Cameron McEwen | McLuhan’s New Sciences

Cameron McEwen writes that the aim of his website McLuhan's New Sciences, “is to set out the patterns he [McLuhan] recognized and the study of configurations to which he resorted.”

Below is a sample from the website, a letter written by McLuhan to his old Winnipeg friend, colleague at the University of Toronto, fellow editor of Explorations and now president of the University of Western Ontario, Carlton Williams.

“Father Stan Murphy (Basilian) of the University of Windsor (formerly Assumption College) has sustained the Christian Culture Series with zero staff and zero budget for more than thirty years.

You may remember that Murphy came to Toronto when he heard of the presence of Wyndham Lewis here during the war. He rescued Lewis from absolute poverty and total neglect by Toronto and took him back to Windsor where Lewis began to teach Comparative Literature. It was when Lewis gave a lecture in the Culture Series on Rouault that my mother, who attended the lecture, wrote me in St. Louis. I could not credit the possibility that the great Lewis was actually in Windsor. After all, he was one of the greatest men of the century, both in painting and in prose. I got on a train at once and went to Windsor and met Lewis.

When I got back to St. Louis, I arranged sitters and lectures for him, and he came to St. Louis for a year. One day he said: “Why don’t we go back to Windsor and start up my old art magazine The Enemy?” I wrote Murphy at Assumption and he arranged for me to have a job at Assumption at once, so Lewis joined me in Windsor, just as the war ended. Lewis decided to go back to London and I stayed on at Assumption, whence I moved up to Toronto via the Basilians.”

Letters, (482-483)