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Thursday, February 17, 2005

GOD IS NOWHERE. GOD IS NOW HERE. Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland On production of his first novel, Coupland was labelled by critics spokesman for a new lost generation - “Generation X” - those individuals aged between mid-twenties and mid-thirties who have come of age in an increasingly technological and materialistic bureaucratic society. As a consequence, they are emotionally scarred and alienated, reject conformity and search for some kind of meaning to life. When asked about this label, Coupland stated that he spoke '...for myself, not for a generation. I never have.' The story of one family piecing itself back together after a tragic highschool shooting, Hey Nostradamus! is Douglas Coupland's most soulful, piercing and searching novel yet. Pregnant and secretly married, Cheryl Anway scribbles her last will and testament -- and erie premonition -- on a school binder shortly before a rampaging trio of misfit classmates gun her down in a high school cafeteria. Overrun with paranoia, teenage angst and religious zeal in the ensuing massacre's wake, this sleepy Vancouver neighbourhood declares its saints, brands its demons and finally moves on. But for a handful of people still reeling from that horrific day, life remains perpetually derailed. Four dramatically different characters tell their stories in their own words: Cheryl, who calmly narrates her own death; Jason, the boy no one knew was her husband, still marooned ten years later by his loss; Heather, the woman trying to love the shattered Jason; and Jason's father Reg, a cruelly religious man no one suspects is still worth loving. Each wrestles with God, self-defeat and a crippling inability to hold on to those they love.

- Coupland.com - Douglas Coupland's Official Site
- The Coupland File : The site about Douglas Coupland
- Douglas_Coupland - Wikipedia
- The Morning News - Robert Birnbaum v. Douglas Coupland, September 2003
DC: "As there are more and more people on the planet and information becomes more transparent and more pervasive, the tokens of authenticity that we look for become ever smaller…"
- Douglas Coupland (1961- ) The Guardian
"Did you know? He refuses to own furniture and is an avid meteorite collector."
- The Bogus Tribute Blog to Douglas Coupland
Douglas Coupland in conversation with Naomi Klein, Black Book (Winter 2004) PART 1, Part 2.
DC: "The only tenable viewpoints of the present I've been able to find come from Eric Hobsbawm, a British intellectual who wrote extensively from Marxist stance. While my background is utterly nondoctrinaire, I have noted that once Marxism became a historical novelty, it oddly became genuinely relevant. Marxism is a structured ideology based on the creation of wealth, the nature of "ownership," and the links of wealth to collective social welfare. It remains eerily precise in decodifying the shifting matrices of capital that define our era. This, in spite of 1989, September 11, 2001, and, as this is a fashion magazine, the intractability of acid-wash denim on the former East German style consciousness."
- From Fear To Eternity, Spike Magazine, Chris Mitchell emails Douglas Coupland about fame, the future and the problem with American chocolate.
"your 20s are muck and shit and painand loneliness and horror"
"the only decisions that matter are those madein the face of eternity"
- All the lonely people - Artist and Generation X novelist Douglas Coupland talks about disaster movies, Google, and his new book, Eleanor Rigby. (Outtakes from an interview that appears in the February 1, 2005, issue of The Advocate)
DC: "As of last month I began doing this body of work which is explicitly about books. The Hornet’s Nests, for example. Which is literally...I’m addicted to Law & Order. But I feel guilty just sitting there doing nothing. Curse you, Dick Wolf! And so I thought, Well, I might as well chew up pages while I’m watching TV. So I chew them up and then weave them together to make these nests. That’s about cellulose. That’s about taking a book out of cultural time and putting it into Darwinian or archaeological time. That becomes about the way that cultural information is passed forward or isn’t passed forward. "
DC: "Someone told me once that irony is like country-and-western music, that only 20% of the population actually gets irony. Which means there’s 80% of the population out there who are taking everything at face value. I mean, I have a hunch you understand irony quite well. But I can imagine if you had to take the world at face value, and you had no safety valve of irony to help you reconcile opposites that coexist, you’d go nuts. I think ironic and unironic can coexist; I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive."
- Reality Bites (1994):
Lelaina: Can you define "irony"?
Troy Dyer: It's when the actual meaning is the complete opposite from the literal meaning.
- IMDB Generation X

Posted by Nick @ 17:38 GMT
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