On re-reading Douglas Coupland

It’s a difficult thing, falling out of love with an author (or musician or artist or chef or, for that matter, a lover, I guess). The moment you realise their last two or three books have been dull reiterations of the same bloody theme, or misguided attempts to switch genre, or half-arsed doodles that wouldn’t have been commissioned if they didn’t have an established name attached, or some combination of all of them, can be a punch in the face. It’s not just the time you’ve wasted ploughing through the tomes in the hope of finding some of the sparkle that attracted you to the author in the first place; it’s the fact that even the earlier books, the ones you do love, are a little bit tainted. The question starts to nag at the back of your skull — were they actually that good to start with? And do you really want to go back and find out?

Shortly after I gave up on Douglas Coupland, thanks to the confused farce and misfiring satire of Worst. Person. Ever., I also managed to lose my Kindle, so found myself getting reacquainted with my bookcase. Which is how I found myself leafing through Coupland’s third book, Life After God, which I think I think I first read in the dying days of the John Major administration. In the last story, the narrator tracks down the friends from his teenaged years, including Julie, who is “trying to escape from ironic hell” – perhaps embodying the shift from the sarcastic wisecracks of the author’s debut, Generation X, to the more fleshed-out characters that came in the likes of Girlfriend in a Coma. And this exchange occurs, although as the use of the future tense implies, maybe it’s all in the narrator’s wishful thinking and will never really happen.

We will talk some more. She will remind me of a night the seven of us had back in 1983. “You know — the night we drank lemon gin and we each stole a flower from the West Van graveyard for our lapels.”

I will draw a blank. I won’t remember.

“Oh, Scout, don’t blank out on me now — you weren’t that drunk. You gave me all that great advice at that restaurant downtown. I changed schools because of that advice.”

I will still draw a blank. “Sorry, Julie.”

“This is truly pathetic, Scout. Think. Markie went shirtless down Denman Street; Todd and Dana and Kristy got fake tattoos.”

“Uh – brain death here. Nothing.”

Julie will become obsessed with making me remember: “There was that horrible brown vinyl 1970s furniture in the restaurant. You ate a live fish.”

“Wait!” I’ll cry. “Brown 1970s furniture – I remember brown 1970s furniture.”

“Well thank the Lord,” Julie will say, “I thought I was going mad.”

“No, wait, it’s all coming back to me now... the flowers... the fish.” Like a thin strand of dental floss the entire evening will return to me, inch by inch, gently tugged along by Julie. Finally, I will remember the night in its entirety, but the experience will be strangely tiring. The two of us will sit on the warm concrete steps quietly. “What was the point of that story, anyhow?” I will ask.
“I can’t remember,” Julie will say.

 You know, maybe he isn’t so bad after all.

The partial redemption of Douglas Coupland

I’ve been reading a book. Yes, a book, a book book, a codex, a book that looks like a book, with covers and pages and things. OK, granted, I’m only reading it in such a form because the publisher, has seen fit not to produce a Kindle version. But I do start to remember the advantages of analogue text – for a start, you can use it to reserve your table in Starbucks and be pretty certain that nobody will nick it.

This is despite the fact that the tome in question – Shopping in Jail, by Douglas Coupland – is the sort of minimalist, functional, slim (92 pages) volume that exudes a sort of utilitarian panache in its cover of Guantánamo jumpsuit orange, the sort of book for which ponces such as myself are prepared to pay over the odds in the gift shops of the ICA and the Pompidou and MoMA; which is, of course, exactly the sort of shallow, facetious aperçu about 21st-century consumerism that Coupland might have included in his book of essays. In fact, I bought it because although I’ve pretty much given up on Coupland as a novelist, I can still acknowledge that he’s a good writer. Older readers may recall my review of JPod, which essentially degenerated into curating a list of the book’s best one-liners. 

I’d already deduced that the best line connected with the book occurs among its Amazon reviews but Coupland can still come up with the goods. First he quotes Paul Valéry – “Any view of things that is not strange is false” – with a studied insouciance that precludes him having to explain who Paul Valéry is, thereby leaving the reader wondering whether she really ought to know and, if not, whether she needs to pretend. And then there’s this:

I start to tune out the statistics I’m being told about the future of China’s consumers, which largely have to do with Chinese advertisers targeting the right Chinese consumers. This is depressing, and one would hope China might do something different with targeted data than just nurture shopping — possibly something gruesome and eye opening, but different nonetheless, Seated on a comfy leather sofa, watching the end of a reality series, I muse on the 7 billion people on earth and how almost everybody these days voraciously devours countless unbundled fragments of our creative past, either by watching it as a YouTube clip or by sticking it in a plastic envelope for sale on eBay, and how we seem to be consuming far more culture than we create. I’m wondering if everything before 2001 will be considered the Age of Content, and all the time thereafter as the Age of Devouring.

Which is good and true but is also pretty much what I was trying to say in my book about the Noughties. Although, according to Coupland’s analysis, by recycling his words I’ve come fairly close. Maybe I should give up on this whole shallow, facetious cultural commentary lark and write a shallow, facetious novel instead.

Douglas Coupland vs La Tricoteuse

I’ve probably been more than a little snooty in the past about reviews on Amazon, and not only those that have neglected to offer unabashed praise to my own work. Too often their combined effect is to reinforce one’s prejudices about a particular book rather than to provoke or challenge. Sometimes they can completely confound their intended purpose. Consider, for example, the reviews of 50 Shades of Grey: the one-star dismissals suggest the book might be a source of dumb fun if read while very drunk, while the five-star paeans conspire to make it sound tedious. And that’s before you confront your snobbish instincts and ask whether reviewers’ poor spelling and grammar entitle you to disregard what they have to say about the literary quality of a book.

But every now and then a review catches me off guard. I was particularly taken by what Annie Wright had to say about Douglas Coupland’s essay collection Shopping In Jail:

I probably didn't understand the reason for this book being written in the first place or maybe it's just gone ovr [sic] the top of my head. 

Oh, the sneery literature graduate in me might want to dismiss Ms Wright – whose main interests, if her Amazon profile is anything to go by, revolve around doing interesting things with wool – but those 26 words do what all great literature should. They tantalise, they tease, they make the reader wonder. Why did Annie put down her knitting to read this book? It’s not one of Coupland’s novels, something she might have overheard them discussing on Front Row, or just picked up because the cover looked enticing and she needed one more paperback to make the 3-for-2 work. It’s a short, slightly overpriced selection of his musings about contemporary society, more like a selection of blog posts than anything.

But Annie’s going to have her say, oh yes she is. And her say is devastating: not that this is a bad book or a dull book or an offensive book, but a book that, as far as she can see, has no reason to be. It’s worse than bad. It’s pointless. Sadly, the cultural cringe then kicks in and she starts to wonder whether it’s all her fault after all. But for half a sentence, she was the critic who lives inside every writer’s head, the one asking why you even bother to turn on the laptop of a morning. Her tone is level, polite, even apologetic: oddly, she reminds me of one of Coupland’s own characters, Karen from Girlfriend in a Coma, who wakes up from a 17-year sleep, at once confused by the world into which she has appeared and also more aware of what’s happening than anyone else around her. It’s as if Coupland has been confronted by his own creation, who calmly stabs him through the heart with a huge knitting needle. And to be honest, if I could provoke a reaction like that from a single reader I’d be more than happy. So long as she gave me at least four stars.

Please hold, your life is important to us

I’m suffering yet more post-natal regrets about the Noughties book: now I realise that I didn’t give nearly enough space to the works of Douglas Coupland. I’ve already discussed the fact that several of his books have a tendency to degenerate into loosely connected strings of one-liners, but is that necessarily a bad thing? Maybe this simply reflects the direction in which culture and society is developing; as the interminable Big Brother retrospectives have proved, our attention spans today can’t even cope with the Warholian 900 seconds.

In Coupland’s most recent novel, Generation A, one of the main characters is a Sri Lankan call centre worker called Harj, who defines his own professional identity as

...a chunk of disgraced meat at the end of a phone line, forced by the global economy to discuss colour samples and waffle-knit jerseys with people who wish they were dead.

which would have been useful in my deliciously fleeting contribution to the BBC2 show History of Now, in which I discussed the ersatz Englands being constructed right now in the cubicles of Bangalore. And Harj also encapsulates the Noughties interface of capitalism and celebrity culture with his prank commerce site:

For $4.99 you could visit my site and download one hour of household silence from rooms belonging to a range of celebrities, all of whom promised to donate their royalties to charity. There was Mick Jagger (London; metropolitan), Garth Brooks (rural; some jet noise in the background), Cameron Diaz (Miami; sunny, sexy, flirty)) and so forth. For cachet, I threw in household silences from the Tribeca lofts of underworld rock survivor Lou Reed and motherly experimental performance artist Laurie Anderson.

What price now for a shallow piece of dignity?

I'd hate to give the impression that the works of Douglas Coupland are essentially a string of vaguely connected smartarseries. On the other hand, this is from Life After God:

"One day I came home from the library, where I had spent the afternoon trying to make people feel middle class by scowling at them."

(And in response to all your kind messages, fine thanks, unless or until I need to go anywhere.)

When I get older, losing my hair

(I suppose I should post something about Obama but, really, what is there to say? The sheriff is near...)

The other day, I had an Ayurvedic fusion massage. It was work, not play: I was reviewing the spa facilities at a big posh hotel. This isn't my usual sort of gig, I should stress. I tend to cover restaurants, shops and the like; activities where you keep your mind on the job, and most of your clothes on. As I submitted to the expert fingers of my therapist, I wondered how one is supposed to review such an experience; how can you keep your critical faculties intact when the whole point of the experience is to drift off into a sort of blissful half-sleep? Like the Sixties, if you remember it, you weren't there.

At one point, she proferred a tub of some fragrant unguent, laced with ginger, aloe and apricot, explaining that it would strengthen my hair roots. As she rubbed it into my scalp, I wondered whether such claims would stand up to the rigours of the Advertising Standards Authority. I do remember that purveyors of hair products are forbidden from saying that such-and-such can give you healthy hair, because all visible hair is essentially dead; the best you can hope for is "healthy-looking hair". But what does that mean? If something can't in reality be healthy, how can it look healthy? Could you have a healthy-looking rock, or a healthy-looking chair?

The fact that my mind was meandering along such a pointless, meaningless trajectory is, I suppose a tribute to the care-kneading properties of the spa. Maybe I should just type 1000 words of stream-of-consciousness bollocks and say there, that's how good this place is.

On the way home on the train, still slightly spaced out, I found my battered copy of Douglas Coupland's The Gum Thief tangled up with various press releases at the bottom of my bag, and realised that three weeks ago, I'd got to within 20 pages of the end and then forgotten about it. Which may say something about Coupland's ability to write compelling prose, or my ability to finish what I'd started, or both. Or, of course, neither.

But I won't review the book, except to say that it feels like an uneasy synthesis of Coupland's self-consciously post-modernly smartarse works (Generation X, Microserfs, JPod - the ones where it sometimes feels as if the plot is just an excuse for a barrage of one-liners) and the more heartfelt ones about dysfunctional families and suburban loneliness (All Families Are Psychotic, Eleanor Rigby).

I'll just offer this short extract:

By twenty-five you know you're never going to be a rock star, by thirty you know you're never going to be a dentist, and by forty there are maybe three things left that you can still possibly be -- and even then, that's only if you run as fast as you possibly can to try to catch the train.

Which links, however tangentially, with two events of the weekend; my bubblewrap-related midlife crisis and seeing Nick and Barney for the first time in Dawkins knows how long. Because, with all due respect to the many fine, upstanding, dedicated, talented firefighters and brain surgeons and teachers and fishmongers and actuaries and Sudoku compilers and lumberjacks and bank clerks and hod carriers and psychiatric social workers and morticians and spivs and dilettantes and flâneurs and hotel spa reviewers out there, I've come to the conclusion that there are only two jobs worth doing: editing the Guinness Book of Records; and being a Dalek. And between us, we cracked them both. Before we were forty.

Repeat to fade

From The Gum Thief, by Douglas Coupland:

Or maybe memories are like karaoke--where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen's bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn't know even half the lyrics to your all-time favourite song. Only afterwards, when someone else is up on stage humiliating themselves amid the clapping and laughing, do you realize that what you liked most about your favourite song was precisely your ignorance of its full meaning--and you read more into it than maybe existed in the first place. I think it's better not to know the lyrics to your life.

Talking of which, my current favourite song might just be in amongst this lot.

Doug and dusted

First, thanks to all of you who took part in the Coupland contest. It was very difficult picking a winner, especially because none of you gave the right answer. If you're the slightest bit interested, the odd one out, the Coupland-free zone, was "In the future, everybody will mime to the Backstreet Boys between ironic fingers on YouTube for 15 minutes." There, that was worth the wait, wasn't it?

While I'm here, something odd has happened. I don't normally do the personal diary type blogging. But here you go. About four years ago, around the time I came to Bangkok, I changed my e-mail address, because the old service provider suddenly decided it wanted to charge me for the privilege. I notified everyone in my address book, but my old details presumably stayed in various mailing lists, in particularly those kept by a number of small, interesting record companies, and the PR companies working on their behalf. (Before I moved continents, I used to write for a small, interesting music magazine, now sadly departed.)

In the last few days, for reasons that aren't immediately apparent, e-mails sent to the old address have started to pop up at my current address. I presume someone's been sending them since 2003, presuming all the time that I've been receiving them. Two responses: a look back at myself four years ago; and the feeling that a parallel reality has been going on, and I've been granted a fleeting glimpse of what might have happened in my life, had I made a few different choices, or if circumstances had gone another way. All those potential connections, disappearing into god-knows-where. I half expect a gaping hole to appear in the narrow membrane between what happened and what might have happened, and hundreds of messages to gush out.

Maybe I need to stop watching Torchwood. It's not that good, after all.

Today's post is dedicated to the memory of Magnus Magnusson. "Dum der-der dum... DER dum..."

Bloodless Coupland

I mentioned in a post that's already been dismissed by the fashion police as "sooo last year" how I'd expected JPod, by Douglas Coupland (Bloomsbury) to end up as my favourite book of the year, not least because it seemed to have the potential to encapsulate the whole Web 2.0 thingy.

It doesn't do that, though. I mean, it touches on some aspects of online existence, such as the narrator's karaoke embarrassment going viral, and the delights of unexpected e-mails from Nigeria. But it's either nodding backwards to a previous generation (Coupland himself makes several appearances, which serves only to remind us that Martin Amis was cutting edge once, as well) or stabbing at futurology (Ethan, the narrator, travels to China, which sets us up for a droll contemplation of the coming Asian Century, but this never really happens either). As far as contemplating now goes, Coupland hovers on the surface, content to watch, rather than engage and dissect in the way that Pelevin does. He is the anti-Forster: ”Only disconnect.”

It wasn’t always thus. Coupland began in the very early 90s as the wry, detached chronicler of wry, detached people who peppered their speech with phrases that sounded mighty Couplandy. Later, though, he diversified into less detached, almost tender depictions of suburban families with unusual dysfunctions. In JPod he finally unites his two favoured genres. His main characters are underachieving geeks working for a video gaming company; but there's a backdrop of batty Moms and crushed Dads, not to mention a ballroom-dancing people smuggler named after an actor who appeared in Hawaii Five-O. A previous novel proclaimed that All Families Are Psychotic. In this version of Coupland's Vancouver, All Mothers Are Dope Farmers.

There’s a sense that Coupland’s really not trying that hard any more, being content to slap his characters into freaky scenarios and watch them sweat through their ironic t-shirts. At times, it’s like Carl Hiaasen on autopilot, or a low-budget Coen Brothers, but with more Morrissey quotes. However, even if JPod doesn’t exactly work as a novel, it still made me laugh more than any other book last year. It’s as if he’s spent the last 15 years jotting down droll aphorisms and non sequiturs, and then tried to cram as many of them into the story as possible, with the barest reference to context or relevance.

Since Coupland also has no qualms about padding out his narrative with found text, like a too-cool Bryon Gysin (page 10 is the phrase ‘ramen noodles’ on apparently infinite repeat; 213 to 228 comprises nothing but prime numbers), I am unashamed about filling the rest of this post with the author’s best one-liners. In fact, this could be the basis for a Random DC Aperçu Generator, but the existence of such as beast is so archly Couplandesque in itself that I’m not sure it doesn’t exist somewhere in his fictional world. (A self-parody of a self-parody? The mind reels at the upitsownarseness of the concept.)

Anyway, here are some slivers of JPod that would have adorned my school folder were I currently 17 years old, although, come to think of it, maybe kids don't have folders. OK, here are some slivers of JPod that may at some point end up in that oh-so-self-consciously-deadpan zone just under the blog title:

I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel. | The buzzword is so horrible I have to spell it out in ASCII. | It’s like casual Friday at the Asian Studies department of a Midwestern university. | I suggested North Korea should change its name to something friendlier, more accessible. | Greg tells me that all you eat is Doritos and fruit leather. | En route to Costco, I was phoned by John Doe for details on an upcoming Tetris tournament, but we got sidetracked and ended up discussing work. | Drinking Zima is something Douglas Coupland would do. | I wanted to pretend I was living inside an Archie comic. | You’re always making these ironic comments that don’t quite work. | Sim City? That’s pretty vanilla, John. | Everyone looked awkward, as if Angela Lansbury's aging collie dog had noiselessly passed wind. | Haven’t you noticed how nobody ever allows their forearms to be exposed here? | If I ruled the world, every day would be a Thursday. | I caught Evil Mark licking his stapler. | In the future, everybody will mime to the Backstreet Boys between ironic fingers on YouTube for 15 minutes. | I’ve come to the conclusion that documents are thirty-four percent more boring when presented in the Courier font. | Is it so wrong to like toast? | You look like the host of a faltering Japanese game show. | Carrots coast through life. If they were any colour other than orange, they'd be extinct by now. | Toblerone's not just for mini-bars any more. | Wears yellow-lensed Fendi sunglasses that make him resemble a repeat sex offender. | This doll is the spokesmascot of Japan's most beloved mayonnaise company. | How strange that all you have to do sometimes to meet somebody is to walk up to their house and ring a doorbell, and magically they appear as if from nowhere. | Acupuncture's one of the few Chinese things that actually works. | I hereby strip you of the ability to perceive cartoons. | Wired? How 1996. | I bought a bootleg DVD of outtakes and bloopers from the making of Schindler's List. | In order to prevent confusion, the 2003 strain of SARS that appeared in China and Toronto is now being called "SARS Classic". | I looked into Coupland's cold eyes; it was like looking into wells filled with drowned toddlers. | I hate guys who flaunt their eighties geek credentials. | We take the unwanted girl babies, dry them out, and then grind them into a powder, which we mix with latex paints to make anti-skid coating for the military's helipads. | Tell me something about mini-bars I probably don't know. | I've already gotten an advance for the novel I'm going to write based on the contents of your laptop. | I honestly don't know how gore websites could exist without contributions from Mexico and Southeast Asia. | What do lesbians have against capital letters? | Just don't try to give a clever answer on any topic at all. | Let's go and buy a statistically average meal from a large multinational restaurant chain. | The plan was to rig the condo lights of a tall, empty downtown tower to simulate the Tetris grid. | I'm so fucking sick of Google. | Dad showed up and got whacked out on Japanese apricot sake and some leftover date rape drug from a Chanel frangrance launch the night before in Hong Kong. | I think I hear the sound of someone who didn't make the high school math stream. | You look like a 1982 liquor store clerk with herpes. | The air smells like five hundred sheets of paper.

Taking a lead from Coupland (see pp 212, 237-8, 331, 352) I've included a line that is not a Coupland original. The first person to identify it wins something branded, worthless and trite.

And please, whatever you do, don't regard the list above as any kind of plagiarism. Rather, it's a meditation on the fluidity of notions of intellectual property in a Wiki-universe. See, Mr Coupland, I am so much more 2.0 than you.

PS: And at CiF, the latest twist in the Danish cartoons saga, and the ramifications for postmodernism in the British legal system.