Douglas Coupland

Just for a bit of a change of pace, here’s a link to an interview with Douglas Coupland from The Guardian. I find it so fascinating just how ubiquitous his phrase/concept/idea of Generation X has become, how ingrained it is in our cultural understanding. Every other day in the conservative mainstream Australian media there is an article setting up the generational differences between the X & Y generations. I think the Coupland’s conception of generation X has become much larger than his entire body of work, he captured the zeitgeist I suppose, but lately it has just become more relevant – or an easy way of establishing otherwise difficult to pinpoint differences between the age groups. Anyway, Coupland definitely has a unique perspective on life, and he has some interesting views of the future. Here he touches upon an issue I feel strongly about (and yes, I can see the humour in me copying and pasting this particular snippet of his interview):

“I like it that people are smarter, that every-one can find facts quicker, and it does make people more interesting. But what happens – and this is the thing I’m not really sure about – when it comes to the point where people don’t actually do anything any more? They just cut and paste from things that happened in the past. You can’t download getting your hands dirty. Younger people don’t think that way, they wouldn’t mourn the passing of a manual universe – it’s just ridiculous to even think about for them – so they’ll miss something you and I have experienced. But they’ll have something else they’ve experienced too, so, um …” He tails away, lost in thought.

Obviously he is talking about the internet, but also how delicately subjective experience is. His new novel, Generation A, is released in September, and in October for Australian readers.

Just something for you to muse over on a Monday evening, an excerpt from Life After God:

I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few little moments that have just a bit more resonance than other moments – we hear a word that sticks in our min-or maybe we have a small experience that pulls us out of ourselves, if only briefly-we share a hotel elevator with a bride in her veils, say, or a stranger gives us a piece of bread to feed to the mallard ducks in the lagoon; a small child starts a conversation with us in a Dairy Queen-or we have an episode like the one I had with the M&M cars back at the Husky station.

And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection-certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether, one we didn’t even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real-this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story-making events of our lives.