Douglas Coupland

Dou­glas Cou­p­land writes books about the weird­ness of modern cul­ture and the effect of tech­nol­ogy on rela­tion­ships. His new book, Hey, Nos­tradamus! con­cerns the after­math of a mas­sacre in a sub­ur­ban high school. He lives in Van­cou­ver and as well as writ­ing, some­times makes tables. We talked to him about coin­ci­dence, change, and how strange R. Crumb’s upbring­ing was.

First off, why write about a Columbine-​style school shooting?

Hmmm. [long pause] I talked about this last night with a writer named Matt Thorne. And we were talk­ing about how you know when a book is ready to be writ­ten, and we both sort of came up of the notion of what it must be like to be preg­nant. You just go oh, that’s the book. On one level you can plan things out but on another, it just comes out of nowhere.

You have to let it take its own course.

Yeah, but at the same time I don’t want it to sound pre­cious and mys­ti­cal and all’ooooh,’ which I think it may be a little bit, but some­times it’s just ‘Ok, ooh, that’s it, better run with it.’

I sup­pose any­thing, any activ­ity that is done in soli­tary and is then made avail­able to the out­side world is like that to an extent, in that it sounds a bit mystical.

I think so. I try not to be super­sti­tious about it, but there is some­thing super­sti­tious about it as well. It’s also, I mean we’re talk­ing about writ­ing now, it’s a trance that you put your­self into for how­ever long it takes to write the book. And while you’re in that trance, every­thing else sort of takes on an unreal qual­ity, and then it’s over and it’s like’Oh! I’m not preg­nant any more,’ you know?

You’ve given birth, as it were.

Haha! It’s strange, I’m sure it must be a little like that for women, having kids.

Some­thing that isn’t nec­es­sar­ily in all your books, but in some of them, cer­tainly, is the idea of there coming at some point A Change, and after that everything’s dif­fer­ent. For exam­ple in Girl­friend In A Coma, it’s the coma, and then the end of the world, in Hey, Nos­tradamus! it’s the high school shoot­ing, in Microserfs it’s the uproot­ing from Seat­tle to California’ is that a fair assess­ment, or am I read­ing too much into things?

Och, no, I don’t think so at all. I was talk­ing about this with some­one down­stairs a few min­utes ago, the notion that fic­tion - I per­son­ally wouldn’t want to read a book unless at the end of it, or within it, there’s the pos­si­bil­ity of change or trans­for­ma­tion within myself. And so I think okay, with any book I write, I would hope that some­one enter­ing it would come out a dif­fer­ent person at the end, and I guess quite lit­er­ally in the book, that’s what hap­pens to the char­ac­ters, so it’s a con­scious deci­sion.

A lot of the time, it seems to be focus­ing on not the after­math, as such, but what hap­pens after the change, how people do change.

I’m inter­ested in grow­ing up, hear­ing a story and they all lived hap­pily ever after. I’m always inter­ested in what hap­pened after; who devel­oped a drink­ing prob­lem, and so and so began to cheat, and so and so got caught drunk dri­ving, the every­day­ness of life that accrues after a cer­tain trans­for­ma­tion. So on one level you have people who have very aver­age lives, which are sud­denly changed for them, and within the sort of hap­pily ever after, it’s like, well, here’s the nitty gritty.

A reminder that hap­pi­ness is always transitory?

Well, what’s the expres­sion? That hap­pi­ness is the only emo­tion that you can make go away imme­di­ately simply by being aware of it. So yes, hap­pi­ness is def­i­nitely transitory.

You said as well about the every­day­ness of things. Do you know about Amer­i­can Splen­dour?

No, last night, I saw some­thing about it, what is it?

It’s about this guy from Cleve­land who turned his life into a comic, drawn by Robert Crumb. Anyway, the reason for this tan­gent: his stuff is about the small things, and a reminder that the high-​gloss hap­pi­ness you see every­where else in pop cul­ture isn’t the way things are. There seemed to be a link there, between his stuff and yours.

Funny you should men­tion R Crumb. There was a doc­u­men­tary made about him, maybe about 10 years ago, and I went to go and see it with a number of friends, and coming out of the the­atre it was a bit spooky, because no-​one would talk to me, because the Crumb family was so close to my own family that no-​one wanted to be the one to acknowl­edge that fact.

Did they know that you knew that they saw this?

It’s one of those sit­u­a­tions where, you, it’s a hard thing to talk about:’your family’s that nuts,’ we talked about it and obvi­ously it was fine. I think with the Crumb family, though I’m not quite sure about the Amer­i­can Splen­dour movie, he had this sci­en­tif­i­cally generic middle class family, which had weird­ness vis­ited upon it. I think the case with the Crumbs was just a DNA that just wanted to do some­thing quite odd. It’s’ I’m inter­ested in aver­age sit­u­a­tions which become un-​average.

That ties in with the idea that, with every­thing that looks aver­age, there’s weird­ness under the sur­face. It comes back to the orig­i­nal con­cep­tion of the gothic, almost. Harold Pinter once said he wanted to write about the weasel under the cock­tail cabinet’

Hahaha! [loud, loud laugh]. It’s not nasty but it’s quite often inter­est­ing. Today at lunch in the restau­rant, there was this thing going on, this guy was talk­ing to this woman and she ran out in tears, she came back and gave him a lec­ture, and they were dressed for work, obvi­ously having some sort of affair. And once they were over, they walked to the lobby and brushed their hair down: and it was’back to normal’

All these little insights?

Yeah, there’s always some­thing going on, for better for worse. Some­times it’s very funny, and then you meet people’ I know a lot of people, I’m gre­gar­i­ous in a cer­tain way, and the two men in my life who I thought had it all together’a good job, beau­ti­ful wife, kids, good family, plenty of money, all that’hanged them­selves. And so I’m always sus­pi­cious of when things are too good. And I miss them, [I think] how could they do that? Come back to life for a minute just to tell me what you were thinking.

That’s the hard thing: not just the fact of what hap­pened, but that you’re never going to know why.

It’s not that you know why, it’s just’what’s this front you’re putting on?’ It’s not just them, it’s every­one else that knew them. Like,’Harvey, you’re the per­fect person, and if it’s bad for you then what are we sup­posed to think?’ So anyhow’ that was a few years ago and I’ve seen more weird­ness, so I’m used to it now, but not used to it at the same time. I’d just rather have them back, actually.

Some­thing else: after Gen­er­a­tion X, did you feel pres­sure to’be Dou­glas Coupland’?

I’ve never, hehe, never really known what it was I was sup­posed to be. I think if I was living in Man­hat­tan or some­thing I would have had lots of people telling me. But I’ve lived, and con­tinue to live, in Van­cou­ver, which is for­tu­nately I think removed enough from the world that you can still basi­cally live a’ a life with­out expec­ta­tions. You have to remem­ber that, when I wrote that book, which was pub­lished in March 1991, I had no expec­ta­tions for it.

It wasn’t going to be a book, orig­i­nally, was it?

That’s true. Of all my books. I had no hopes for it what­so­ever, and I just do what I’m going to do, and I think, you take what we were just speak­ing about, and you stretch it out, broaden it and clar­ify it’ What I found over the years is that since 1991 we’ve been through mas­sive cul­tural, social, tech­no­log­i­cal changes, and the only thing that pro­tects me or you or anyone, the only thing that can pro­tect you in all this is fig­ur­ing out what it is that you like to do, and then stick­ing with it. Because once you start to do what people expect you to do, or what your par­ents think you should do, or who­ever in your life thinks you should do, you’re sunk. And that applies to my life. Microserfs, [which] I was writ­ing it in 93, 94, even my editor in New York was like,’Microwhat? Soft­ware? What’s soft­ware? Seat­tle? Doug, don’t expect a big advance on this one.’ But it was inter­est­ing, I saw a few people there, I thought it was fas­ci­nat­ing, I wrote it, it came out the same month as Windows’95, and every­one thought I had pre-​engineered this huge coup, and it was’Good God, no,’ it was just inter­est­ing. People expect me to be some­thing, I just write about what I find interesting.

Happy coin­ci­dence of Windows’95 and the book, arriv­ing at the same time?

Well, unhappy coin­ci­dence for the planet. All your read­ers should switch to Mac right away!

I’m with you on that; I’m a devoted Mac user. Anyway, soemthing like Microserfs, con­cerned with the way tech­nol­ogy affects per­sonal rela­tion­ships, cul­ture in gen­eral, that’s a big thing for you, isn’t it? Assim­i­la­tion of infor­ma­tion, and inter­ac­tion with each other?

Oh yeah, I think the inter­est­ing thing about tech­nol­ogy and change is that it’s going to visit itself upon you no matter how hard you try and run from it. I look at things like’ What have we had? Fax machines are almost over. Mobile phones, the internet’ Ask your­self, how many people do you know who have met and gotten mar­ried, or met and gotten together, through the inter­net? How much money did you spend shop­ping on the inter­net last year? When was the last time you wrote an actual pen and paper letter? The changes are very subtle, but over time they accu­mu­late and all of a sudden you realise that you can’t go home any­more. There’s, South Park, that car­toon in the States, there’s this one episode where this guy Steve was frozen for 2 years and then brought back to life by the other char­ac­ters, and he couldn’t cope with all the changes that had hap­pened in the last 2 years.

Did you read about that guy who woke after 19 years?

I did. every time some­one wakes up from a coma, my email inbox is flooded.

Somebody’s woken up! Email Doug!

Yeah, basically.

You write non-​fiction and do sculp­ture and so on, as well as writ­ing fic­tion. Does it all come nat­u­rally? Is it a case of think­ing, well, I think this idea that I want to explore is suited to this par­tic­u­lar medium?

I think’ Hmmm. Okay. I was raised with­out being raised, really.’Here’s a hot meal, there’s your school, and have a nice life,’ which sounds quite strange but it was quite lib­er­at­ing. It meant I could do what I wanted, and it trains you to be intro­spec­tive and think about things maybe more than you might oth­er­wise, and so now I have this theory that everything’s an art supply. What I do know is that there are cer­tain feel­ings you can create within your­self and within some­one engag­ing with what you’ve done that you can only get from look­ing at an art object, that you can’t get from words, and vice versa. And I don’t make that many dis­tinc­tions in my head, I don’t see them as being very dif­fer­ent from each other. I enetered writ­ing with words quite lit­er­ally being arts sup­plies as objects, through Jenny Holzer and text art, and then the text art becamse long­form fic­tion, so in my head, I think of the new book, or the new novel, as being an art exhi­bi­tion, and it’s dif­fer­ent from the books that came before it. Hope­fully I’m bring­ing some­thing from the prior books but I’ve done some­thing new in this, and then will go on and con­tinue to pro­duce some­thing new. Which is the oppo­site of what I think my pub­lisher wants.’Can you please have every book more like the one before?’ Because that way it’s easier for them.

People find the famil­iar a lot easier to deal with; when things start chang­ing that’s when they start freak­ing out a bit.

Well, Leon, I’m lucky. I think at this point in my career that the one thing people do expect is change. And my God, what’ eight novels, some­times I just feel like a robot or some­thing. Actu­ally that’s not fair, I love every word of every book, but once you do get that track record of con­tin­ual change or evo­lu­tion, people take sort of com­fort in the rou­tine of change.

Paul Auster once said some­thing, whilst being taken to task about coin­ci­dences in his books, to the effect that there are coin­ci­dences in his books because that’s what real life is like. Full of coincidences.

I think every­one gets two coin­ci­dences a day, that’s like the uni­ver­sal soup pot: here are your two daily coin­ci­dences, your ration. And once you get them it’s like’oh good, I’ve had my day,’ and if you don’t get a coin­ci­dence during the day it’s like’ooh! where’s my coin­ci­dence? I want my coincidence.’ And then it’s almost strange that we don’t get more coincidences’ you think of all the bil­lions, quadrillions, umpteen zil­lions of things that could happen, and all we get is two? That’s almost’ unfair. On the other hand life is won­der­ful, life is mar­vel­lous, every second’s a coin­ci­dence, I’m quite aware of that, prob­a­bly because I’m aware that, [I made] the deci­sions in my life to do what I did, prob­a­bly to forego what might have been. I was a smarty pants, I had options, I could have gone the sci­en­tific route, where I was work­ing in a lab­o­ra­tory some­where in a par­al­lel uni­verse, or alter­na­tively, I’m living down on main street, I’m using dirty nee­dles, and life is basi­cally over. I’m grate­ful for what’s hap­pened, and I’m very aware of what could happen as well, and coin­ci­dence has played a large part in my life.

Is a belief in coin­ci­dences not nec­es­sar­ily the oppo­site of, but [pause] sorry, I’ll rephrase that.

Coin­ci­dence is only a symptom.

Okay: is an accep­tance of the fact of coin­ci­dences an acknowl­edge­ment that you’re not in con­trol of everything?

Well, that’s an inter­est­ing way of putting it, I never thought of that.

You know the way people like to plan their lives down to the last minute detail. To the last second, and will not brook any change in that plan whatsoever.

Ooh, then they’re set­ting them­selves up for a big unhappiness.

Exactly. I don’t know whether you could say accept­ing coin­ci­dence is even the accep­tance of a power in the world that is not you, or some sort of higher power, I don’t know if you could extrap­o­late that far, but I think it might work along sim­i­lar lines.

Hmm. [long pause].’.Hmm’. [longer pause] we can edit out the silences, right?

It’s not for broad­cast, it’s for print, so it doesn’t matter.

Oh, right, sorry, of course. Good, I can make all sorts of scary noises now. We were talk­ing about coin­ci­dences, and you can cer­tainly ask anyone who knows me, I’m no con­trol freak. Um, it almost gets back to what we were talk­ing about a few min­utes ago, if there’s some higher order and it’s mess­ing with us, the only thing that can pro­tect you is fol­low­ing your instincts, your likes and dis­likes, and again, look­ing at all the people in life’ not because they made it, but the people who seem con­tent are the people who decided,’I like work­ing with wood, there­fore I’m not going to try and be a mil­lion­aire, I’m going to work with wood.’ You know,’I get this,”I’m going to get involved in agriculture,’ what­ever. And, I think, sci­ence will some­day deter­mine a test, like a litmus paper, [to deter­mine] whether or not you’re happy, and I think those people would score happy. My phone just made a little noise, I don’t know what it’s about. Just between you and me, Mal Maison’s going down­hill. I was here the week it opened, and now it’s just exhausted.

It’s been a while since I’ve there. Maybe it’s sliding.

Yeah. Maybe I just got the bum room or some­thing, some­times it hap­pens. But it’s not just the phone; the toilet doesn’t flush, you know? But I’m only here for one night, I’m not going to get too upset about it.

Posted at 8pm on 14/09/03 by Leon McDermott to the interviews category.
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