These events eventually lead to my organizing McLuhan’s papers, scattered throughout about 60 boxes, for Corinne McLuhan and Matie Molinaro in November-December, 1981.
Hopefully, this inventory will help get McLuhan scholarship ‘back on track’.”
1936 G. K. Chesterton: a practical mystic DALHOUSIE REVIEW, Vol.15, pp.455-64
p.455 “miracles of sense and consciousness”
455 legislation
457 retracing history
458 conspiracy
458 Metaphysicals
459 communists
459 Secret People
461 salesman
461 Eliot – “3,000 people who comprehend”
462 no panacea
463 detective story
464 retrieval
1943 Education of Free Men in Democracy: The Liberal Arts ST. LOUIS UNIVERSITY STUDIES IN HONOUR OF ST. THOMAS AQUINAS, Vol.1, 47-50
47 Aquinas and “the barbarism of comfort and ease and slackness”
48 Adam and “the painful cultivation of the arts”
49 technology and speech
49 “people take refuge in music and musical politics”
50 Aquinas and new Dark Age (“as our age enters its dark night’)
1943 Herbert’s Virtue THE EXPLICATOR, Vol.1, #2, October
– “each stanza is a paradox”
– “the third stanza makes a transition from Nature to Art”
1944 Edgar Poe’s Tradition SEWANEE REVIEW, Vol.52, #1, January, 24-33
29 Ockhamists
31 “Evil is a fact, perhaps the most important fact, in the New England consciousness”
1944 Poetic vs. Rhetorical Exegesis SEWANEE REVIEW, Vol.52, #2, April, 266-76
267 Korzybski, Ockham, Richards’ discovery, and “meaning”
268 rhetorical and poetic drama
268 Richards and Empson
269 cluster-symbols
270 Leavis
271 poetry, intensity, and “age” (the GROUND)
271 rhetorical strategy
272 “new” work as in a “play”
273 Leavis and “line of wit”
275 semantic and synecdotal vistas vs. the whole
276 poetry/moral perception/dramatic awareness and plenary critical judgment
1944 Wyndham Lewis: Lemuel in Lilliput ST. LOUIS UNIVERSITY STUDIES IN HONOUR OF ST. THOMAS AQUINAS, Vol.2, 58-72
58 food poisoned
59 Catholics, Joyce, and arts
59 no art
60 “pamphlets” on stupefaction
61 no serious reading public
61 “youth” snobbery
62 intelligence and control
62 seamless life
63 medicine, dionysiac finance, and “will”
64 everybody as revolutionary
64 modern state as educationalist
65 modern rulers
65 zeitgeist
65 Catholics and Protestants
65 Gallup Poll
66 scrutiny of philosophy of last 400 years
67 paradoxical pathology
68 “discoveries”, melting life, and reason
69 cui bono?, appetite for OTHER not BETTER
70 everybody loses
70 attack on family and Proudhon
70 Chesterton remark on women’s liberation
71 interment of society, sex, and children
71 privation of matter itself
71 family and socialism
71 sex is dead, LaRouche’s principle
72 Lewis can’t be popularized, greatest since Machiavelli
1944 Eliot’s “The Hippopotamus” THE EXPLICATOR, Vol.2, #7, May
– Laodicean,
– “objective correlative”
– ascetic Eliot, grinning
1944 Kipling and Forster SEWANEE REVIEW, Vol.52, #3, July, 332-43
332 two-world view (art and life)
334 post-war bohemia, stress
335 Kipling and women (demons or angels)
337 “two-world formula”, list of dichotomizing “versus”
338 “the symbols” (good and bad) within “wider whole”
339 nostalgic agnosticism
342 “slack”
343 melodrama as from cultural neurosis
194? Milton, Montaigne, and the Philosophi Christi UNPUBLISHED
2 grace precedes human knowledge
22 misconceptions about Renaissance
194? Baroque vs. The Dissociation of Sensibility UNPUBLISHED
4 symbol and allegory, the Logos
5 “the whole pagan wisdom and mythology” as content of Scripture
6 high and homely
6 pun
6 four levels of exegesis
7 Ockhamists split language from things
8 pagan mythology in Scripture, paradox
9 exegetical paradox, hyperbole, and prosopopoeia
11 collapse of synthesis, Baroque (external world), and Baudelaire and Eliot (psychological)
11 language as network of terrors and desires
11 comparative anthropology
11 psychological stress effect of Renaissance
12 new synthesis, “we are still looking for an orchestral score, to say nothing of a director”
15 history of ideas and of style
15 awake all antiquity
16 four levels of exegesis
16 Jung and “participation mystique” (“submersion in a common unconsciousness”)
1945 The New York Wits KENYON REVIEW, Vol.7, #1, 12-28
12 serious art and affections, present cleavage never mended
13 Tennyson and young men
14 Pre-Raphaelites and bohemia
15 aristocrat and commerce, relevance
16 American letters ignore popular art
18 aristocratic scorn on plebeian folk
23 public flattered by Woollcott
24 ignore Joyce and Lewis
25 “escapist” game, passive resistance, “member of the super-Bohemia of the rich”
26 Benchley as end-product of line of social rebels
26 Swift (“faith in reason”) vs. Thurber (“flight from reason”)
27 “no strain is ever put on the slackest or smuggest audience”
28 snobbery of wealth, rhetorical device of ads
28 puritanical left-wingers
28 apelike assume wit, emperor’s new clothes
1946 An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America THE CLASSICAL JOURNAL, Vol.41, #4, January
156-62
156 “metaphysical”
156 “analogy of the individual as a note in the musical score vs. each person as a complete musical work
158 society as mirror of Logos
159 dialectics
160 “speculative dialectician and scientist vs. eloquent moralist”
160 hasty accusation and warm rejoinder
161 separation of eloquence and wisdom by Socrates
161 gnostic’s need for encyclopedic learning
161 fourth book of Cicero on rhetoric
162 Werner Sombart – “he derives both industrial technology and the capitalist spirit from the great scholastic effort of abstraction”
1946 Out of the Castle… Into the Counting-House POLITICS, September, 277-79
277 “‘Man’s place is in the home!'”
277 “aimless cruising in a car is now a substitute for the pub”
278 “Save the men!”
278 conscious homosexuality
278 no reward for marriage
278 disappearance of community
279 fantasy, Marx, and Rousseau
279 Freud completed “pollution”
279 fear of homosexuality
279 Sinatra as “wolf” cult, status quo
279 caveman’s club again
279 tradesman and bureaucrat negate any basis for community
279 real problem for men and women is new mode of being
279 funeral arrangements for our society
279 “the need is for a vision unconditioned by bureaucratic or commercial cadres
279 “vision comes not by grappling with major problems as ‘social engineers’ but by patient observation and analysis”
1946 Footprints in the Sands of Crime SEWANEE REVIEW, Vol.54, #4, October, 617-34
618 “technology was developed by a reason which was enslaved to appetite” (political slogans, Benda)
618 “ancien regime” as transitional phase
619 hopeful exploratory modes of thought and feeling (Benda, Jung)
619 analysis of modes of social being
619 sociology as technological derivative
620 human panic in jazz or jive
620 prophecies of Marx in bureaucratic parody
621 “our own slackness… the mark of our incompetence”
621 indifference to “getting order into our experience”, no desire to contemplate our lives
621 history moved from status to contract
622 universal sense alienation in the 16th Century
622 devil worship, class war, and depravity
622 suppress doctrine of the MEAN
622 scientific formula in Shakespeare (“take but degree away”)
623 Calvinists not morally responsible
623 revenger and modern sleuth
623 “taking it”, Stoicism
624 Sophist strategy vs. Socratic strategy
625 new tradesman ETHOS
625 Cervantes handles revolution humorously
626 Byron, Baudelaire, Wilde, Joyce – Lucifer-like exhibitionism
626 bohemia forces artist (genuine rebel) back into “decent society”
626 the police
627 despair in Machiavelli and Hobbes leads to police
627 Manichean outlook
627 “private vices, public benefits”
627 Adam Smith solves “the Manichean psychological split of the time”
627 bourgeois man cut off from being and love
627 “man on a desert island” – Crusoe/”castle”
627 castle until Darwin and Freud
628 Mill’s “On Liberty” rooted in Manichean despair
628 exorbitant appetite or fear in society reverberates
629 in detective fiction, cause and effect dealing with material evidence (Descartes)
629 minorities and elites
629 Hitler entertained by Karl May’s cowboys
630 detective fiction reflects immaturity of our age (failure to unify experience)
630 detective fiction is an “escape valve” and “barometer for a deeply resentful and humanly wasteful society”
631 detective fiction and comic strips
631 detective fiction as emotional illiteracy and confusion
633 qualities of gambler, businessman, and general
633 sleuth pattern (bad art) imitated in ordinary living
634 Jeffersonian rationalism
634 Poe’s “Maelstrom”, detached observation = “scientific” interest
634 escape “by a trick of analysis” = “scientific” attitude = “the formula for happiness” = “the possession of being perpetually well deceived”
1947 American Advertising HORIZON, #93-94, 132-41
132 democratic freedom = ignoring politics
132 excluded middle rather than a NON SEQUITUR
133 ads as “orgy of irrationalism” serving as catharsis
133 ads as common language
133 comedian can use ads
133 Hollywood and ads are inseparable
133 considering the imponderables
133 detective fiction = sharing scientific detachment
134 win survival time by any source of happiness
134 McLuhan’s formula as an intellectual
134 market research = totalitarian social engineer
134 Audience Research Inc.
135 “control” through passions
135 politics as studying effects (ads)
136 American ads = Cartesian, English ads = Baconian
136 “the language of ‘human service’ is rooted in the respectable neurotic formula of Adam Smith” (“public good via private greed”)
137 Rousseau and Marx, vertical and horizontal symbolism
137 Nielsen Audimeter
138 Gallup polls
138 child as emperor
138 irritation in ads is “attention-getting”
138 “Nausea” as new principle of commerce
139 visual representation of motion in ads as GROUND
139 ads as makers of “patterns of living”
139 ads as dramatic sequence
140 ads as social catalysts (boy-girl shyness)
140 ads analyze the causes of every type of human failure
141 ads represent poor man’s aristocratic dream
141 study ads to fulfill American promises
141 excess of ads leads to rational detachment (pattern-recognition)
1947 Introduction to “Paradox in Chesterton” by Hugh Kenner, New York: Sheed and Ward, xi-xxii
xi “master of analogical perception and argument”
xi metaphysical intuition of being
xii search for moral and political order in the current chaos
xii “a Thomist by connaturality with being”
xii directed his gaze at chaos, not at Schoolmen
xii behind him 1500 years of encyclopedic irrationalism
xii decline by psychologism, not philosophies
xii psychological strategies of practical bearing up against universal confusion
xii Church Fathers adopted Plato and Stoic concept of Logos, led to commitment to symbolism and allegory
xii outer world as network of analogies, sustained inner world
xii inner and outer worlds were mirrors
xiii great psychological security in such mirrors
xiii Shakespeare (“When degree is shak’d…”)
xiv Shakespeare’s “mechanical formulation” (“when this great symbolic and psychological synthesis was really destroyed”)
xiv Aquinas’ abstract “rational synthesis” possible because there was still a “psychological and symbolic awareness of order”
xiv followers irritated by some Schoolmen
xiv Aristotle was anti-symbolic
xv Descartes offers mathematical proof as unifier (failure of dialectical and metaphysical proofs)
xv Descartes made explicit divorce between abstract intellectual and psychological order
xv Descartes offered mathematical order and excluded human and psychological order
xvi artists left to introduce or discover order in man’s psychological life (appetite and emotion)
xvi Who then is the true Thomist? Contemplate or plunge into Chaos!!
xvii Thomist must act to create a practical moral and social order in cooperation with numerous hopeful features of our world
xvii Catholics failed to use Vico: – (a) condition of man is never the same; (b) nature is unchanging
xvii Spengler perverted Vico for paranoiac rationalism
xviii Gilson – first use of Vico’s method
xviii Vico not a Thomist, but had tool for discovering psychological and moral unity in practical order
xviii Catholics reflect mechanized world
xviii Eliot and Leavis train esthetic and moral perception in acts of unified awareness and judgment
xviii Chesterton attacked problem of morals and psychology
xviii Chesterton always in the practical order
xix Chesterton connatural with every kind of reasonableness
xix Chesterton’s metaphysical side very impressive
xix Chesterton’s irrelevant Pre-Raphaelite rhetoric
xix nobody wants to preserve William Morris
xx Lear’s “anarchic nursery wisdom” served the Victorians
xx Baudelaire gazed into “that world of adult horror… with intense suffering and humility”
xxi Chesterton “really was happy” in spite of his “professional heartiness”
xxi Chesterton got from Wilde – rhetorical paradox and epigram
xxi Chesterton not interested in Victorian influences enough to make a permanent fusion of them
xxi Otherwise, Chesterton would have been limited like Stevenson and Pater
xxi Chesterton not a poet
xxi Chesterton a metaphysical moralist
xxii artists offer not a system, but a world
xxii artists make a world, metaphysicians contemplate a world
1947 Mr. Connelly and Mr. Hook SEWANEE REVIEW, Vol.55, #1, July, 167-72
167 great Irish and American influence on English letters
167 definition of esthete – art as narcissistic device
168 Connelly – eclectic and cosmopolitan
168 investigate spiritual possibilities, post-war, post-Freud, post-Einstein, post-20th Century
168 “Bloomsbury is the residual legatee of British aristocratic amateurism”
168 French = professional tradition
169 complete self-effacement – Baudelaire
169 Connelly – no critical standards
169 “nutriment to creative impulse”
170 dialectician, not investigator, doesn’t extend current perception
170 metaphysician must master trivium
171 many cultural climates and artistic objects
171 Werner Sombart
171 Hook’s enthusiastic conformity to long-established trends
172 In America the intellectual heretic does not use a method
172 Gallup Polls “calculated”
172 American education does not train sensibility
172 emotional education by press, radio, and screen
172 preferences shared by Catholics and Communists
172 spotting economic fallacy not as important
172 failure of Hook, Hutchins, Adler, Van Doren, and Maritain
172 commercial entertainment is major educational force
1947 Inside Blake and Hollywood SEWANEE REVIEW, Vol.55, October, 710-15
710 “multi-locational mode of perception” (avoided by Marxists and sociologists)
710 Petrarch and Da Vinci to Gibbon and Hume
711 Vico – complex genetic metaphor
712 Northrop Frye inside Blake
712 Blake became what he beheld
712 Blake as Gnostic, encyclopedic allegorist, psychologist, and concerned with his art’s “intellectual meaning”
713 Frye’s inside view in need of development from outside
713 Parker Tyler “substitutes perception for abuse or passivity”
713 Joyce and Eliot examine commercial culture
713 Giedion and Moholy-Nagy on technical effects (Joyce and Ford cars)
714 America has to import AVANT GARDE
714 “medium is massage” mimes phases of Incarnation
714 Seurat, movie technique, Scott, novel character
714 implies “angelism”, non-human ends
715 homeopathic means
715 Hollywood provides night-dream to exorcise terrors of day-time
715 Tyler doesn’t consider Hollywood’s “deep artistic anemia”
715 like Empson, Tyler has “no technique of evaluation of the products he explores”
715 Tyler cannot “isolate the CLICHE and timidity as rooted in the death of all intellectual impulse”
715 Tyler’s focus is “preliminary to opening up a plenary critique”
1948 Henry IV, a Mirror for Magistrates UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, Vol.17, January, 152-60
152 Shakespeare accepted “in a new mode by the romantic enemies of art and convention”
152 metaphor lulls
152 Alexander Pope and problem of evil
152 Shakespeare’s superhuman provenance
152 former critics deprive character of function
153 Renaissance rhetoric recovered
153 musical metaphor for McLuhan’s oratory
153 “Take but degree away…”
154 Falstaff “lives for common appetite” in the GROUND of the “hubristic appetite of power” in the court
155 “the epiphany of Hal as Henry V”
155 Shakespeare does not foresee change in audience
159 Cicero’s orator
159 Shakespeare in humanist or patristic party (James I)
160 features of the audiences for Milton’s Satan and Falstaff
1948 Tradition and the Academic Talent THE HUDSON REVIEW, Vol.1, No.2, Summer, 270-73
270 “I.A. Richards’ Kantian criticism has very little relevance”
271 new cultural unity
271 continued relevance of the trivium?
271 “genetic” view of history “rejected”
272 basic conception of metaphor (“the poet was to the world he made as God to creation”)
272 “subsequent mathematicism began to reduce decorum to external categories in the later 17th Century”
272 just “spotting figures” – an academic game?
272 tradition killed from 1620-1820
272 Ramus and Ockham – nominalism
272 Ramus doctrine lay not in, but under the FIGURES
273 Joyce is key to discovering the relevance of Renaissance poetic
1949 Encyclopedic Unities THE HUDSON REVIEW, Vol.1, No.4, Winter, 599-02
599 murder of classical education = inside job
599 two schools of German encyclopedic study: a) Hegel and Spengler (ideas as GROUND)
599 Giedion’s “alert and prolonged attention to…” b) Burckhardt and Giedion (ideas are MEANS)
599 McLuhan suggested Eliot to Giedion
600 Giedion explores causes and effects of split
600 “Space, Time, and Architecture” – “genetic” study
600 demonstration of the precise function of the arts
601 “progress” alien to study of the arts
601 irrational wish precedes mechanization
601 Moholy-Nagy presents Bauhaus program for training sensibility
602 “Moholy-Nagy being quite often a naif of sensation” like Stein or Watson
602 a serious teacher can turn “Vision in Motion” into “a baedeker of contemporary arts, crafts, and engineering seen in a single vortex of interfused interests and activities”
602 “the era of isolated specialisms which was begun with the rise of biologism a hundred years ago”
1949 “Color Bar” of BBC English CANADIAN FORUM, Vol.29, April, 9-10
9 the question in the 19th Century of how new wealth would be “admitted” to the aristocracy
10 aristocracy originally local, only stand. speech after commercial
10 question not settled in terms of social justice or logic
1949 Mr. Eliot’s Historical Decorum RENASCENCE, Vol.2, #1, Autumn, 9-15
9 novel, Flaubert, to read the world
9 essences, definitions, nutriment of existence
10 metaphor, “no other door from any present to any past”
11 language decays into banality and violence
11 Wordsworth’s “Lucy”
12 poetry precise as science, ontological mystery
12 Poe and movie camera, poetry of effects
13 poetry freed from rhetoric and novel
13 analogical act of the mind
13 all existence was “grist”, any “plot” will do
13 “from the shaman to the medium and the poet”
14 “interested in the situation which exhausts all such causes and effects and includes further levels of analogical perception”
14 “you are the music while the music lasts” is the case for the reader of the Symbolists
15 Joyce’s “mythical method”
15 “between the stairs of the mind and the levels of poetic and spiritual awareness”
1949 Psychopathology of “Time” and “Life” Reprinted in SCENE BEFORE YOU, Chandler Brossard, ed., New York: Rinehart, 1955, 147-60
148 “the centers of political initiative today are as inaccessible as the accusers of a Kafka character”
151 “Time”, “Life”, “Fortune”, and “New Yorker” = American Bloomsbury, psychological bureaucracy
151 model of Stephen Daedalus at Harvard
152 HOMO BOOBIENS, Sorokin
154 technics are the opium of the commuters
155 musical politics, light opera
156 “Life” stereotype is technology, sex, and blood
158 physics is now politics
158 “Fortune” stereotype (“Life” minus sex and blood)
159 media “fast”/ecology
160 universal new flunkeyism
1950 Reason and Tradition UNPUBLISHED
1 lack of community stunts talents
3 weakness of the public speech of the literary man, the scientist, and the statesman compared to the wit and phrase in the ads
4 teaching as subversive activity, compare and contrast
7 access to “unconscious” obsolesces dictionaries
1950 Review of Essays in Criticism 1920-1948 by R. W. Stallman, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, January, 211-12
211 definition of poetry, first Romantics and last Romantics
212 French and Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Lewis make a single vortex
1950 Poetry and Opinion: Examination of Ezra Pound and Letters of Pound RENASCENCE, Vol.3, #2, Spring, 200-02
200 1912 to 1922
201 Bloomsbury stalwarts vs. American ascendance via Pound
202 Pound zoning states of mind
1950 T. S. Eliot RENASCENCE, Vol.3, #4, Autumn, 43-48
43 beboppers and magazine claques, the greats
44 Laforgue and Rimbaud
44 “Anglo-Saxon distrust of technique in the arts which bedeviled all the Pre-Raphaelites save Hopkins”
45 Kant dialectical, life of words, Jung and Freud
46 “Finnegans Wake” as drama, Mystical Body
47 speakers as permanent modalities, Lewis boycott
48 Joyce as Aristotelian
1951 Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process RENASCENCE, Vol.4, #1, 3-11
3 Aquinas’ labyrinthian “articles”, communicates before understood
3 Joyce the first, NOUS POIETIKOS
4 epiphany, three notes of beauty
5 Joyce and senses as analogies, Freud and Jung
5 Joyce’s clairvoyance
6 Where to begin to discuss Joyce?
8 Joyce and Eliot surpass the Symbolists
8 the method of Edgar A. Poe’s detective is used by the modern psychologist, historiographer, archeologist, physicist, and chemist
9 two labyrinths: stone and sea
10 Ear labyrinth = organ of Incarnation
10 “Finnegans Wake”, voice of river of human blood
11 Coleridge not aware of retracing process
1951 A Survey of Joyce Criticism RENASCENCE, Vol.4, Autumn, 12-18
13 World War One stops the Vorticist milieu in England
14 Lewis vs. Joyce
15 Budgen helps to understand Joyce
15 nominalist conceptions
15 “Ulysses”, robots of cliché , words as actors
16 Joyce is a poet of situations, not statement
16 “Finnegans Wake” – “multi-millioned voice of human history and experience”
16 “Skeleton Key” by J. Campbell and H. Robinson
17 no knowledge of Dublin
18 communication before and beyond understanding
18 Joyce and Blake, Joyce and friends and family
18 Joyce, “Anna Livia” and Verdi’s “Otello”
1951 Revolutionary Conservatism UNPUBLISHED
1 America as communism
2 “medium is the message” – form/content
2 Romantics try to recover intuition
3 radical roots of conservatism,
3 the battle in the mind of the American advertiser
4 solution in Giedion’s “Mechanization Takes Command”
4 Lord Acton
5 value of Catholic attitude
1951 Review of Collected Poems by Roy Campbell RENASCENCE, Vol.4, Autumn, 101-03
101 Hemingway, Lewis boycott
102 Elizabethan double-plot
103 delights in all creatures as voices
1951 Review of D. H. Lawrence and Human Existence by Father William Tiverton, Philosophic Library, 108-09
108 “all real life is meeting” – Buber
108 1930’s – political obsessions and confusions
108 1920’s – unpolitical 20’s, apostle of promiscuous sex
109 “an existential approach to character”
109 “did not live to recover and renew the bases of Catholic tradition”
1951 Review of Ruskin and the Landscape of Feeling by Francis G. Townsend, ILLINOIS STUDIES IN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE, Vol.35, No.3, typescript
2 poetic process
3 Marxist aesthetics and Tolstoy
1952 Advertising as a Magical Institution COMMERCE JOURNAL (University of Toronto Commerce Club), January, 25-29
25 ads mean social revolution
25 ads as something else than social manipulation
26 internal dimensions of ads are concealed
27 science based on picturegrams
28 artist must be aware of science
28 ads as tribal mask, ritual, and art
28 people read anything to hide
29 ads are new “Golden Bough”
29 need to study ads, not a theory of ads
1952 Review of Melville’s Quarrel with God by Lawrence Thompson, Princeton University Press UNPUBLISHED
1 devil-god of reality
3 two traditions of European Manicheanism
4 arts as pagan rituals of rebirth
6 existence of Anti-Christ
7 “the inevitable conclusion of a devil-god resulting from a univocal approach to existence and the problem of evil”
8 symbols have to be understood to be effective
8 relevance of St. Thomas
1952 Eliot and Manichean Myth UNPUBLISHED
2 time and space
4 children of darkness like the visual arts
5 Prince of Air – master of space, not time
7 American innocence
9 John Lindberg
10 govern through norms/passions
12 Lewis and Eliot
1952 Review of Word Index to James Joyce’s “Ulysses” by Miles Hanley, University of Wisconsin Press RENASCENCE, Vol.4, #2, Spring, 186-87
186 Hanley “envisaged the Index as of use to psychologists interested in the process of association, to students of style imagery and literary technique…”
1952 Review of The Poetry of Ezra Pound by Hugh Kenner, New Directions RENASCENCE, Vol.4, #2, Spring, 215-17
216 the 1930’s of Auden
216 period of exhaustion after discovery
216 Eliot wears a series of masks since 1922
216 poets’ criticism is autobiographical
217 self-effacing honesty to create modes of vision
217 “‘poetry’ today, like ‘art’, unfortunately functions like advertising, to provide assurance and conviction about those things which, regardless of facts, people wish to believe”
1952 Auden: An Introductory Essay RENASCENCE, Vol.4, #2, Spring, 220-21
220 no civilized center
220 relevance of poetry to physics
220 need for dialogue between the arts and science
221 demand for relevance
221 poetry of 1930’s based on misreading of Eliot, Joyce, and Pound
1952 Technology and Political Change INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL, Vol.7, Summer, 189-95
189 Bergson – “speed-up of the universe leads to impoverishment of the mind”
190 dialectics and rhetoric = private and public communication
190 newspaper as space-binder
191 newspaper as science fiction
191 audience participates in own participation
191 culture as communication network
193 “happening here… happening there” – hypnosis
193 diplomacy must be simple
194 Lewis and romantic time-traveller
194 “the first impulse of reason is to cry out for uniformity at any cost… a new start, abolition of historical differences” are demanded
195 anthropology discovers cultural equality
195 TV camera is flexible, death of “star” system
1952 Baseball is Culture CBC TIMES, Oct.25, Nov.1, and Nov.8, unpaginated pamphlet
1 “in the same way Canadians can see easily enough that cricket is cultural activity…”
3 training of sensuous perception
4 “star” cannot have privacy
1953 From Eliot to Seneca Review of The Senecan Amble: A Study in Prose from Bacon to Collier by George Williamson, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, January, 199-202
201 Senecan vs. Ciceronian
201 Pliny and Montaigne are Senecan in style
202 FIGURES of inner psychological stage
1953 Review of Light on a Dark Horse: An Autobiography by Roy Campbell, Regnery RENASCENCE, Vol.5, Spring, 157-59
157 amphibious operation, a natural force
158 corruption of letters
158 mysterious poetic process
1953 Review of Paul Klee by Carola Giedion-Welcker, Viking Press, SHENANDOAH, Vol.4, No.1, Spring, 77-82
78 seven and twelve-tone scales in music
79 Kant and Newton, scientist is now artist
81 Whorf and Sapir, and Giedion
82 theosophy and occult
82 “whether with the instant of individual cognition or the phases of collective consciousness, the retracing of the stages of apprehension provides the exact artistic form which is the formula for that experience”
1953 Review of Changing Concepts of Time by H.A. Innis, University of Toronto Press, NORTHERN REVIEW, Vol.6, No.3, August-September, 44-46
45 a stammer in Innis’ mind and prose
46 Canadian nationalism of Innis
1953 The Age of Advertising COMMONWEAL, Vol.58, #23, September 11, 555-57
555 Arabian Nights world of Aladdin lamps
557 fashion as popular substitute for art
1953 Review of A Reading of George Herbert by Rosemond Tuve, University of Chicago Press, THOUGHT, Autumn, 456-58
456 literal contains all levels
457 new Tower of Babel
458 “dialectic and four-level exegesis could never agree except in their distrust of pagan mythology”
458 Thomas Aquinas changed Aristotle
1953 Maritain on Art RENASCENCE, Vol.6, Autumn, 40-44
40 art is religion in the pagan world
42 passions are a laboratory, Ouspensky
42 Levy’s “Gate of Horn”
42 goal of “the big forces'”
43 rites of Pan are dead
44 media as angelic, relevance of angelic doctor Thomas Aquinas
44 Maritain on Christianity? Thomist?
44 “but most people are inclined to transform Maritain’s sign-posts into park benches”
1953 The Later Innis QUEEN’S QUARTERLY, Vol.60, #3, Autumn, 385-94
385 penetrative powers of pricing system
386 modeling “from the inside”
388 art form’s quiddity, socially
388 Eliot – rhythms of internal combustion engine
389 didn’t master “Finnegans Wake”
390 didn’t know Sapir and Whorf
390 world of political power and business = world of space
391 world of religion and arts = world of time
391 psychology of Canadianism
392 Gestalt theory and “existenz”
392 stem tide of technological flux
393 Von Neumann theory of games
394 media study harmonizes arts and sciences
1954 Comics and Culture OUR SENSE OF IDENTITY: A BOOK OF CANADIAN ESSAYS, Malcolm Ross, ed., Toronto: Ryerson Press, 240-46
240 “Let me make the peoples’ comics and I care not who writes their songs”
242 no one can foresee changes
242 Innis, form imposes matter in the arts
243 words as mass-experience
244 Abbé Jousse
246 comics adjust young to changes
1954 Through Emerald Eyes RENASCENCE, Vol.6, Spring, 157-58
157 three great talkers
158 “almost any Gaelic word includes every other possible word – a fact which became the esthetic basis of ‘Finnegans Wake'”
158 face-to-face investigation of artistic matters
158 “one Irish trait which recurs in this volume is the unremitting impulse to self-dramatization”
158 “Secret Tradition” of Europe
158 Joyce wrote all Irish literature – “her Dante and her Chaucer, a St. Augustine, etc….”
1954 Mind of the South UNPUBLISHED
1 characteristics of the Canadian and the Southerner
2 twenty years ago, McLuhan studied the trivium and the quadrivium
3 Canada not a melting pot
4 “the holistic approach of current anthropology”
4 Why did the German and the Swede not become frontiersmen?
5 characteristics of the Southerner (English school boy)
5 European idea takes precedence over physical circumstances
6 “South out of step with the modern world”
1954 The God-making Machines of the Modern World THE COMMONWEAL, March 19, 606-07
606 vertical and horizontal categories become confused
606 “Finnegans Wake” – Finn (horizontal metaphor)
606 master-clue to all future government
607 Lindberg is the best introduction to “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake”
1954 Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press SEWANEE REVIEW, Vol.62, #1, Winter, 38-55
40 psychic withdrawal in literacy
40 media as art forms (“phantom city”) in “Finnegans Wake”
41 “cabbalistic significance of the letters”
41 “pictographic Chinese culture, for example, would seem to stand midway between the extremes of our abstract written tradition and the plenary oral tradition with its stress on speech as gesture and gesture as ‘phatic communion'”
44 Dickens and metropolis
45 vacuum tube as metaphor
46 pagan rituals as catharsis in art
46 “cultic twalette” – anti-cognitive attitude
47 Hercules, Augean stables of speech
49 Mallarmé writes “that the whole world exists in order to result in a book”
50 “Finnegans Wake” – all time in a brief space
51 “Finnegans Wake” – “telekinetic”
52 “crystal” image
53 time into space metamorph in “Finnegans Wake”
54 scare journalism is paralysis vs. artist’s idea of awakening
55 word and speech gesture has all existence embedded
55 Dr. Thomas Brown says the poet’s imagination reverses the direction of association (McLuhan adds “like cinematic montage later”)
1954 Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters CHRISTIAN HUMANISM IN LETTERS: THE McAULEY LECTURES, SERIES 2, ST. JOSEPH COLLEGE, WEST HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT, I can’t recall where I got this so page numbers are not from the original publication
70 McLuhan as teacher explains “metaphor”
73 Poe and Symbolists re-establish basis of Catholic Humanism
73 above discovery is matrix of new world society
73 secular world refashions human nature
73 Incarnation, good and bad (Yeats), what is magic? (simple shaping of natural experience)
74 exclusive coteries of the art world
75 Machiavelli
76 three/four notes of beauty (Joyce)
76 most poetic = ordinary consciousness
76 “the more extensive the mass medium, the closer it must approximate to the character of our cognitive faculties”
76 confession about “The Mechanical Bride”
78 Protestants have much to fear today
78 ads as art form, cosmic man?
80 movie as Plato’s Cave (“sacred grove”)
80 the medium is the message – cognition
83 TV, human perception = incarnation
83 Christ, James Joyce
84 AEIOU, angelism
85 Joyce created great new synthesis
86 Joyce via Aquinas surpasses Pre-Raphaelites (analogy derived from sense perception)
86 social process = incarnation
86 Lindberg proposes Christianity as new Machiavelli
87 a great lie (at the time of the Renaissance), a great truth (today)
87 world government, Catholic’s field of trial
1954 Sight, Sound and the Fury COMMONWEAL, Vol.60, April 9, 7-11
7 Dylan Thomas and radio
7 Metaphysical poetry, Erasmus and the classroom
7 “Nature” disappeared
8 atomic physicists, American speech and writing
8 invade now with ideas and entertainment
9 all war is civil war, newspaper as great collective poem
9 explanation of movie and cognition (Aristotle’s “plot”)
10 “darshan”
11 error of “The Mechanical Bride”
11 “citadel of this defense must be located in analytical awareness of the nature of the creative process involved in human cognition”
1954 Poetry and Society POETRY, Vol.84, #2, May, 93-95
95 Marx and machine, individual and collectivist
1955 Nihilism Exposed RENASCENCE, Vol.8, Winter, 97-99
97 Gnosticism flooded into Europe in the 15th Century (Descartes to Dewey)
98 Bergson, angelism
99 government is entertainment, and entertainment is the art of government
99 existence is a Hollywood set, gnostic
99 Lewis – greatest satires in English
99 Lewis suppressed
1955 Paganism on Tip-toe (Eliot) RENASCENCE, Vol.8, #3, Spring, 158
158 paganism on tip-toe
158 “for spiritual man, natural law doesn’t exist”
158 Gnosticism, Jung, Isis and Osiris, pagan lore
158 “modern Catholics… haven’t a clue to these developments in the arts”
158 “the Thomist cannot regard either the human body nor the body politic as a mere obstacle to salvation”
1955 Review of Seduction of the Innocent by Frederick Wertham, Rinehart, SHENANDOAH, Vol.6, No.2, Spring, 53-57
54 science is gnostic in its acceptance of violence
55 hum of machines as deadly as radioactivity
56 after writing, he hollows space
56 cryptic remarks
57 don’t start with morals – becomes red herring for comic industry
1955 Self-Condemned (on Wyndham Lewis) UNPUBLISHED
1 no freedom of speech, journalistic exaggeration
1 Lewis boycotted for 30 years
2 Gouzenko
5 dictaphone
1955 Five Sovereign Fingers Taxed the Breath SHENANDOAH, Vol.7, #1, Autumn, 50-51
50 speech as cosmic architecture
51 new cosmic plane, deaf-blind mutes
51 Mars and Orson Welles, radio, well of loneliness
1955 An Historical Approach to Media TEACHERS COLLEGE RECORD, Vol.57, #2, November, 104-110
104 “Darwinian” media
105 metaphysical poetry
105 “Magister Ludi” game
106 calling out in silent house
106 Giedion and Egyptian, Greek, and Roman space
107 “Finnegans Wake” as recapitulation of evolution
108 the “good life” – practical problem?
109 book swallows its rival – “Ulysses”
109 definition of artist
109 much that is published later in “Counterblast” (1969)
110 vacuum tube as metaphor
110 classroom revolution a century late
1956 Educational Effects of Mass Media of Communications TEACHERS COLLEGE RECORD, Vol.57, #6, March, 400-03
400 insults since Renaissance (Freud)
400 X-rays and psychology
401 much that is published later in “Counterblast” (1969)
402 new communications ecology
402 new homogeneity
402 new role of classroom
402 “content” is preferable?
403 educator must enlarge his role
403 youth already comparing and contrasting media
403 “the citadel of individual consciousness has not fallen nor is it likely to fall; for it is not accessible to the mass media”
1956 Stylistic (Auerbach) RENASCENCE, Vol.9, #2, Winter, 99-100
99 new role of book
100 Giedion (McLuhan’s first)
1956 Music and Silence (Joyce and Byrne) RENASCENCE, Vol.9, #2, Winter, 152-53
152 resentment against Joyce
152 Byrne’s “chaocipher” vs. “Finnegans Wake” (simple comic book)
153 theosophy, progress (symbolic) of soul (symbol of girl)
1956 The New Languages THE CHICAGO REVIEW, Vol.10, #1, Spring, 46-52
46 tight conglomerates
47 Eucharist as symbol?
48 front page of newspaper as cosmic “Finnegans Wake”
48 “Life” magazine “becomes a single Gestalt where association, though not causal, is often like-like”
48 children, no “interruptions”
50 Innis disliked monopoly of knowledge
51 CBC officials, words betray us (deaf-blind mutes)
51 mass media ARE democracy
51 what can print do better?
51 door to “highbrow” and back again to “lowbrow”
1957 Why the CBC Must Be Dull SATURDAY NIGHT, Vol.72, February 16, 13-14
13 “Pravda”, power must be dull
14 America founded on public opinion
14 TV caused politicians to panic, P.R. agencies
14 TV upset F.D.R. style
14 Russia uses newspaper as “highbrow”
14 Hindus and Moslems don’t like the printed book
14 radio excites the Near East
14 radio frustrates literacy in the Near East
14 Russia more sympathetic with East
14 pressure of American TV (“The Ugly American”)
14 CBC as monkey suit, entertainment as politics and vice versa
14 CBC hates professionals
1957 Subliminal Projection on Project CANADIAN FORUM, Vol.37, December, 196-97
196 Edison and celebrities, do-it-yourself
196 the public was not flattered by the Symbolist poets
196 change is stable factor, co-existence
196 people baffled by daily newspaper
196 explicitness and implicitness (“make-happen” powers)
196 next stage beyond subliminal projection (TV for the blind)
196 “plugged in” (see the Evergreens’ “Man of 2078” recording)
196 relation of movie, news, and ads
196 P.R. agencies self-liquidating
196 businessmen eager to talk
196 “sovereign rights of subject and specialty are frantically maintained in what William Whyte, Jr., calls the university jungle”
196 repackage entertainment as culture-strategy
196 Soviet brainwashing vs. our entertainment
196 atom bomb joke
1958 Classic Treatment (Eliot) RENASCENCE, Vol.10, Winter, 102-03
102 poets shape their epoch, English and French obsolete
103 global thrombosis, young have beards
103 Joyce superior to Eliot, PhD’s
1958 Compliment Accepted RENASCENCE, Vol.10, Winter, 106-08
106 Joyce prophetic of co-creating technology
107 relevance of Roman Catholicism
107 Roman = reason as spiritual faculty
107 verbal art to equal science
107 Joyce concerns entire world’s health
107 PhD’s, Joyce avid newspaper reader
107 22 epiphanies
107 difference between Joyce and Mallarmé
108 meaning of “keys”
108 Joyce was not an aesthete, triad
108 Joyce and his Faith
1958 Excerpts from Explorations Magazine BASILIAN TEACHER, 2 and 11-16
2 book as speech, thinking as talking
2 without eye, incomplete
1958 The Electronic Revolution in North America INTERNATIONAL LITERARY ANNUAL No.1, John Wain, ed., London: John Calder, 165-69
165 print as archetype
166 Descartes to Darwin, linear cause and effect
166 painting as “thing”
168 two views of art, puny role of art
168 businessmen bring reforms
169 oral = instantaneous
169 depth charge
1958 Media Alchemy in Art and Society THE JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION, Vol.8, #2, Summer, 63-67
63 life as social experiment is over
63 Descartes anticipates “causes with effects”
63 objective correlative, “causes” in audience
64 scattershot communication is wasteful and dangerous
66 two reasons why no theory of change in West
67 nuclear revolution
67 boundaries between planets abolished and those between the arts and sciences, too
67 media ecology (to hold social forms in patterns for 100,000 years)
1958 One Wheel, All Square (Joyce) RENASCENCE, Vol.10, #4, Summer, 196-200
196 the letters were once an event
196 resentment against Joyce
196 Joyce never applied to a Foundation
196 “my producers, are they not my consumers?”
196 tyranny of middle-man, over-sized public
197 key to Swift’s madness
197 Joyce helps Giedion’s daughter
198 the greatest is Joyce
198 the living word as the archetype of all creation
198 tropes, “lunging” for God (Maritain) is Joyce’s method
199 artists are masters of integration
200 Joyce’s Faith at end of “Finnegans Wake”
1958 Knowledge, Ideas, Information and Communication YEARBOOK OF EDUCATION, 225-32
226 modification in music is natural
228 the fixed-in-his-ways typesetter vs. the radar-guided, other-directed man
229 failure of Leavis
230 students of cinema (“if only we’d known”)
230 new Tower of Babel
231 Descartes’ bias for clarity
231 “character” as theme, contrapuntal
231 obsolete eccentric individual vs. new conformity
231 change in classical physics
1959 Virgil, Yeats, and 13,000 Friends (Eliot) RENASCENCE, Vol.11, Winter, 94-95
94 only oral exegesis can cope with
94 Eliot putting his lands in order
94 disliked Goethe, Eliot engages all levels of civilization
95 Pierrot, technical interest in the East
1959 Yeats and Zane Grey RENASCENCE, Vol.11, #3, Spring, 166-68
166 Joyce alone used radio and television
166 “formal causalities”
167 correspondence as P.R. activity
167 Westerns helped his literary sense
167 early poetry very bad, missing novel
168 early years in the occult
1959 Myth and Mass Media DAEDALUS, Vol.88, #2, Spring, 288-99
288 Gorgon and Cadmus
289 single word as myth, macromyths
289 language for participation, not classification
289 “in the long run”
290 “myth” as still-shot of macromyth
290 Gorgon, Cadmus, and Oedipus
291 sphere
292 “Western” strategy far from over
292 “formal causes” of media
292 “figures” of rhetoric
293 collective postures of mind
293 new form is a cluster of items
293 manuscripts are read too slowly to create sense of self-expression
294 “camera obscura”
294 “communism” is oral “nationalism”
294 myth defined, too “literary”
295 media as myths and source of many subordinate myths
295 child has no stake in past vs. new
295 McLuhan says “it is my point”
296 Rouault anticipated TV by decades
296 reading as heraldry
296 efficient causality (“good or bad”)
296 philosophical agreement is not necessary
297 “media” as great tracts of time
297 THE MECHANICAL BRIDE is too easy
298 peripety or “flip-point”
298 “psychic eye of man”
298 “subliminal” (interior landscape) advertising takes over Romantic Madison Avenue (external landscape)
298 “editorials” are for passive readers
299 “sponsors of pre-electronic media continue to overlay the new myth by injections of earlier myth”
299 “audio-visual aids” (rear-view mirror)
299 language as myths for media ecology
1959 Joyce or No Joyce RENASCENCE, Vol.12, #1, Autumn, 53-54
53 no Joyce in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”
53 “prelection” (five steps)
54 Joyce’s work must be HEARD
54 docility is necessary before “Finnegans Wake”
1960 The Effects of the Improvement of Communication Media JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY, Vol.20, 566-75
566 Tom Easterbrook, “goat” joke
567 Parkinson’s Law, “authority of knowledge”
568 the “call girl”, Parkinson’s Law and Nazi Hjalmar Schacht
569 Dewey, “forming the very ground plan and the superstructure of social and business institutions”
571 economic “take off”
571 nuclear structures via Disney
572 game and information theory is self-liquidating
572 “substitutability of one resource for another”
572 early industrial England revived Greek design and styling
573 Ruskin attacked Greek mechanism
573 Archimedes and outer space
574 collision of galaxies, our practice is ahead of our thought
575 preoccupation with economic growth
575 no “Cold War” but there is an “Information Hot War”
575 escape into understanding because adjustment is impossible
1960 A Critical Discipline (Lewis) RENASCENCE, Vol.12, #2, Winter, 93-95
94 art as colossal preference
94 Mrs. Lewis’ anecdote about D.H. Lawrence
94 Wagner correct in defending his personal bias
94 “dithyrambic spectator”
94 Lewis had no solution or program
94 conformity as social bond
95 merely offering new point of view
95 “Lewis, in a word, is a stimulant and a mode of perception rather than a position or a package”
1960 Another Eliot Party RENASCENCE, Vol.12, #3, Spring, 156-57
157 Eliot had no point of view
157 Eliot uses analogical structure
157 just “LISTEN” to Eliot
157 “if all languages begin as codes… so languages can revert to code again when the social matrix cracks”
157 Eliot and jazz rhythms
157 “Laforgue, Eliot, and others have shown us how to inter-relate the common and the decorous in order to release unexpected splendor”
1960 Statement of 1960 “Project for Understanding Media” (both pages are important)
1960 Joyce as Critic RENASCENCE, Vol.12, #4, Summer, 202-03
202 Joyce tells Yeats to put it into creative order
202 “authority of knowledge”
202 drama is at war with convention
202 “Finnegans Wake” is pure drama, so is Thomas Aquinas
203 “the nuns come to the windows”
1960 Around the World, Around the Clock RENASCENCE, Vol.12, #4, Summer, 204-05
204 “voices of silence”
204 visual culture easily brainwashed
205 artist as control tower, gives models of larger situations
205 Marxist claim to a theory of change
205 the medium is the message in the long run
205 “analogical knowledge cannot be visualized”
205 implosion of the Holy Spirit, lonely Gnostic individual spiritual quest
1960 Romantic Image RENASCENCE, Vol.12, #4, Summer, 207-09
208 reconciliation of opposites (sight and sound) was the task of the first Romantics
208 list of Gnostics
208 Gnostic does not like the Dark Power
208 Gnostic finds the electric environment very stressful
208 from “The Dunciad” to “Finnegans Wake”
209 “Finnegans Wake” prophesizes the end of the subliminal – waking of human consciousness
209 “hypocrite lecteur”
209 speaker is voice in liturgy
209 art’s mandate is to anticipate change
209 importance of Lewis in Yeats
1960 Flirting with Shadows (Eliot) RENASCENCE, Vol.12, #4, Summer, 212-14
212 avant-garde intuition in a living culture
212 the young enlist as rebels
212 “relevance” is the antithesis of “perspective”
213 “… before a total flux occurs”
213 literature will not remain
214 is there a self? (metaphysical doubt)
1960 Personal Approach RENASCENCE, Vol.13, #1, Winter, 42-43
42 “direct oral experience of men of letters” found in newspaper interviews
43 Sylvia Beach has misread “Finnegans Wake”
43 McLuhan proposes “a magazine called ‘Ana-Log’ as an outlet for the epiphanizing anecdote”
1960 Melodic and Scribal RENASCENCE, Vol.13, #1, Autumn, 51
51 in “Finnegans Wake” Shem the Penman is not allowed a song
51 harmony for literate camp
51 Joyce prescribes the “A B C deed” for the auditory and analphabetic “camp”
51 “what the reader sees is not what the reader will hear”
51 “yet today our technology has externalized all of our various senses until the SENSUS COMMUNIS has become a practicality of technology and culture. Joyce was the first man to know this and to leap at the meanings of the ‘Wake’ in relation to our opportunities today”
Do you have the text for any of the unpublished pieces? The review for Thompson's Melville's Quarrel with God especially?