Take this interview, for example. It’ll be archived and will follow me the rest of my life and beyond

Douglas Coupland on JPod
(daqui)

I recently heard someone say that Generation X was the book that completely defined the life she and her friends were living. How do you feel about capturing the Zeitgeist like this and was it intentional?
It’s a total accident, and I’m not trying to be coy. People keep telling me I seem to put out the right books at the right time, but they need to remember that what seems like the right time at publication date usually seems like a quest for disaster two and a half years before, when a book is conceived and begun. In 1990, Generation X came within an inch of being killed by the publisher. Once the book came out in the US (it was never published in Canada) it was never an instant hit. Generation X, despite what it seemed like on the outside, pretty much succeeded in spite of massive attempts to kill it at all points throughout its life cycle.

So to get back to the original question, was the book’s intent to be topical intentional? Holy shit! If only! In my experience, the books that succeed the best are the ones that the publishers hate in advance the most. Microserfs was started in 1993 when you could still walk into the Microsoft campus and knock on Bill Gates’ window—I know this because I did it—and Microsoft was still just a bunch of geographically isolated tech nerds with an anthropologically freaky tribal culture. Nobody in New York had a clue what Microsoft was or who Bill Gates was. The book came out the summer of 1995, the same week as the Windows 95 launch and look like an exercise in military deployment. But that was a fluke. You can’t plan these things. Cynically conceived books can never ever work. I believe that to be true above all things.

In your novels you’ve printed out the 8,363 prime numbers between 10,000 and 100,000 as well as the 972 three-letter words permitted in scrabble and pi to a hundred-thousand digits. Do you expect your readers actually spend time looking over them?
I expect them to look at the numbers and words the way they might look at a Warhol canvas, just enjoy the multiplicity and muchness of it all. I love abundance. Words don’t just have to be words, and images don’t just have to be images. I love replication. I love mass culture. Enjoy it! The world’s a fucking brilliant place to live in. And if younger readers look at these words and images, I hope they’ll go to the library’s Art section and take out a pile of books and begin a lifelong adventure. Back in 1995 with Microserfs, I did two spreads that were nothing but the words ‘money’ and ‘machine’ and this embittered reviewer said that they were nothing more than ‘craven autobiography,’ and attempts to fill space, but I thought that is was simply a nice Warhol tribute to have people see the words and think of Andy and of a fresh new way of seeing and loving the culture we live in.

How much of JPod's narrator, Ethan Jarlewski, is in you?
Of all the narrators in all of my books, Ethan is actually the least like me. He’s a fun guy, and very very smart, but he’s not me. I want to think that fifteen years of creating characters has allowed me to make something non-Doug yet convincing at the same time.

In JPod, you write yourself into the story, or at least a character called Douglas Coupland, who’s a writer. Is it a fair representation of you?
Yes and no. The antiDoug is my response to Google and search engines and archives that never go away. In the future everybody will have their real selves and their shadow self that exists purely inside computers. Take this interview, for example. It’ll be archived and will follow me the rest of my life and beyond. Sometimes press people will say, “Gee, you do a lot of interviews,” but the truth is, I don’t …they just stack up and up and up.

Like JPod, the titles of your books are often rather arch and full of cultural references. Do you spend a lot of time thinking them up?
The opposite. Titles come to me in a flash, and once they do, that’s it. There’s not even a whiff of debate. Usually it happens about one-third of the way through a book. Don’t ask me why.

Your writing covers issues such as globalisation, media saturation, fast food, human trafficking, food genetics and drug culture. Would you describe yourself as a political writer?
Yesterday I was speaking with a friend of mine who’s a psychiatrist. I admitted to him that after a long night of the soul I realized I had no idea what my political convictions are. None. Liberal? Conservative? Anarchist? Zip. I know how I was raised and how my parents tried to indoctrinate me, and I’m long over that. And I know how I feel on separate issues. But to fit me into a slot from a doctrinaire standpoint? Blank. My friend thought my horror at my lack of direction was really funny. He said most people don’t have a clue but pretend that they do. He said the world’s a mess. He said that I’m the generic swing voter and both a pollster and politico’s dream. And I’m unsure of how that makes me feel. I like to think I believe in what’s right, yet a sense of irony allows me to contain a lot of opposites in my head at one time. Net result? A need to play out my internal conflicts about big issues on paper. So—and this is a very unexpected response—I’d have to answer your question with a yes. And it would be so much easier just to be able to say no.

Do you feel you can say more with humour than straight delivery?
I don’t think you can apply industrial metrics to this. But you can certainly approach otherwise difficult subject matter quite brazenly using humour. Witness the following:

“Kam, what do you do?”

“I work with the Chinese government to ensure that as many male babies are born as possible. 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.”

And do you think that comic writing gets a hard time within the literary world?
Does it? I think the problem is that there just aren't that many funny writers out there. Literary programs wallop the bejeezuz and all hope of humour out of the aspiring young. And it's extremely hard to "laugh" people through 80,000 words. Holy fuck! We live in an era of genuinely diminished attention spans. I'm competing with reality TV and with shows written by 24 to 30 professionals per episode. If I have something to say, it had better be something fucking important, and it had better be said in some new and unexpected way.

Lots of writers have an affinity with their hometown or a certain place. Do you feel that Vancouver has a hold over you?
I’ve spent my life resisting the lure to live in New York, London, Toronto, Tokyo or L.A., specifically because the media cultures there would probably override my own senses of how daily life is perceived. And if it weren’t for my body’s inability to withstand Tokyo’s semi-tropical summers (intractable Scottish/Irish genes and my skin’s creation of sheet cystic acne between June and September) I’d never have left the city in 1986. It really is the most fascinating place on earth. So I live in Vancouver because I’m from there and it’s simply easier to live there—and also because so much of what defines the modern world seems to be bubbling about here in Vancouver: film ,TV, video games, high-tech, the interface between western and Asian cultures and extreme ecopolitics. Last summer I visited Melbourne, and it’s easily Vancouver’s clone. I’d live there in a flash, too. They’re clone cities.

I think about this a lot. When I graduated from art school in 1984 I thought I’d be long dead from poverty and drugs in some dump not far from Main and Hastings by 1995. The fact that history and the world has played itself out the way it has, has come as a total surprise. A nice surprise, but not one you expect. Art school gives you a way of looking at the world, but it doesn’t give you specific images of what your life might look like ten years down the road.

How do you feel about the internet? Good thing or bad thing?
I love it.

Who is your preferred character from The Simpsons and why?
The fast-food guy with the cracking voice. That was me from 13 to 30.