Monthly Archives: September 2023

Global Conference on the Future

“The First Global Conference on the Future” was held in Toronto, July 20-25, 1980. It was sponsored jointly by the World Future Society and the Canadian Futures Society.1

Marshall McLuhan was given an award for his outstanding futures writings. He was in declining health at the time and as he struggled to the front to receive the award, his son Eric had to assist him. (Looking Back on the Future, 157)2

McLuhan died 5 months later on New Year’s Eve.

  1. The 59 page brochure for the conference is available at the Internet Archive:
    ↩

  2. Looking Back on the Future by Fred G. Thompson (1992) describes the conference in Chapter 18, ‘The Great Global Conference of 1980’, 153-159:

    Thompson was a friend of McLuhan and at the time was Director of Communications Studies at Bell Northern Research in Ottawa. ↩

Minotaur

In the myth of Dedalus the Greeks symbolized several matters. Primarily responsible for the Minotaur, he destroyed many generations of hopeful youth. The Minotaur he preserved by a labyrinth of great ingenuity whereby, says Francis Bacon, “is shadowed the nature of mechanical sciences, for all such handicraft works as are more ingenious and accurate may be compared to a labyrinth in respect of subtlety and divers intricate passages (…) For mechanical arts are of ambiguous use, serving as well for hurt as for remedy.” (Typhon in America, ca 1948)1

Any movement of appetite within the labyrinth of cognition is a “minotour” which must be slain by the hero artist. Anything which interferes with cognition, whether concupiscence, pride, imprecision or vagueness, is a minotaur ready to devour beauty. So that Joyce not only was the first to reveal the link between the stages of apprehension and the creative process, he was the first to understand how the drama of cognition itself was the key archetype of all human ritual myth and legend. And thus he was able to incorporate at every point in his work the body of the past in immediate relation to the slightest current of perception. (Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process, 1951)

Joyce (…) wanted and got a simultaneous control of widest perspectives and the most intimate and evanescent moments of apprehension. And this he was able to achieve by analysis of the labyrinth of cognition which Aristotle and Aquinas had revealed to him. It is thus, for example, that he is able to include in the first two pages [of The Portrait of the Artist] the entire experience of the race, the ground plan of all his unwritten work, and the most individual features of Stephen’s expanding awareness. The opening words place the hero in the traditional labyrinth and confront him with a minotaur adopted to his infant years: “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo…”. Stephen Hero is so named because the artist in that work confronts and slays scores of minotaurs. The book swarms with labyrinths of many kinds and levels. (Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process, 1951)

Traditionally there are two kinds of labyrinth, stone and sea, eye and ear. Joyce uses both constantly. (…) The moment of arrest is an epiphany, a moment not in time’s covenant, and it is by the bringing of complex perceptions to a focus in such moments that the minotaurs of the labyrinths are always overcome. (Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process, 1951)

Know-how is so eager and powerful an ally of human needs that it is not easily controlled or kept in a subordinate role, even when directed by spectacular wisdom. Harnessed merely to a variety of blind appetites for power and success, it draws us swiftly into that labyrinth at the end of which waits the minotaur. So it is in this period of passionate acceleration that the world of the machines begins to assume the threatening and unfriendly countenance of an inhuman wilderness even less manageable than that which once confronted prehistoric man. Reason is then swiftly subdued by panic desires to acquire protective coloration. As terrified men once got ritually and psychologically into animal skins, so we already have gone far to assume and to propagate the behavior mechanisms of the machines that frighten and overpower us.2 (The Mechanical Bride, 1951)

the labyrinth with its accompanying association of the Minotaur, symbol of the encounter with the self. (Through the Vanishing Point, 1968)3

the story line in the minotaur myth is that of human cognition, leading to the confrontation with human identity, which is the monster. (Exploration of the ways, means, and values of museum communication with the viewing public, 1969)

Daedalus, the mightiest maker or engineer of an­tiquity, contrived the labyrinth that enclosed the Minotaur. The first page of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man concerns the cognitive labyrinth as it is traversed by Stephen, the artist hero, in his first encounter with the Minotaur and the other scandals (cf. Greek etymology)4. Stephen’s surname is not Daedalus but “Dedalus,” i.e., “dead all us.” Joyce’s last story in Dubliners, “The Dead,” and the last lines of the Portrait explain the relation of the young artist to the dead; “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of ex­perience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated con­science of my race.” This verbal implication of ricorso, the millions of repetitions of the cognitive labyrinth, which is traced on the first page of the Portrait, is the task of making sense, of waking the somnambulists in the labyrinth of cognition. (From Cliché to Archetype, 1970)5

Q — is television a monster? A — Yes. It’s literally a tribal monster like the Minotaur from Greek mythology trapped in a maze of sensation. This Bull-man monster swallowed humans lost in the maze. And that’s exactly what TV does. Some of our young are fed to the Minotaur every year. (McLuhan on the Evils of TV, 1977)

  1. Book III. ↩
  2. “As terrified men once got ritually and psychologically into animal skins, so we already have gone far to assume and to propagate the behavior mechanisms of the machines that frighten and overpower us.” Compare McLuhan to Pound, June 22, 1951: “Consider the effect of modern machinery in imposing rhythm on human thought and feeling. Archaic man got inside the thing that terrified him — tiger, bear, wolf — and made it his totem god. To-day we get inside the machine. It is inside us. We in it. Fusion. Oblivion. Safety. Now the human machines are geared to smash one another. You can’t shout warnings or encouragement to these machines. First there has to be a retracing process. A reduction of the machine to human form. Circe only turned men into swine. Our problem is tougher.” (Letters 227). ↩
  3. Page 219. ↩
  4. The bracketed suggestion is from McLuhan. ↩
  5. Page 148-149. ↩

Easterbrook on Innis

In 1978 Tom Easterbrook participated in the University of Toronto oral history project, completing 4 roughly one-hour tapes between November 27 and December 8 that year.

The Easterbrook tapes are very disappointing, not only because the quality of the recordings is often poor, but especially because the questioner seems to have been more interested in the minutiae of the administration of the Political Economics department than in Easterbrook’s incomparably more important relations with Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. Easterbrook’s intimate interactions with Innis in the 1951-1952 period, when Innis was dying, are mentioned only in regard to Easterbrook taking over Innis’ course on communications.1 And the 1953-1955 Ford seminar on culture and technology, where Easterbook worked with Ted Carpenter, Carl Williams, Jacky Tyrwhitt and McLuhan, is hardly touched upon in passing. 

Both Williams and McLuhan were decades-long friends of Easterbrook from the University of Manitoba and Easterbrook and Williams were grad students at UT at the same time in the mid 1930’s when McLuhan was at Cambridge. The three were then colleagues at the University of Toronto for around 30 years beginning in the 1940s until Williams left UT to become president of the University of Western Ontario. Information from Easterbrook about the relations of the three friends over the 1930-1978 period would have been priceless, especially concerning the dynamics of the Ford seminar. 

The eight-minute passage transcribed here from the first tape2 gives an abbreviated overview of Easterbrook’s relation with Harold Innis. Innis was Easterbrook’s PhD thesis adviser in the mid 1930s and arranged the 1938 University of Toronto Press publication of that thesis, Farm Credit in Canada, with a ‘Foreword’ by Innis himself. Easterbrook’s observations have been edited for clarity here, but can easily be checked against the original via the link given in the second footnote below.

Then something [happened] that changed my whole life (…) I had heard about a guy named Innis, who (…) had an awful lot to say if you cared to listen. So I went along to a class (…) and watched this (…) figure walk in with some scrappy looking notes and stand in front of the class. He seemed to be completely unaware that anyone was present. Pedagogically this was a disaster. He read this stuff and, you know, that seemed to me heresy. I’d been raised in what seemed to me the oral tradition where, if you knew your stuff, you spouted it and you kept people alive [to the flow of the lecture]. 

I don’t think he was ever really aware of the size of an audience or cared very much [about it]. There was a story that during a blizzard he arrived in a great hall (…) and I think three people had arrived out of a hundred or so [enrolled students]. I was told that he [nevertheless] gave the full lecture. 

On the other hand, what caught me was that this was an exploring mind at work and this was his own work. Now this was something new to me. For years I’d been listening to professors spouting about the work of others. [In contrast], this [from Innis] was hard rock mining in Canadian scholarly areas of research. When he talked, it was his work. And the lessons he drew from seemingly minor incidents, you know, like how steam points in the Klondike revolutionized the [gold mining] industry up there and then [could be] traced through the whole effects of what was a much more massive change than I’d realized because I’d had no historical background at all. I’d avoided history as poison in Manitoba because of my high school experience where you memorized kings from now to kingdom come (…).

So I was caught. 

Now there was a problem. I talked to him and while he never talked much, for a man who was such a communications expert in his field it was very hard to engage in dialogue with him. (…) He’d say, ‘it’s interesting’ or something — but l don’t ever remember the kind of spontaneous open discussion that I had with McLuhan and several others over the years. It never worked [with Innis]. On the other hand, when you left him, you were fired up [to get on with your work]. (…)

So I began very intensive studies of Canadian economic history right from the beginning, the French period and all the rest of it, and discovered that Innis had a helluva lot to say and that he had the most revealing mind I’ve ever encountered. He could take a simple fact like the contrast between drying [salted ashore] and green [salted onboard] fisheries. They had the most physical difference and the most profound effects on the trading systems of two empires and their relationships with the new world. He saw a whole set of interrelationships from what often seemed to be a very simple proposition into quite a network of change with a definite sense of pattern to it. It was exciting. I tried to tell students who didn’t read his Fur Trade, they ought to read it just to see how you have the whole thing laid out. That’s why it’s such an interesting book. You have tremendous massing of evidence, [the details of] quintal [weights, and so on] — and then [you have] the purple passage, the pulling [everything] together. It’s just like raising a curtain on the whole thing. A whole set of revelations appears in just two or three paragraphs and then you’re back into the sifting, the turning over, [of further details]. His processing seemed to be to sift, turn over, work with material until, intuitively, a sense of pattern emerges, in which he could relate a whole series of elements in terms of their interactions against the background of change regarded in the Gestalt sense.3

[Lately] I’ve been trying to absorb some of this in a course in the physics area, and I’m astonished how many of the findings that they regard as very modern in modern science involve a methodology that is very similar to the one [Innis] adopted.4 (…)

[In my grad work in the 1930s] I carried on doing a bit of statistics on banking and then [got] going into Innis and doing something on early farm finance. (…) My whole interest had shifted to Innis.5 (…) I swung completely over [to him]. So then followed nearly three years [~1934-1937] of intensive work [by me] largely devoted to Innis’s preoccupations… 

 

  1. This may be one more nail in the coffin of McLuhan’s account of his meeting Innis. For discussion see McLuhan on first meeting Innis. But if Innis gave over his communications course to Easterbrook, presumably in 1951, McLuhan’s account falls apart completely. ↩
  2. William Thomas James Easterbrook (oral history, part 1) — 27 November, 1978, 32.10–40:10. ↩
  3. Easterbrook’s appeal to Gestalt here, and to the similarities between methodologies in the humanities and modern sciences, doubtless reflects the influence of McLuhan. Since 1964, when he first read Wolfgang Köhler‘s Gestalt Psychology, McLuhan had been talking incessantly about the Gestalt relation of figure and ground. Meanwhile, since meeting Sigfried Giedion in 1943, and reading Giedion’s work as a result, McLuhan had come to share Giedion’s view that the hidden ‘orchestration’ of the methodologies in the humanities and modern sciences needed to be brought to light and investigated in a ‘Faculty of Interrelations’. For discussion see Sigfried Giedion — A Faculty of Interrelations and Faculty of Interrelation in Toronto. ↩
  4. See the previous note. ↩
  5. A contemporary review of Farm Credit in Canada begins by indicating its Innisian methodology: “The eighty-five pages of notes which supplement the 169 pages of text indicate the character of this book”. ↩

Crump’s Epyllion

McLuhan often referred to Marjorie Crump’s 1931 The Epyllion from Theocritus to Ovid.1 For example, in his ‘Intro­duction’ to Alfred Lord Tennyson: Selected Poetry, published in 1955, but apparently written and submitted years earlier, perhaps as early as 1951, he cites Crump describing “the general characteristics of this form” (Crump, 22) as follows: 

An epyllion is a short narrative poem. The length may and does vary considerably, but an epyllion seems never to have exceeded the length of a single book, and probably the average length was four to five hundred lines. The sub­ject is sometimes merely an incident in the life of an epic hero or heroine, sometimes a complete story, the ten­dency of the author being to use little-known stories or possibly even to invent new ones. The later Alexandrians and Romans preferred love stories and usually concen­trated the interest on the heroine. (Crump, 22)2

This same passage from Crump was then re-cited decades later in From Cliché to Archetype (1970) in the course of a long self-quotation there from that same Tennyson ‘Introduction’:

The only extensive study of this form is Marjorie Crump’s The Epyllion from Theocritus to Ovid, which is discussed in the Intro­duction to Tennyson by Marshall McLuhan3: “The so-called art of the little epic (the idyll and epyllion) was a late Greek form associated with magical rituals. It was especially cultivated by Theocritus, who was Tennyson’s favorite poet. Theocritus and the Alexandrian school were di­rectly responsible for “the new poetry” of Catullus, Ovid, and Virgil.
The work of Theocritus, Catullus, Ovid, and Virgil, masters of the epyllion, needs to be known for any deep understanding of Tennyson’s technique in narrative poetry. But the discontinuous technique of the epyllion is equally the clue to the art form of Dubliners, of The Waste Land, and of The Cantos. Professor Crump describes the epyllion as follows: ‘… a short narrative poem. The length may and does vary considerably, but an epyllion seems never to have exceeded the length of a single book, and probably the average length was four to five hundred lines. The sub­ject is sometimes merely an incident in the life of an epic hero or heroine, sometimes a complete story, the ten­dency of the author being to use little-known stories or possibly even to invent new ones. The later Alexandrians and Romans preferred love stories and usually concen­trated the interest on the heroine.’ (…) Whereas the cyclic epic, as in Homer, moves on the single narrative plane of individual spiritual quest, the little epic as written by Ovid, Dante, Joyce, and Pound is ‘the tale of the tribe.’ That is to say, it is not so much a story of the in­dividual quest for perfection as it is a history of collective crime and punishment, an attempt to justify the ways of God to man. From this point of view ‘In Memoriam’, like Petrarch’s Sonnets, is a seasonal cycle of little epics or idylls in the form of the individual quest. And the Idylls of the King is the collective quest, the tale of the tribe. The twelve idylls follow the cycle of the zodiac, each book corresponding faith­fully to the traditional character of the twelve ‘houses’ of the zodiac. By following this traditional zodiacal track Tennyson was able over a long period to compose his twelve idylls in any order he found convenient.
The pattern of collective quest lends the prominent salva­tion note to the Idylls of the King and explains his philosophy of history. ‘The Coming of Arthur’ is thus the coming of the culture-hero, and Arthur’s struggles with the demonic earth powers are the theme of the cycle. The masculine-feminine duality of most of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King may have been suggested to him by the similar aspect of each house of the zodiac.”4

Another essay on Tennyson, the 1960 ‘Tennyson and the Romantic Epic‘,5 also touches on Crump’s book:

The culture-hero as conceived in our time by James Joyce (Stephen Hero) is he who has learned the technique of intercession between the profane and the divine. He is the inventor of language, the one who can capture in his net the divine powers. In her Epyllion from Theocritus to Ovid, Marjorie Crump comments on the passion for abstruse erudition which attached itself to the little epic forms: “The fashion for learning affected not only the style but the choice of subject. Scholars searched their records for unknown myths, strange customs and marvels of all kinds. The idea of explaining some custom or ceremony, which appears in certain of the Attic tragedies, took firm root in Alexandrine poetry, and gave rise to the Aitia of Callimachus and to various poems dealing with ktiseis or the founding of cities.”6 Here is an aspect of little epic which never leaves the form whether it is cultivated by Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, or Marlowe. But its major phase is found in Joyce, Pound, and Eliot. Digression is the principal artistic device by which little epic exists. The reason for this is quite simple. To transcend time one simply interrupts the natural flow of events.7 

McLuhan wrote an introduction (‘Empedocles and T.S. Eliot’) to Empedocles by Helle Lambridis which appeard in 1976. Here again Crump is referenced after a citation from Empedocles:

“I shall speak a double truth;
at times one alone comes into being;
at other times out of one several things grow.
Double is the birth of mortal things and double their demise.
For the coming together of all both causes their birth
and destroys them; and separation nurtured in theirbeing makes them fly apart. These things never stop
changing throughout, at times coming together throughAmity in one whole, at other times being violently
separated by Strife. Thus, on one side, one whole
is formed out of many, and then again, wrenched from
each other, they make up many out of one. This is
the way they become, and their life is not long their
own, but in as far as they never stop changing throughout,in so far they are always immobile in a circle.” (…)
[McLuhan:] Empedocles (…) stresses “a double truth”. This is a matter central to Eliot, but it is also closely involved in the work of Yeats, who, as I have suggested, has elucidated the procedure in his brief essay on “The Emotion of Multitude”.8 This emotion, or sense of the universal in the particular, is born of “a double truth”, somewhat in the mode of Quantum Mechanics where the chemical bond is the result not of a connection but of a “resonant interval” such as must obtain between the wheel and the axle. The means [or media!] indicated by Yeats for achieving the emotion of multitude are familiar to modern students of Shakespeare under the head of “double plots”, and these means were taught in antiquity as essential to the aitiological epic or the Epyllion. (See Marjorie Crump’s The Epyllion from Theocritus to Ovid.)9

One of McLuhan’s last publications, the 1979 ‘Pound, Eliot, and the Rhetoric of The Waste Land’10 reverts to Crump once again: 

The discontinuous epyllion, or mythic, structure, as Marjorie Crump explains, requires a plot and digression, or a double plot, which constitutes a metamorphic structure of figure in interplay with ground — necessary to the etiological epic, a study of origins and causes.

One chapter in Crump must have particularly struck McLuhan, reminding him of Eric Havelock’s 3-part essay, ‘Virgil’s Road to Xanadu’, which was published in the first year McLuhan taught at UT, 1946-1947. Since McLuhan does not appear to have read Crump before the early 1950s, it must have been this essay by Havelock, McLuhan’s UT colleague at the time, which introduced him to the epyllion form and may have prompted him to the study of Virgil which he made over the next decade.11

Crump’s chapter begins:

The story of Aristreus, which closes the fourth Georgic, is the most beautiful of the Latin epyllia. Embodying, as it does, Vergil’ s most finished work in the epic style, it has at once the technical perfection (…) and the poetic beauty of Vergil’s greatest period. So direct is the narrative and so great the charm that it is almost a shock to the critic to discover that it is constructed on the lines of the formal epyllion, and is a genuine product of Alexandria. It is, in fact, an Alexandrian epyllion transfigured by that undefinable quality which constitutes the genius of Vergil.12 (178)

It was Havelock’s essay exactly on this Aristaeus episode in Georgics 4 (perhaps itself suggested by Crump’s monograph), that prompted McLuhan to a study of the epyllion form and of Virgil’s use of it — studies he began in the late 1940s. And it was these, not without other factors like his encounters at that time with Mallarmé and Innis, that prompted McLuhan to a changed sense of the “intercession between the profane and the divine’ (as cited above from his 1960 Tennyson essay). And it was this shift that entailed the great change recorded by him in his 1969 Playboy interview:

For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride,13 I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. I loathed machinery, I abominated cities, I equated the Industrial Revolution with original sin and mass media with the Fall. In short, I rejected almost every element of modern life in favor of a Rousseauvian utopianism. But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was, and I began to realize that the greatest artists of the 20th Century — Yeats, Pound. Joyce, Eliot — had discovered a totally different approach, based on the identity of the processes of cognition and creation. I realized that artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experience — from trash to treasures. I ceased being a moralist and became a student.14

The great lesson from the epyllion form is put by Crump as follows:

The digression [on Orpheus and Eurydice] obeys the [Alexandrian] convention which requires a contrast of style in the two parts of the epyllion.15  The convention of a contrast and yet a parallel in subject is also observed. The main subject [Aristaeus and his bees] is the story of a loss, which is ultimately made good. The digression [Orpheus and Eurydice] tells of loss without recovery, the pathos being heightened by the frustrated restoration of Eurydice [from Hades]. Underlying the pathos is the moral, characteristic of many of Vergil’s tragic stories, that the consequences of guilt fall most heavily on innocent people. Aristaeus, who is responsible for the whole tragedy, ultimately recovers his bees; for Orpheus and Eurydice there is no recovery. (189-190)

Until he was around 40, McLuhan had seen only the contrast between the  tradition he revered and the modernity he detested. He had not also seen the parallel between them. And it was this change of vantage from mere exclusion — only difference — to inclusion — difference and unity — that  spurred him to become a student of the two of them at once.

 

 

  1. The Epyllion from Theocritus to Ovid, by M. Marjorie Crump. Pp. viii + 284. Oxford: Blackwell. 1931. ↩
  2. Crump continues here: “The style varies; it may be entirely narrative, or may be decorated with descriptive passages of a realistic character. The dramatic form is frequently employed, and it is usual to find at least one long speech. So far the only distinction between the epyllion and the narrative hymn consists in the subject. A hymn always tells the story of a god, whereas an epyllion deals with human beings; gods may appear as characters, but there is no emphasis on their divinity. There is, however, one characteristic of the epyllion which sharply distinguishes it from other types, namely the digression. Except the Hylas of Theocritus, all the extant epyllia before the time of Ovid possess digressions. The digression is a second story, often of great length, con­tained within the first, and frequently quite unconnected with it in subject. Usually it appears as a story told by one of the characters; less commonly as a description of a work of art. Judging from the extant examples, it seems to have been the practice to secure an artistic connection between the two parts of the poem by using parallel subjects and contrasting the details; or two definitely contrasting subjects might be chosen; in many cases there is also a contrast of style. (…) The digression is probably an inheritance from both Homer and Hesiod. The Shield of Achilles and the narrative of Odysseus are obvious Homeric examples (…) But in Homer the important digressions are an integral part of the whole story, while any irrelevant matter is kept strictly subordinate to the main interest. In the epyllion the digression is often as important as the main subject, and sometimes even becomes the more important of the two, the main subject acting as a framework. Here we find the Hesiodic tradition at work, for the genealogical catalogue had to depend for its interest on its narrative digression. The general style of the epyllion is that of all Alexandrian poetry, formal, allusive, learned. The language and atmosphere are more homely than those of grand epic, and a graceful use of realism gives great charm to the work of some poets.” (Crump, 22-23-24) ↩
  3. McLuhan and Wilfred Watson refer to McLuhan in the third person here. ↩
  4. From Cliché to Archetype, pp. 94-96. McLuhan and Watson continue here: “For each planet’s day home is located in a positive masculine sign, and its night home in a negative or feminine sign.” The wokers will jump on this as an indication of McLuhan’s prejudice and ignorance and as reason to cancel him. But McLuhan’s life was in fact happily dominated by women — by his mother Elsie, his wife Corinne, his secretary Marg Stewart and his 4 daughters, Mary, Teri, Stephanie and Elizabeth. Over and over again in his work he praises the feminine ability to multitask roles. In his view, women are more ‘electric’ than men, less Gutenbergian, and therefore more likely than men to lead the world in healthy directions. So ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ are used here not in an evaluative sense, but in the electro-magnetic sense of interactive poles. ↩
  5. ‘Tennyson and the Romantic Epic’ in Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson, ed. John Killham, 1960, 86–95. ↩
  6. Crump, 14. McLuhan cites this same passage in his unpublished notes on the little epic dating from the 1950s. ↩
  7. For Crump on digression in the epyllion form see note 2 above. ↩
  8. See Yeats on the emotion of multitude. ↩
  9. The bracketed reference here is from McLuhan. The same point about “the aitiological epic” had been made in a letter from him to Joe Keogh in 1969: “Apropos aitios, remember it is the technical term for ‘little epic’, cf. Marjorie Crump.” ↩
  10. ‘Pound, Eliot, and the Rhetoric of The Waste Land’, New Literary History, 10:3, Spring 1979. ↩
  11. For references and discussion, see Jackson Knight on “the main question” and The Road to Xanadu. ↩
  12. Crump and other British scholars like Jackson Knight preferred the ‘Vergil’ spelling to ‘Virgil’. ↩
  13. The Mechanical Bride appeared early in 1951. But it was largely composed in the late 1940s. ↩
  14. McLuhan’s realization “that artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experience — from trash to treasures” might be formulated as the artist’s “sense of the universal in the particular” and of the “intercession between the profane and the divine”. ↩
  15. For Crump on digression in the epyllion form see note 2 above. ↩