
1967
forward to ‘The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan 1943–1962.’ Eugene McNamara, editor, 1969
Interview
‘Speaking Freely’ program with host Edwin Newman, from a partial transcript, around 1970
Untitled typescript,
February 28, 1973
‘At the moment of Sputnik the planet became a global theatre in which there are no spectators but only actors’
Journal of Communication, Volume 24, Number 1, Winter 1974
‘At the Flip Point of Time – The Point of More Return?’
Journal of Communication (Philadelphia: The Annenberg School Press), Autumn, 1975, Vol. 25, No. 4
‘City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media’
Marshall and Eric McLuhan and Kathryn Hutcheon, 1977
‘City as Classroom Teacher’s Guide’
Marshall and Eric McLuhan and Kathryn Hutcheon, 1977
‘Man as Media’
Lecture at York University, 1977
‘Laws of Media: The New Science’
Marshall and Eric McLuhan, 1988
‘Letters of Marshall McLuhan’
Corinne McLuhan, Matie Molinaro, William Toye, 1988
‘Theories of Communication’
Eric and Marshall McLuhan, 2011
‘The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism’
T.S. Eliot, 1933
‘Phillip Massinger’
T.S. Eliot ‘The Sacred Wood.’
1920
‘Media Ecology in the 21st Century’
Eric McLuhan, 2018.
‘Autobiography,’
n.d., published 2019, Invisible Press
‘Five Bloody Cannons’
Andrew McLuhan, 2021
Do you believe your Grandfather was a Menippean Satirist?
"Most of my writing is Menippean satire, presenting the actual surface of the world we live in as a ludicrous image." - Marshall McLuhan