Exploding helicopters #14

Douglas Coupland - The Gum Thief

I was tweeting about reading All Families Are Psychotic last week, and my friend Nathan said that this was one of his favourites by Coupland. I’d had it in my to-read pile (which is more like a to-read bookshelf if I’m truthful) for ages, so I ignored my natural tendency to avoid reading two books by the same author in succession.

I don’t agree that it’s one of his best, mainly because the excerpts from the (terrible) novel being written by the main dude stop being amusing very early on. He’s an old alcoholic loser who works in Staples and strikes up this bizarre pen pal arrangement with a young goth girl who also works there. They take the piss out of creative writing classes by sending each other new interpretations of buttered toast - from the toast’s perspective. As usual with Douglas Coupland, it was the bits about how life is utterly pointless that I liked the best, but there were some funny bits (not included here because I could just copy out entire chapters) about going to London and realising that the only food available is packaged sandwiches.

Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want.

“How did society ever function without you, little Sharpies? Your nibs have the precise amount of give to create a line quality with character, yet not so much character as to be smushy. Thank you, little pens.”

I read in a newspaper last week about this scientist who claims that the human race will, over the upcoming millennia, split into two distinct species. One will be a superhuman race, the other, Gollum-like hunckbacked retards. His argument is that selective breeding will produce an underclass that will then become a distinct race. Scientists have already isolated part of our DNA that ‘intelligent,’ ‘sociable’ types have and others don’t. I think these scientists should come into Staples and do some DNA swabbing. I think we’ve already leapt into that future and the rest of humanity needs to catch up with us.

Douglas Coupland - The Gum Thief
Publication date: 2007
Published by: Bloomsbury
Price then: £10.99
Price now: I wish I could remember. I’m the worst blogger ever.
Bought from: Pretty sure it was Ebay, although it might have come from somewhere in Hay-on-Wye.

From the synopsis: “Coupland reminds us that love, death and eternal friendship can all occur where and when we least expect them and that, even after tragedy has hit, one can still find solace in the comedy and strange comforts of modern life.”

Douglas Coupland - Microserfs
Publication date: 1996
Publisher: Flamingo
Price then: £6.99
Price now: a copy of The Cider House Rules by John Irving
Purchased from: swapped via Read It Swap It

From the synopsis: “The job may be super cool, the pay may be astronomical, but they’re going nowhere, and however hard they work, however many shares they earn, they’re never going to be as rich as Bill.”

Amazing true fact: I have never come across anyone who doesn’t like Douglas Coupland. I’m about half a generation too young to fit into the ‘demographic’ that he apparently became a ‘spokesman’ for when he bottled their ‘slacker zeitgeist’ with Generation X, but I completely related to it for many reasons, not least the fact that I hate the word ‘zeitgeist’ and reject the idea of people as ‘demographics’. It’s a book I read and loved, but then I sat in my bedroom for a week worrying about whether or not my job could be classed as a McJob and whether or not I should ignore my family and move to a squat in Palm Springs. Coupland gets you like that.

With Microserfs, a book essentially about some misfit nerds who are working on a web start-up in the early 90s, I read it as an amusing little set of anecdotes which kept me smiling for 300+ pages, but then an hour after I’d finished it I was still thinking about how the geeks will inherit the earth, and about how friendships will surpass all obstacles, and about the basic human instinct to form familial groups and how that changes as we get older. He’s like that, is Douglas Coupland.

“Susan said that the BIG issue nowadays is that on TV and in magazines, the images we see, while they appear surreal, ‘really aren’t surrealistic, because they’re just random, and there’s no subconsciousness underneath to generate the images’…
To this end, I’m creating a file of random words that pop into my head, and am feeding these words into a desktop file labelled SUBCONSCIOUS.”

“She said, ‘I don’t believe human beings store memory in our brains exclusively - there simply aren’t enough storage slots or interconnective possibilities. And so if not in the brain, then where? I concluded that another viewpoint on memory was to see our bodies as ‘peripheral memory storage devices’.”

“He had another Wallbanger - ‘You know, pal - maybe I should de-wire myself. De-wiring would reconnect me to the world of natural time - sunsets and rainbows and crashing waves and Smurfs.’”