Douglas Coupland
Douglas Coupland
Douglas Coupland OC OBCis a Canadian novelist and artist. His fiction is complemented by recognized works in design and visual art arising from his early formal training. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized terms such as "McJob" and "Generation X". He has published thirteen novels, two collections of short stories, seven non-fiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television. A specific feature of Coupland's novels...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth30 December 1961
CountryCanada
The Internet has destroyed irony in the world, or at least wounded it considerably. What are we to do about an invention whose end result is that starving people in China are looking up things on marthastewart.com?
I had a lot of really terrible advice early in my writing career, and I cheesed off people without even knowing it, all the while thinking I was implementing good advice. Well, what can you do about it? Next.
I think as a species we're not designed to be able to think more than one year into the future - if that. Even trying to imagine one year from now makes most people feel like they've been given a huge boring chunk of homework that's too hard to do.
I connect fashion to other peoples' elegance, but not my own. I don't think I've ever felt elegant. I've felt appropriate, but never elegant, and I wonder what that must be like. I like it when other people are elegant - I prefer it - but I can't do it myself. I honestly think it's some form of autistic disorder.
Fashionable people can opt out of the fashion stream, but a stylish person never becomes unstylish unless they hit their head on a rock and suffer brain damage.
I'm a visual thinker. Research tells us that only 20 per cent of people think visually. So what about the other 80 per cent? Don't they think in pictures? I mean if you imagine washing and preparing potatoes you visualise the process, right?
Some people think fashion is frivolous but it's not... it's just that some ideas come and go quickly, and that's the nature of the language of fashion.
I think half the people who get married now have met online. If I think about all the people in my life who married - they met online, online, online. And it makes sense if you think about it, because you fill out this form of 35 things that really define you and - bam - look, you've got two people who match. It works.
I keep vampire hours, going to bed at 2 A.M. and waking up at about 10:30-11 A.M.
I miss the reference section at the library. I used to go there twice a week on missions. Now everywhere's a research library and I can't get an elitist kick from it any more.
As a form of escapism, yearning for the 20th century is understandable, but in practice it would be horrible - sort of like going on a holiday promising yourself you could go without the Internet, only to crumble and walk in a daze to the local Internet cafe to gorge on connectivity.
I miss the silliness of the Nineties. What would society be like if 9/11 never happened? If that silliness was extended forever?
I like being surrounded by good ideas. Every single time you walk past something you like, you get a blast of happy chemicals to the brain, and I like that.
The way we experience history and time in all its forms shifted quite massively between 1989 and 2001 - to the point where contrivances like decades are now kind of silly.