Generation X author Douglas Coupland was last in Scotland for the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2004, and this time he was back sporting a greyish beard and a new novel titled Generation A, as well as his trademark ironic, yet incredibly sincere and honest, sparkle in his eyes.
As an insight into the thought processes behind those eyes, let me begin with the end, as in this evening’s last question from the audience. A member of the audience wanted to know if Coupland, after having written Microserfs about Microsoft, and Jpod about Google, would consider writing something on FaceBook or Twitter.
“A book on Twitter?” Coupland replied, “Twitter is kind of like a hoolahoop, it’s a fun thing that’s happening right now. There’s one guy in the states, his name is, like, ‘shitmydadsays’, you’ve heard, no doubt? He’s 28 and his dad is 73, and his dad says things like ‘no, the dog is not bored, it’s a fucking dog!’”
Roars of laughter from the audience, certainly not for the first time this evening, and Coupland continued his musings about Twitter:
“It’s fun, that’s all it is. Well, hang on, you say that and then you look at the Iranian election, and say ‘hello?’. Massive change happening because of something stupid. Twitter has a really stupid name. If they’d called it, like, Churchill, or something really…august. Like, ‘have you Churchilled today?’ So, yes, it has a bad name, it’s crippled from the get go.”
Before contemplating on Twitter, Coupland held the - it has to be said - enthusiastic audience in an iron grip during this hour on the penultimate day of the Edinburgh Book Festival.
After conducting a cell phone sonata (the audience calling each other on their mobile phones, creating a cacophony of ring tones reminiscent of the sounds after the Columbine massacre), he read two short stories from Generation A, a novel which Coupland wrote in what he calls “a transitional phase”.
He doesn’t think that we ever, as a society, have had as many new technologies in such a short period of time as we have in the last 15 years.
“Things are changing right now,” Coupland said, “here we are at the Edinburgh literary festival, and we are celebrating the act of writing. It’s sponsored by a bank, which has been brought down by…the whole online universe…it seems like everything in our world is up for grabs. I think artists are the canaries in the coal mine. When I saw Damien Hirst and that stupid platinum skull with all the diamonds, I just knew the meltdown was coming.”
In Generation A, a group of people are together telling stories to make sense of the way things are, similar to the situation in Coupland’s Generation X, and indeed the classic Decameron.
There are 16 stories all in all, and Coupland read two of them, one about Superman and a Kryptonite cocktail and the other about a princess, who is about to become the next queen.
The way things are, according to Douglas Coupland, was very much predicted by the, also Canadian, philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan. Douglas was writing a biography on McLuhan at the same time he was writing Generation A, and told the audience:
“When I was looking back at what he wrote, I said, holy shit, this guy basically predicted the entire internet in, like, shocking detail. And part of what he talks about is the way that language, when turned into print, created a sense of individualism, individuality, that we value in a society. With all these new technologies that we have, we are basically losing that, we’re re-tribalising, going back to being a village again.”
Coupland is a thoughtful writer, full of stories and thoughts and anecdotes, and who never seems to stop thinking or observing, even at an event like this. His website is full of so called “couplandisms”, like this one:
“Canadians can easily ‘pass for American’ as long as we don’t accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car.”