doug's excellent adventure
By Wendy Cavenett
The non-interview is the great wonder of modern reportage; conversational, chaotic, an enclosed, meditative experience that never quite seems to escape the undertow of doubt. Douglas Coupland, Mr X-er himself, not only inspires the non-interview but exemplifies its free-form dive away from convention. “It’s like we’re having one of those college conversations at three in the morning,” he says, “and we’re both really high or something.”
It must be that crisp, millennial air of anticipation, or maybe it’s just the sparks from the big fizz rippling through contemporary culture’s cerebral cortex. Whatever it is, Mr Coupland is, by all accounts, an ambiguous kind of chap who tends to speak of himself in the third person and re-arrange his thoughts out loud. “Have mercy!” he says, “Have mercy! One question, 18 answers. They come in leaps, you know, so have mercy!”
So how would he describe himself? “What, to aliens?” he responds. “If it was to aliens and they were hungry I’d say, ‘Ah, too skinny. Not much meat on me. The people next door are much crunchier and tastier.’ To Earth people I’d say, ‘Enjoy the pace of things.’ Is that too fortune cookie-ish?” Probably.
Coupland is the author of Generation X: Tales for an Accidental Culture, the seminal work that documented the disillusioned and disenfranchised post-baby boomer twentysomethings (i.e. the 41 million Americans born between 1961 and 1971). Now 38, Coupland’s famous ectomorphic body (“all skin and bones”) seems to be holding its own while his “barricaded inner world” continues to spill onto the pages of books read by more generations than just his own. Since X there has been Shampoo Planet, Life After God, Microserfs, Polaroids from the Dead, and Girlfriend in a Coma.
February 2000 sees the release of Miss Wyoming, his latest and probably most sensitive novel so far. It manages to incorporate Coupland’s obsession for existential dilemmas—particularly the emptiness fame and materialism brings—while staving off brand-name overplay and what many critics post-Generation X saw as trend-based, hyper-narratives (a strange position for Coupland considering his X catch-phrase, “I am not a target market”).
“I’m always interested in stories about people who consider themselves unredeemable,” he says, “whether that’s their own minds or in the minds of other people. Yet somehow, through some form of action—whether or not it’s them causing it or something happening to them—they claim some kind of redemption. And that’s what Miss Wyoming is about.
“I’ve had enough moments with Hollywood now to see a lot of things first hand and I thought what if there was this fantastically used-up, scary film producer who’s been around the block a million times and a media damaged teen idol/film star/has-been, and you meet them individually and they’re really scary but then they meet each other and then suddenly they’re beautiful. I mean, how does that work? So I guess it’s about how people make each other, how people can actually redeem each other.”
Coupland, who was born on a Canadian NATO base in West Germany, grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia. He graduated from the Emily Carr College of Arts and Design in the 1980s with a degree in studio sculpture, and before X pandemonium hit, practiced his art, held various McJobs (low paid service positions with no future), and was, for a short time, a faminologist—he lived in Sligo in Ireland for a month investigating the mechanics of famine. He was also fascinated with Antarctica and is one of the few people who is able to draw a “cartographically accurate map” of the place. Believe it or not, the characters who populated X were all named after Antarctic geographical locations.
“I’ve always approached book-writing from the visual arts point of view,” he says, “taking whatever idea or form it is you’re exploring, giving it a really good work-out and then building on that with another idea or form.
It must be that crisp, millennial air of anticipation, or maybe it’s just the sparks from the big fizz rippling through contemporary culture’s cerebral cortex. Whatever it is, Mr Coupland is, by all accounts, an ambiguous kind of chap who tends to speak of himself in the third person and re-arrange his thoughts out loud. “Have mercy!” he says, “Have mercy! One question, 18 answers. They come in leaps, you know, so have mercy!”
So how would he describe himself? “What, to aliens?” he responds. “If it was to aliens and they were hungry I’d say, ‘Ah, too skinny. Not much meat on me. The people next door are much crunchier and tastier.’ To Earth people I’d say, ‘Enjoy the pace of things.’ Is that too fortune cookie-ish?” Probably.
Coupland is the author of Generation X: Tales for an Accidental Culture, the seminal work that documented the disillusioned and disenfranchised post-baby boomer twentysomethings (i.e. the 41 million Americans born between 1961 and 1971). Now 38, Coupland’s famous ectomorphic body (“all skin and bones”) seems to be holding its own while his “barricaded inner world” continues to spill onto the pages of books read by more generations than just his own. Since X there has been Shampoo Planet, Life After God, Microserfs, Polaroids from the Dead, and Girlfriend in a Coma.
February 2000 sees the release of Miss Wyoming, his latest and probably most sensitive novel so far. It manages to incorporate Coupland’s obsession for existential dilemmas—particularly the emptiness fame and materialism brings—while staving off brand-name overplay and what many critics post-Generation X saw as trend-based, hyper-narratives (a strange position for Coupland considering his X catch-phrase, “I am not a target market”).
“I’m always interested in stories about people who consider themselves unredeemable,” he says, “whether that’s their own minds or in the minds of other people. Yet somehow, through some form of action—whether or not it’s them causing it or something happening to them—they claim some kind of redemption. And that’s what Miss Wyoming is about.
“I’ve had enough moments with Hollywood now to see a lot of things first hand and I thought what if there was this fantastically used-up, scary film producer who’s been around the block a million times and a media damaged teen idol/film star/has-been, and you meet them individually and they’re really scary but then they meet each other and then suddenly they’re beautiful. I mean, how does that work? So I guess it’s about how people make each other, how people can actually redeem each other.”
Coupland, who was born on a Canadian NATO base in West Germany, grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia. He graduated from the Emily Carr College of Arts and Design in the 1980s with a degree in studio sculpture, and before X pandemonium hit, practiced his art, held various McJobs (low paid service positions with no future), and was, for a short time, a faminologist—he lived in Sligo in Ireland for a month investigating the mechanics of famine. He was also fascinated with Antarctica and is one of the few people who is able to draw a “cartographically accurate map” of the place. Believe it or not, the characters who populated X were all named after Antarctic geographical locations.“I’ve always approached book-writing from the visual arts point of view,” he says, “taking whatever idea or form it is you’re exploring, giving it a really good work-out and then building on that with another idea or form.
“I actually see my work more as if I was in an art gallery looking at a retrospective show of things on a wall than I do looking at it as a series of books. You know, I see evolution in my work. Miss Wyoming is the big leap. Generation X was like going from water to being amphibious; Miss Wyoming is like spurting wings.”
Today, Coupland is reliving his college years. He’s back in Vancouver after sampling life in Milan, Tokyo, Montreal and Los Angeles (amongst other stopovers) during the 1980s, and he’s again involved with various visual projects. He still writes for the college’s paper, receives studio time on-campus, and enjoys hanging with the students. “It’s kind of like I’ve re-created the happiest year of my life,” he admits, “which was third year of art school, except it’s now slightly different.”
So does Coupland prefer the past? “Oh no,” he says, “I enjoy right now, exactly where I am. Absolutely, without hesitation. I have no romanticism about the past or the future—that comes fast enough. No, I’m not into time travel at all.”
While Coupland is all for techno-innovation, he is the first to admit he prefers his life relatively “low tech”. Not so his 63-year-old mother who has “completely rewritten her life” thanks to new technologies. Wearing only GAP and Banana Republic clothing, Mrs Coupland surfs the internet (“she can find anything”), is now a complete extrovert, and wants to find a job.
“it’s sort of like the old regime meets the new,” Coupland says of his mother. “With me, I call it a ‘fold of filters’, you know, putting on enough social sunscreen to deal with life. I don’t have a fax machine, I don’t answer the phone unless it’s a scheduled call, and I don’t socialise on email anymore. I think there’s like an equilibrium point that everyone has for themselves and mine’s quite low-tech actually. If I adopt a new technology, something else has to go.”
In contemplating the state of modernity, Coupland has deconstructed the conflict between progress and its effects on the individual. His style is highly digestible, intelligently ironic and in most cases, keenly observant. Today’s loneliness, and the helplessness that inevitably brings, consistently form the basis of many of his characters’ maladies. In Generation X he coined the phrase OPTION PARALYSIS: “The tendency when given unlimited choices, to make none”, a completely modern-day phenomena linked to a ‘loneliness stinking of helplessness’.
“I think in most modern societies there are so many different options, so many different things you can do with your life,” he says. “It’s not like there’s only two or three cookie-cutters options available and that’s it, and that, in tandem with a long life-span, and various mechanisms for personal, intellectual and spiritual enlightenment… it’s all new territory. It’s not the same old thing in brand new drag, it’s completely new and I think it was unexpected.
“When you invent a technology, a series of technologies, you always have very weird, unexpected side effects,” Coupland says. “Like when they invented automobiles, there was no way of knowing that dogs would like to hang their heads out the side and put their face out in the wind and hang out their tongues. If you were to look at a water molecule, there’s no way you’d be able to understand or anticipate glaciers or snow or ice.
“So we’re living in this constant motional fall-out from all these technologies, and if we go back to like 1900, just 100 years, statistically, you’re probably going to be dead by 38 or something, so this would be the year I die. I mean, senior citizens are one of the great wonders of the world. We’ve just opened up this whole new continent of time that didn’t exist before which is something we tend to forget.”
So what of the future? What would Coupland like to see in the new millennium? “Instead of having a census,” he says, “I wish every 10 years the government would force everyone to write down one thing they’re learnt about life up to that point and then collate them to create a master book of culture. We could learn something from that.”
And what would he write? “I think I’ve probably learnt to worry less than I use to,” he concludes, “but that’s taken work. It’s not like I hit some magic Xanadu transcendent point or anything. But that’s the one thing for me: Don’t worry so much.”
> > >
This article originally appeared in Australian Style, 2000. Since that time, Douglas Coupland has published various books including God Hates Japan, (2001), a Japanese language novel with computer animator, Michael Howatson; All Families Are Psychotic, (2001); School Spirit, (2002), with conceptual artist, Pierre Huyghe; Hey Nostradamus!, (2003); Eleanor Rigby, (2004); and JPod, (2006).
In 2006, a TV pilot based on the first two chapters of JPod was commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Filming was completed in early 2007. In 2008, a series of 13 episodes will be screened on CBC.
For more, check out Douglas's website @
http://www.coupland.com/
> > >
Picture of Douglas Coupland by Roberta Karpa,
Polaroids From The Dead, (1996).
> > >
Today, Coupland is reliving his college years. He’s back in Vancouver after sampling life in Milan, Tokyo, Montreal and Los Angeles (amongst other stopovers) during the 1980s, and he’s again involved with various visual projects. He still writes for the college’s paper, receives studio time on-campus, and enjoys hanging with the students. “It’s kind of like I’ve re-created the happiest year of my life,” he admits, “which was third year of art school, except it’s now slightly different.”
So does Coupland prefer the past? “Oh no,” he says, “I enjoy right now, exactly where I am. Absolutely, without hesitation. I have no romanticism about the past or the future—that comes fast enough. No, I’m not into time travel at all.”
While Coupland is all for techno-innovation, he is the first to admit he prefers his life relatively “low tech”. Not so his 63-year-old mother who has “completely rewritten her life” thanks to new technologies. Wearing only GAP and Banana Republic clothing, Mrs Coupland surfs the internet (“she can find anything”), is now a complete extrovert, and wants to find a job.
“it’s sort of like the old regime meets the new,” Coupland says of his mother. “With me, I call it a ‘fold of filters’, you know, putting on enough social sunscreen to deal with life. I don’t have a fax machine, I don’t answer the phone unless it’s a scheduled call, and I don’t socialise on email anymore. I think there’s like an equilibrium point that everyone has for themselves and mine’s quite low-tech actually. If I adopt a new technology, something else has to go.”
In contemplating the state of modernity, Coupland has deconstructed the conflict between progress and its effects on the individual. His style is highly digestible, intelligently ironic and in most cases, keenly observant. Today’s loneliness, and the helplessness that inevitably brings, consistently form the basis of many of his characters’ maladies. In Generation X he coined the phrase OPTION PARALYSIS: “The tendency when given unlimited choices, to make none”, a completely modern-day phenomena linked to a ‘loneliness stinking of helplessness’.
“I think in most modern societies there are so many different options, so many different things you can do with your life,” he says. “It’s not like there’s only two or three cookie-cutters options available and that’s it, and that, in tandem with a long life-span, and various mechanisms for personal, intellectual and spiritual enlightenment… it’s all new territory. It’s not the same old thing in brand new drag, it’s completely new and I think it was unexpected.
“When you invent a technology, a series of technologies, you always have very weird, unexpected side effects,” Coupland says. “Like when they invented automobiles, there was no way of knowing that dogs would like to hang their heads out the side and put their face out in the wind and hang out their tongues. If you were to look at a water molecule, there’s no way you’d be able to understand or anticipate glaciers or snow or ice.
“So we’re living in this constant motional fall-out from all these technologies, and if we go back to like 1900, just 100 years, statistically, you’re probably going to be dead by 38 or something, so this would be the year I die. I mean, senior citizens are one of the great wonders of the world. We’ve just opened up this whole new continent of time that didn’t exist before which is something we tend to forget.”
So what of the future? What would Coupland like to see in the new millennium? “Instead of having a census,” he says, “I wish every 10 years the government would force everyone to write down one thing they’re learnt about life up to that point and then collate them to create a master book of culture. We could learn something from that.”
And what would he write? “I think I’ve probably learnt to worry less than I use to,” he concludes, “but that’s taken work. It’s not like I hit some magic Xanadu transcendent point or anything. But that’s the one thing for me: Don’t worry so much.”
> > >
This article originally appeared in Australian Style, 2000. Since that time, Douglas Coupland has published various books including God Hates Japan, (2001), a Japanese language novel with computer animator, Michael Howatson; All Families Are Psychotic, (2001); School Spirit, (2002), with conceptual artist, Pierre Huyghe; Hey Nostradamus!, (2003); Eleanor Rigby, (2004); and JPod, (2006).
In 2006, a TV pilot based on the first two chapters of JPod was commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Filming was completed in early 2007. In 2008, a series of 13 episodes will be screened on CBC.
For more, check out Douglas's website @
http://www.coupland.com/
> > >
Picture of Douglas Coupland by Roberta Karpa,
Polaroids From The Dead, (1996).
> > >
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