Forward through the Rearview Mirror: Reflections on and by Marshall McLuhan ed. by Paul Benedetti and Nancy DeHart (review)

HUMANITIES 313 poetries. His influence was deeply felt not simply in the United States but throughout the English-speakingworld, ineluding Canada,wherehis work affected, among others, some ofthose poets who started Tish magazine aI1d Coach House Press in the 19605 and went on to make major contributions to Canadian writing. Olson's attack on the EIiotic tradition was not an attack on learning, as is so often the case, but on Eliot's backward-looking poetics and the way in which that stifled poetic invention and strangled poetry's prophetic possibilities in an elegant, lingering wrune. Olson's particular work was also strongly anti-lyrical. Recognizing early on the dead end the lyric was stuck in, Olson took it upon himself to rethink Pound's project and push poetry towards some further narrative possibility. The result was The Maximus Poems, a work thatchanged the direction ofmid-twentieth-century poetry. The foundation of that work was Olson's prodigious reading. He was among the most energetic readers of his generation..His poetry, more than that of any of his contemporaries, draws its power from the extraordinary range ofhis reading. Maud'sbook is an immaculate record ofthat. The first thing that Maud had to do was reconstruct the poet's library, an enormous task in itself. After that, he had to track the poet's attentions through all that work. While the notion of the history ofsorneone's reading might sound less than interesting, Maud dovetails the details of Olson's reading with an ongoing narrative of the growth ofhis thinking as it nourished the body of his work This constant movement between reading, thinking, and writing is fascinating. The bios in biography here is really a zoe, the revelation of the synthetic, creative mind at work. Olson himself proposed that the way into a writerls work was through the triangulation of his/her life, reading, and writing. Maud has provided an invaluable service by giving us in exemplary detail that second, crucial term, andl beyond that, by making clear how it figures in the production of an irmnensely important body of poetic work. (MICHAEL BaUGHN) Paul Benedetti and Nancy DeHartl editors. F011JJard through the Rearview Mirror: Reflections on and by Marshall McLuhan Prentice-Hall. 208. $29.95 paper Ofall important twentieth-century thinkers, Marshall McLuhan seemsboth the easiest to introduce to people, and yet, at the same time, the most difficultto assess comprehensively. McLuhandiscovered and perfected the use of the'sound byte' several decades before there was such a term. This means anybody can offer an apparently intelligent opinion on MeLuhan's observations, even after hearing only one or two of his famous pronouncements (a point brilliantly recognized by the scene in Woody Allen's Annie 314 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 Hall where a man pronounces himself an expert, and Woody Allen produces McLuhan, right on the spot, so hecan declare to the young man, 'You know nothing of my work'). Perhaps it is possible to think of taking a line from Plato or Nietzsche that would nicely fill out a bumper sticker, but a phrase like ~god is dead' has a 'take it or leave it' quality, whereas 'the medium,is the message' is aphoristic and parabolic in a way that requires you to engage it, even before you can figure out whether or not you agree with it. As several commentators in this compilation of quotations and pictures suggest, McLuhan seemed a visionary and a poet, someone who inspired or annoyed, but not someone with whom you can agree or disagree in the traditional sense of those terms. The qther non-academicrhetorical strategyMcLuhan applied effectively, one gleaned from advertising, was repetition. He utilized the philosophical equivalent of slogans to allow people first to be intrigued by his idea, before trying to move them towards a more complex appreciation of his work. This way, in a classic strategy of advertising, everyone comes away with something upon encountering him, even though some people get considerably less out of the experience than others. And McLuhan was not trying to fool anybody with this approach of strategic repetition; on the contrary, he saw it as a necessary way for him to produce insight...