Book Review - Terry by Douglas Coupland

Teena has taken part in the annual Terry Fox run for the past two years. This year she volunteered as well as walked for the Liberty Village Terry Fox Run.

Terry Fox is one of the most important Canadian and even the world in the last 40 years. Every Canadian knows what he did. As of 2017, over $750 million dollars has been raised in Terry's name for cancer research. I'm not sure if it is on the Canadian citizenship exam or not but there should be a question on Terry Fox's accomplishments on it.

I just completed reading Terry by Douglas Coupland.

In 1980, Terry Fox was just a young man with a dream. Three years earlier, he had lost a leg to cancer. Some combination of passion, idealism and sheer guts led to the impossible notion that he would run across Canada on one good leg and a prosthesis. His goal was to raise $1 from every Canadian to help find a cure for cancer. Twenty-five years later, the dream remains alive, and Terry's legacy has raised more than $360 million for cancer research.

Terry has been written with the support of the Fox family and the design reflects the style of Douglas Coupland's Souvenir projects, mixing more than 145 superb photographs of a previously unknown collection of family memorabilia with a very moving text about Terry's life and the Marathon of Hope. Printed in full colour, the book brings a profound moment in Canadian history, and the young man who inspired it, freshly to life.

I really enjoyed this book. Most of Terry's story is told through photographs which were saved by his family. The pictures are not only of Terry's run but home shots, pictures of his journals, letters and drawings that supporters sent him. Coupland keeps his descriptions to the minimum using them to accent the photos, rather than telling the story himself. Because of the many many personal photos and the way it was written, I came away with a greater sense of knowing him.

Even during his last Christmas alive, Terry was broke and refused to take any money from the funds he raised during his run to buy presents for his family. He scrimped to buy a present for his mom. Of course, there is a picture of it. Coupland does the same with this book as all royalties from the sale of the book goes to cancer research.

Definitely worth reading.

About Douglas Coupland

Since 1991 Coupland has written thirteen novels published in most languages. He has written and

performed for England’s Royal Shakespeare Company and is a columnist for The Financial Times of London. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, e-flux, DIS and Vice.

In 2000 Coupland amplified his visual art production and has recently had two separate museum retrospectives, Everything is Anything is
Anywhere is Everywhere at the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and Bit Rot at Rotterdam's Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, and Munich's Villa Stücke. In 2015 and 2016 Coupland was artist in residence in the Paris Google Cultural Institute. In May 2018 his exhibition on ecology, Vortex, opened at the Vancouver Aquarium and will be traveling globally throughout 2019-2021. In June 2018 National Portrait, an installation of over 1,000 3D-printed heads and busts, pens at the Ottawa Art Gallery.


Coupland is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy, an Officer of the Order of Canada, a Officer of the Order of British Columbia, a Chevlier de l'Order des Arts et des Lettres and receiver of the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence.

Bit Rot by Douglas Coupland

Today I finished Bit Rot by one of my favourite writers, Douglas Coupland.

Bit Rot, a new collection from Douglas Coupland that explores the different ways 20th-century notions of the future are being shredded, is a gem of the digital age. Reading Bit Rot feels a lot like bingeing on Netflix... you can't stop with just one. "Bit rot" is a term used in digital archiving to describe the way digital files can spontaneously and quickly decompose. As Coupland writes, "Bit rot also describes the way my brain has been feeling since 2000, as I shed older and weaker neurons and connections and enhance new and unexpected ones."

Bit Rot explores the ways humanity tries to make sense of our shifting consciousness. Coupland, just like the Internet, mixes forms to achieve his ends. Short fiction is interspersed with essays on all aspects of modern life. The result is addictively satisfying for Coupland's legion of fans hungry for his observations about our world. For almost three decades, his unique pattern recognition has powered his fiction, and his phrase-making. Every page of Bit Rot is full of wit, surprise and delight.

I really enjoyed Bit Rot. The description above says the book is full of essays but they're not really essays but what I would call musings. Most are only 2 or 3 pages in length. Almost all are thoughtful or hilarious. I found most to be true. Written in 2015, it all still rings true 3 years later. Some of his thoughts on the future of humanity even seem to be uneasily accurate.

If you are a fan, you'll enjoy a few appearances from the Channel 3 news team. I wonder what he has against them. For a book of short stories and such, like this one, I always enjoy reading it in short bursts, a story or two a sitting. as a result it took me awhile to finish it.

Douglas Coupland never disappoints.

About Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland is Canadian, born on a Canadian Air Force base near Baden-Baden, Germany, on December 30, 1961. In 1965 his family moved to Vancouver, Canada, where he continues to live and work. Coupland has studied art and design in Vancouver, Canada, Milan, Italy and Sapporo, Japan. 

His first novel, Generation X, was published in March of 1991. Since then he has published nine novels and several non-fiction books in 35 languages and most countries on earth. He has written and performed for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, England, and in 2001 resumed his practice as a visual artist, with exhibitions in spaces in North America, Europe and Asia. 

Binge by Douglas Coupland

I just finished reading Binge, by one of my favourite writers, Douglas Coupland. He did not disappoint. 

Thirty years after Douglas Coupland broke the fiction mould and defined a generation with Generation X, he is back with Binge, 60 stories laced with his observational profundity about the way we live and his existential worry about how we should be living: the very things that have made him such an influential and bestselling writer. Not to mention that he can also be really funny. 

Here the narrators vary from story to story as Doug catches what he calls the voice of the people, inspired by the way we write about ourselves and our experiences in online forums. The characters, of course, are Doug's own: crackpots, cranks and sweetie-pies, dad dancers and perpetrators of carbecues. People in the grip of unconscionable urges; lonely people; dying people; silly people. If you love Doug's fiction, this collection is like rain on the desert.

I really enjoyed the stories in this 60 short story collection. Some are funny. Some make you think. Many are connected. There might be a story early in the book, then 10 stories later, comes a story connected, continued or a prequel to it. Most of the time, you don't realize it till the end of the next story. 

Binge is well written, diverse and keeps the reader on their toes. A terrific book.

About Douglas Coupland 

Since 1991 Coupland has written thirteen novels published in most languages. He has written and performed for England’s Royal Shakespeare Company and is a columnist for The Financial Times of London. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, e-flux, DIS and Vice. 

In 2000 Coupland amplified his visual art production and has recently had two separate museum retrospectives, Everything is Anything is Anywhere is Everywhere at the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and Bit Rot at Rotterdam’s Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, and Munich’s Villa Stücke. In 2015 and 2016 Coupland was artist in residence in the Paris Google Cultural Institute. In May 2018 his exhibition on ecology, Vortex, opened at the Vancouver Aquarium. 

Coupland is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy, an Officer of the Order of Canada, a Officer of the Order of British Columbia, a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and receiver of the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence.

Book Review - Generation A by Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland is one of my favorite authors. He is also an artist and has one of his works featuring the War of 1812 on display at the corner of Bathurst and Front Street. Today, I just finished a novel he wrote in 2009, Generation A.

A brilliant, timely and very Couplandesque novel about honey bees and the world we may soon live in. Once again, Douglas Coupland captures the spirit of a generation….

In the near future bees are extinct — until one autumn when five people are stung in different places around the world. This shared experience unites them in a way they never could have imagined.

Generation A mirrors 1991’s Generation X. It explores new ways of looking at the act of reading and storytelling in a digital world.

The book is told in first person by five different people, Harj, Zack, Samantha, Julien and Diana, which was a little difficult to grasp at first. Once I realized that each chapter is named for the character who is doing the narrating, it became easy. I don't think many authors could pull this off but Coupland does and quite well.

The story is well told, highly imaginative and the last quarter of the book is quite unusual, but highly entertaining. Coupland does a great job is describing a world without bees. With no bees to pollinate plants, they no longer grow. Other animals die because of this. The chain reaction goes on and how the world comes to cope with it.

What killed off the bees. Why are they suddenly making an appearance. Will they return and flourish again. It's not a depressing look at the future but a very enjoyable one.

I enjoy Coupland's books and after reading this one, his Generation X (1991) is next up for me for books of his to read.

Book Review - The Gum Thief

In 2010 I read a book by Douglas Coupland, Player One, What is to Become of Us, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I loved how it made me think. I read a lot of non-fiction and decided I needed something more off the wall to read and realized that I haven't read any more of Coupland's works, so ordered The Gum Thief.

In Douglas Coupland's ingenious new novel we meet Roger, a divorced, middle-aged "aisles associate" at a Staples outlet, condemned to restocking reams of twenty-lb. bond paper for the rest of his life. And then there's Roger's co-worker Bethany, who's at the end of her Goth phase, and young enough to be looking at fifty more years of sorting the red pens from the blue in Aisle Six. 

One day, Bethany comes across Roger's notebook in the staff room. When she opens it up, she discovers that this old guy she's never considered as quite human is writing mock diary entries pretending to be her-and spookily, he is getting her right. She also learns he has a tragedy in his past-and suddenly he no longer seems like just a paper-stocking robot with a name tag. 

These two retail workers strike up a peculiar and touching epistolary relationship, their lives unfolding alongside Roger's work-in-progress, the oddly titled Glove Pond, a Cheever-era novella gone horribly, horribly wrong. Through a complex layering of narratives, The Gum Thief, highlights number-one bestselling author Douglas Coupland's eye for the comedy, loneliness and strange comforts of contemporary life. 

Everything that happens in this book is told through diary entries and letters and it's fascinating how well this works.

There are really two stories being told here. One is the story of Bethany, a young goth girl with a very negative view on life, and Roger, an older man who works with her, who has been dragged through hell in his life and has a very negative attitude towards life himself. Maybe that's why they can relate so well to each other.

The second is the story of Glove Pond, a book that Roger is writing. At first I thought it was a little dumb but then got really pulled into that story too. Interesting that Glove Pond actually has a listing and review on Goodreads!

Unstoppable rage smolders amid the imploding remains of a dying marriage. A college-town academic, Steve, is hectored and tormented by his bullying, shrewish wife, Gloria. The appearance of a younger successful novelist, Kyle Falconcrest, and his wife, Brittany, becomes the final ingredient in a powder keg of lust, revenge, alcoholism and unthinkable secrets.

In the end I hoped that both the story of the characters in the book and Glove Pond would all have a satisfactory finish,  At first I thought one did and one did not. After thinking about this for awhile, I decided that both endings were very good.

That's what's so great about Douglas Coupland. He makes you think. A great read, although the people at Staples may not think so!

I'm the dead girl whose locker you spat on somewhere between recess and lunch.

I'm not really dead, but I dress like I want to be. There's something generic about girls like me: we hate the sun, we wear black, and we feel trapped inside our bodies like a nylon fur mascot at a football game. 

I wish I were dead most of the time. I can't believe the meat I got stuck with, and where I got stuck and with whom. I wish I were a ghost. 

And FYI, I'm not in school any more, but the spitting thing was real: a little moment that sums up life. I work in a Staples. I'm in charge of restocking aisles 2-North and 2-South: Sheet Protectors, Indexes & Dividers, Note books, Post-It Products, Paper Pads, Specialty Papers and "Social Stationery." Do I hate this job? Are you nuts? Of course I hate it. How could you not hate it? Everyone who works with me is either already damaged or else they're embryos waiting to be damaged, fresh out of school and slow as a 1999 modem. Just because you've been born and made it through high school doesn't mean society can't still abort you. Wake up. 

Let me try to say something positive here. For balance. Staples allows me to wear black lipstick to work. -Bethany -from The Gum Thief.

Player One: What Is to Become of Us by Douglas Coupland

I saw a list of the Giller Awards long list of nominees and realized that I have never purposely read a book because it has been nominated for a Giller, so I decided to change that. I went through the list and a book by Douglas Coupland caught my eye, Player One: What Is to Become of Us.

The subtitle to the book is A Novel in Five Hours, and was part of the Massey Lecture series on CBC Radio. The book is a real-time, five-hour story set in an airport cocktail lounge during a global disaster. Five disparate people are trapped inside: Karen, a single mother waiting for her online date; Rick, the down-on-his-luck airport lounge bartender; Luke, a pastor on the run; Rachel, a cool Hitchcock blonde incapable of true human contact; and finally a mysterious voice known as Player One. Slowly, each reveals the truth about themselves while the world as they know it comes to an end.
Coupland explores the modern crises of time, human identity, society, religion, and the afterlife.

It is a very deep book and interestingly put together. Each hour is told from the separate viewpoint of each character. All 4 characters are broken people who end up in the bar of an airport hotel bar just as the world goes into chaos. When it does, they fight for survival while at the same time trying to figure out all the greater questions about life itself.

Funny that I never really knew much about Douglas Coupland and in the period of a week-end have read a book and seen a monument created by him. Would not even have realized it, had Teena not pointed it out to me while reading my Gord's Eye View of Toronto. She has a good eye.

The book is interesting and a little depressing, but one worth reading.

Douglas Coupland's Monument to the War of 1812

On the northwest corner of Lakeshore Blvd and Bathurst St. stands the Monument to the War of 1812 which was unveiled on November 3, 2008. I have written about it before but had much poorer quality photos.

The monument was done by Douglas Coupland, who is not only an artist, but a writer too with many books in publication. I have read a few and think he is brilliant. It was commissioned by condo developer Malibu Investments Inc. I'm glad to see a developer spend some of its money to highlight the history of a neighbourhood and, in this case, a city and a country.

Just north of the monument a major battle was fought on April 27, 1813, when between 1,600 to 1,800 American soldiers invaded Toronto (then York) in an amphibious attack. The attack is explained in detail in a chapter of my book, Defending the Inland Shores, available at Amazon and Indigo.

In an interview, Coupland said this of his work, "I wanted to create something that was just a quick haiku moment for people driving by or walking by to think about the War of 1812," said Coupland. "But once I began getting involved in the project and doing research, I began noticing that the Americans are now starting to change history and they're saying, 'Well actually we won that,' or, 'Actually, we didn't lose' or whatever.

"So it's a war monument but it's also an incitement for people to remember what's going on in the present as well as the past."

The standing soldier is gold and represents a soldier from the 1813 Royal Newfoundland Regiment, who fought valiantly in the attack. The other is painted silver and is an American soldier from the 16th U.S. Infantry Regiment.

The War of 1812 was an important part of Canadian history and I'm glad to see that we are still committed to remembering those who stood their ground to defend our country.

A Gord's Eye View of Toronto -Monument to the War of 1812

A couple of years ago, I heard that they unveiled a monument to the war of 1812, in Toronto.

I was excited about it and excited that it was in my neighborhood, close to Fort York. A week ago I was coming home from driving Teena over to the Island Airport and saw it again and knew that I would return for these shots.

Located on the NW corner of Bathurst and Front Street, it is appropriately called "Monument to the War of 1812 ".

It was commissioned surprisingly(to me) by condo developer Malibu Investments Inc. The monument shows one standing toy soldier and one lying down. The standing soldier is gold and represents a soldier from the 1813 Royal Newfoundland Regiment. The other is painted silver and is an American soldier from the 16th U.S. Infantry Regiment.

The monument was done by Douglas Coupland, an artist and writer. As I was putting together this post and talking to Teena about it, she mentioned "Hey, isn't that the author of the book your reading right now?" (PlayerOne).

When I checked it was. Now I'm reading the book. I'm the one who walked to the monument to take shots. I'm the one doing the research. She's the one that puts it together. One smart gal, my wife!

Back to the monument.

"I wanted to create something that was just a quick haiku moment for people driving by or walking by to think about the War of 1812," said Coupland. "But once I began getting involved in the project and doing research, I began noticing that the Americans are now starting to change history and they're saying, 'Well actually we won that,' or, 'Actually, we didn't lose' or whatever.

"So it's a war monument but it's also an incitement for people to remember what's going on in the present as well as the past."

I like that.

The picture on the left was in the media and taken during the unveiling. Developer Rony Hirsch from Malibu Investments is on the right, Deputy Mayor Joe Pantalone is in the middle and artist Douglas Coupland, appropriately wearing a poppy, is on the right.

The War of 1812 was an extremely important period of time in Canada's history and, if it had not occurred, there would not be a Canada.

Book Review - The Age of Earthquakes

I was at the library this week and saw The Age of Earthquakes on the feature shelf. It's a small pocketbook size and is very strangely set up.

A highly provocative, mindbending, beautifully designed, and visionary look at the landscape of our rapidly evolving digital era.

50 years after Marshall McLuhan's ground breaking book on the influence of technology on culture in The Medium is the Message, Basar, Coupland and Obrist extend the analysis to today, touring the world that’s redefined by the Internet, decoding and explaining what they call the 'extreme present'.

THE AGE OF EARTHQUAKES is a quick-fire paperback, harnessing the images, language and perceptions of our unfurling digital lives. The authors offer five characteristics of the Extreme Present (see below); invent a glossary of new words to describe how we are truly feeling today; and ‘mindsource’ images and illustrations from over 30 contemporary artists. Wayne Daly’s striking graphic design imports the surreal, juxtaposed, mashed mannerisms of screen to page. It’s like a culturally prescient, all-knowing email to the reader: possibly the best email they will ever read.

Welcome to THE AGE OF EARTHQUAKES, a paper portrait of Now, where the Internet hasn’t just changed the structure of our brains these past few years, it’s also changing the structure of the planet. This is a new history of the world that fits perfectly in your back pocket.

When first glancing through the book, it seems to involve a lot of disconnected images and statements.

Reading the book from start to finish, though, is a fascinating. I can't picture two people working on a book together let alone three, Douglas Coupland, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Shumon Basa, plus thirty artists. What they managed to do is create a fast reading, thought provoking book.

It speaks to how the Internet and cell phones have shrunk the world, keeping people connected while at the same time isolating individuals. How we live longer but experience life fast. The Age of Earthquakes is a book that makes a person think.

I found an interesting interview with the three writers about their thoughts on our current technological age and where it might be taking us.

To me, this book is a necessary read for everybody!

Book Review - Worst. Person. Ever.

I've become a big Douglas Coupland fan and Worst. Person. Ever. is the third book of his that I have read, plus I have viewed one of his works of art.

Meet Raymond Gunt. A decent chap who tries to do the right thing. Or, to put it another way, the worst person ever: a foul-mouthed, misanthropic cameraman, trailing creditors, ex-wives and unhappy homeless people in his wake. 

Worst. Person. Ever. is a deeply unworthy book about a dreadful human being with absolutely no redeeming social value. Gunt, in the words of the author, "is a living, walking, talking, hot steaming pile of pure id." He's a B-unit cameraman who enters an amusing downward failure spiral that takes him from London to Los Angeles and then on to an obscure island in the Pacific where a major American TV network is shooting a Survivor-style reality show.

After the first chapter, I thought that Fiona, Gunt's ex-wife, was the worse person ever but it turns out she would only be in the race. Gunt is the pure winner. In fact, most of the people in this book are basically not nice individuals. There are a few good ones ... maybe two in the whole book but all are enjoyable to read about.

I thought this book was quite improbable and extremely hilarious. It's an example of an author letting his imagination run wild to the fullest.

Finally, on the back on the book is the following, This novel contains much talk of bodily functions, improbable sexual content, violent death, nuclear crisis and elaborately inventive profanity. Viewer Discretion is advised ... and it all works.

Worst. Person. Ever. is a fun read and I book I would highly recommend.