In this beautifully written paen to the life and work of Marshall McLuhan, Douglas Coupland not only offers a vivid and heart-felt portrait of the man and his ideas but also a fascinating reflection on the nature of the biographical endeavour.

Marshall (this is how Coupland refers to him throughout the book) was fascinated by and extraordinarily good at pattern-recognition, at finding the connections between the dots, and using that understanding to forge unusual theories about the world. He was also an anti-disciplinary thinker who drew from ideas, people and projects with distinct and diverse origins. Here was a man who became a kind of 1960s prophet of the technological/communication revolutions that we are living through by studying pre-modern literature;

in the broadest of senses, one might actually say that Marshall’s ideas intellectually connected the Renaissance with the twenty -first century – from the Gutenberg print revolution and the scientific revolution it triggered to the Google-ous twent-first century, skipping everything in between except Pound and Joyce (who were building similar bridges themselves). p.41

Not only do we learn that in many ways McLuhan was a ‘man of his times’, but also how and why he was, in so many of aphoristic writings, able to transcend those times. Understanding McLuhan is understanding how his brain worked in the time and place in which he lived. Coupland takes the traditional route (by and large, with some interesting off-piste foreys) but offers  insight into how such understanding, and with it the nature of biography, might be changing. Coupland discusses McLuhan’s tendency to be ‘curiously and creatively oblivious’, wrapped up in his own thoughts like a stereotypical absent-minded professor. What was his psychopathology, he asks? Autism, Aspergers, …?

Perhaps this opens the door to what may be one future for the biography of those who create new ideas, a form in which the biographer mixes historical circumstance with forensic medical diagnosis to create what might be called a pathography – and attempt to map a subject’s brain functions and to chart the way they create what we call the self. p51

I’m a fan of Marshall McLuhan. I’ve read, re-read and thumbed the  Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media numerous times. I’ve reached the end of each without ever really finishing either. We may have heard of the writer who introduced us to the idea that the medium is the message or who presaged the notion of the global village in the ways in which we use the internet and the internet uses us, but he has so much more to offer as we become versed in his writings. I am only beginning to mine McLuhan’s explorations of the ways in which the communications revolution has engendered complex shifts in social cognition – the malleable brain stuff that neuro-pschologists are now exploring to explain the ways in which screen time influences the ways we think. And he was exploring this twenty-five years ago.

Oh, and I’ve just become a big fan of Douglas Coupland.