“I quit smoking on Halloween 1988. In December 1988 I was walking to work in a snowstorm when I had the biggest sneeze of my life and afterwards found in my hand a clump of living tissue the size, shape, and colour of a Thompson seedless green grape…Of course this freaked me out, and I went right to a doctor, who said that I should actually be thankful, because ‘At least it’s not inside you any more.’…But from that morning on, my hearing became hyperacute and hasn’t wavered since. It’s not just noises (of any sort) that shut me down (and by ‘shut me down,’ I mean they stop my body in mid-motion). Leaf blowers and hammers are the worst. But after the morning of the nasal incident, I also lost my ability to focus sounds…So when I found out that Marshall’s hearing went cuckoo after they took a lump out of his head, I said, ‘Yes, this is someone I want to write a biography about.’”
—Douglas Coupland on what led him to write You Know Nothing of My Work!, a 2010 biography of Marshall McLuhan, the literary critic behind the saying “the medium is the message.” (via BoingBoing)
