Agent Palmer

At some point in our lives, we read children’s books. Perhaps they were read to us, but the very nature of a “children’s book” conjures up clean white pages with simple stories and often beautiful illustrations.

Later on, we move away from children’s books. We put away anything remotely childish like a picture book, and we start reading for school. It’s the stuff without pictures and often without an interesting cover. If that didn’t kill your love of books and you’re among those of us still reading, you’re probably as far away from picture books as ever…

On at least three different occasions, I have picked up my parents’ hand-me down paperback of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media and I have not gotten past page nine or ten yet. So I was happy to get a biography of the man and a cliffnotes of his career from of one of my favorite contemporary authors, Douglas Coupland.

Coupland was selected to write about Marshall McLuhan for the series Extraordinary Canadians. Now that I know more about McLuhan, at least more than I knew from friend Professor Sara Netzley and my parents, I now see the wisdom of series editor John Ralston Saul in pairing him with Coupland.

Time capsules aren’t often great at relevance, but this book as “a construct amassed from American High School Yearbooks” by Pierre Huyghe and Douglas Coupland is a time capsule that endures.

School Spirit is “an excursion through the soul of a dead and disembodied student lost inside the memories and infrastructure of a California High School.” That’s the premise, but as explained in the book, Kelly, our dearly departed guide, can visit other high schools.