NP but McLuhan

[Mark Kohut]

Didja know that McLuhan's second (I believe) book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, published by
a University Press (Toronto) before he was famous won the Canadian Pulitzer---called the 
Giller Prize because Northrop Frye, one of the secret judges, jawboned persuasively all the judges
in an Ottawa hotel room?
 
Didja know that the book Understanding Media was called that and not its thematic subtitle: The
Extensions of Man as allusive homage to Brooks & Warren's Understanding Poetry, a classic
educational text of its time, codifying the close reading of the New Critics?
 
At one point in McLuhan's intellectual self-development he was in a kind of despair over what Western
Civilization had come to. A friend suggested that in the global perspective, he should look to the Mediterranean---
Malta??---in an intellectual move paralleling V.'s ........!!!??? (no indication MMc ever read Pynchon)
 
Whatever influence McLuhan had on Pynchon, & we know he read him, there are major parallelisms in 
(parts of) their vision at least starting with McLuhan's PhD thesis on Thomas Nashe---unlikely to have
been read by almost anybody but his thesis advisors and impressed Cambridge teachers (not published)-- 
in which, among other things, he explored why Western science after the Renaissance took the path it did
----which was not inevitable, he felt........
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