dogmatika
Pick up a Coupland
11 July 2007
The Penguins, Douglas Coupland's latest art exhibition at the Monte Clarke Gallery, Toronto from July 26, is inspired by those classic Penguin covers.
In their day, Penguin paperbacks had both the marketing clout of an Oprah Book Club selection, as well as potent academic cachet. Using Penguin paperbacks as a starting point for text collages, Douglas Coupland investigates mid-20th century notions of social engineering and mass enlightenment decades after the experiment came to an end. Coupland will also be unveiling a new sculptural wall installation called Luxury Factory Number One.
Busy chap: Coupland's new novel, The Gum Thief [which we're currently reading], is released in the UK in October. His publishers run a Q&A with him about the book:
The Gum Thief is very grounded in its location — a Staples superstore. Yet the workplace is comparatively invisible in literature. Why do you think this is and what made you feel so strongly about the sense of (work)place in this novel?
It may be as simple that people already spend so much time at work already — why would they want to go there in their free time? But I think it's deeper than that. I think there's a definite thread in literature to undervalue the everyday work experience as an arena for fiction. I'm forever talking about the differences between visual culture versus literary culture, but I do come from visual culture where the hierarchy (or snobbery) about mass culture versus high culture vanished with Warhol in the 1960s. To me it seems idiotic to devalue one's own working life as being unbookworthy.
Bethany describes of a piece of bread being toasted "from the toast's point of view" and then, of course, Roger writes 'Glove Pond' — a novel within a novel—and supposedly the product of a creative writing course. What do you think of these sorts of courses?
I've only ever attended two in my life. One was in Vancouver in the early 1980s. Everyone seemed desperate to read their own material aloud; it mostly felt like therapy. That was long before the psychopharmacological revolution of the 1990s. Those people are probably much happier now. The second was Chuck Palahniuk's weekly writer's group down in Portland. It was a real eye-opener for me—smart people writing smart stuff within a mist of inspired feedback. I think I've visited the two poles, if only briefly.
It may be as simple that people already spend so much time at work already — why would they want to go there in their free time? But I think it's deeper than that. I think there's a definite thread in literature to undervalue the everyday work experience as an arena for fiction. I'm forever talking about the differences between visual culture versus literary culture, but I do come from visual culture where the hierarchy (or snobbery) about mass culture versus high culture vanished with Warhol in the 1960s. To me it seems idiotic to devalue one's own working life as being unbookworthy.
Bethany describes of a piece of bread being toasted "from the toast's point of view" and then, of course, Roger writes 'Glove Pond' — a novel within a novel—and supposedly the product of a creative writing course. What do you think of these sorts of courses?
I've only ever attended two in my life. One was in Vancouver in the early 1980s. Everyone seemed desperate to read their own material aloud; it mostly felt like therapy. That was long before the psychopharmacological revolution of the 1990s. Those people are probably much happier now. The second was Chuck Palahniuk's weekly writer's group down in Portland. It was a real eye-opener for me—smart people writing smart stuff within a mist of inspired feedback. I think I've visited the two poles, if only briefly.
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