At the Gary Gumpert memorial organized by Lance Strate at The Players in Manhattan late last night: yours truly, Joshua Meyrowitz, Lance, Ed Wachtel, Susan Drucker, Thom Gencarelli (with Mark Twain and others in the back); photo by Michael Grabowski
I saw Gary Gumpert's 1960 Gutenberg Galaxy last night (April 29) at the Memorial Event for Gumpert (who left us late last year at the age of 91) organized by Lance Strate (sponsored by the Institute of General Semantics) at The Players in Manhattan. The 30-minute black-and-white discussion between Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Robert Shafer of course is primitive -- but, hey, it had no AI, which should make some people happy (sorry, had to throw that in) -- and is easy enough to laugh at. A TV on a stand is made to roll in, apparently of its own accord. A single overburdened camera is made to do all the work. But the conversation, particularly the things Marshall had to say, the comments he continually made ... well, they were more than enough for me to say this recondite bit of television is an outright, not to be missed, masterpiece.
McLuhan was 49 years old. Much younger than I am now, just a few years older than my son is now. His hair was jet black and his tongue was golden. He had most of the pieces already in place that would populate every book and essay he would soon be writing. He talked a lot about the global village. And this was 1960, two years before the launch of the Telstar telecom satellite in 1962 that some people thought gave him the idea for his mini-essay on the global village that would appear in one of his two breakthrough books, entitled The Gutenberg Galaxy, that would appear that same year, in 1962, and would become (along with "the medium is the message" in Understanding Media in 1964) one of his two best-known "probes" (as he liked to call the brilliant insights that poured out of his mind), and indeed was recognized by scholars like me (see my Digital McLuhan in 1999) as nearly literally prescient about the Internet age. He talked about ear-man vs. eye-man, a lesser-known but key probe he would come to call "acoustic space". I recall walking down the street with him near the University of Toronto, must have been around 1978, when a glitzy car drove by with 1950s-style fins -- might have been a Chevy Impala -- and he looked at me with that trademark twinkle in his eyes and said, "you know, the automobile retrieves the knight in shining armor". He didn't say that in Gutenberg Galaxy, the show Gary Gumpert directed, or in The Gutenberg Galaxy, the book McLuhan wrote, but the 30-minute televised conversation teemed with that kind of nonchalant genius that Marshall McLuhan was justly known for. (I say "justly," because many self-appointed media "experts" who either were too jealous or lazy, or maybe just too creaky in their thinking, professed to not understand a single phrase that McLuhan so seemingly effortlessly produced.)
There does remain the question of who came up with the "Gutenberg Galaxy" phrase, Gumpert or McLuhan? Gary Gumpert once told me point blank that he not Mcluhan had come up with that title. I actually got to know McLuhan in person in the late 1970s a lot better than I ever knew Gumpert, and I regret that I never put the question to McLuhan in our many New York and Toronto meetings. Thus, my final judgement on that question right now is: I don't know.
But I do know that I hope the world, our 2025 world, gets to see Gumpert's Gutenberg Galaxy as soon as possible. It's already been digitized. Let's see it up on YouTube ASAP.
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Two of my books about McLuhan: Digital McLuhan and McLuhan in Age of Social Media
McLuhan calls me after I sent him my doctoral dissertation, Human Replay: A Theory of the Evolution of Media
More about the Gumpert Memorial and the Institute of General Semantics
Published today: Tom Cooper's Wisdom Weavers: The Lives and Thoughts of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan
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