In my previous post, I talked about hearing Douglas Coupland last Friday evening at a University of Winnipeg conference on Marshall McLuhan. I gave most of my attention to his physical presence and manner, because that’s what we so often want to know about celebrities we might try to see in person, but also because it seems the kind of investigation of “medium” that fascinated McLuhan, and in his wake, Coupland.

McLuhan (1911-1980) was a communications theorist who became something of a media guru in the 1960s — during my teens — drawing attention to media in a way we hadn’t encountered before, both dazzling and mystifying us with his critique. He came up with “the global village,”  “the medium is the message,” and notions of “hot” and “cool” media. He was provocative and controversial then, and remains so.

Several years ago I read Philip Marchand’s biography of Marshall McLuhan and enjoyed it. I haven’t read Coupland’s treatment of the man (one of the biographies in the Extraordinary Canadians series) but there’s lots of Google discussion and reviews of the book. (Since Coupland claimed to get a lot of his material for the biography from Google, why not access his book the same way?)

Here, for the record, a few scraps from his talk, things that interested me, more or less as he said them:

— We’re back in the 50s again…. [Then] everyone was going through this collective convulsion….  [Now] we’re back in this point. Time is beginning to feel funny…. We want it now… [Can’t do without] emails 48 hours without having a meltdown.

— Marshall thought the inner voice [we all have] came with reading.

— He was kind of kooky.

— He was a God-seeker. [It had to do with] the limbic system at the back of his brain.

— He’s good at helping you trigger your own ideas… He never preached…. He was a leaf-blower but he didn’t preach.