The Dark Side of Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland doesn’t want to end the Book Club meeting on a positive note. They always end upbeat he explains. For once, he wants things to end darkly. “Doomed. We are all doomed.” He throws this out there as his final words. “Quit your job. There is no hope.”

It is this topic of life’s darker edges that seemed to continue to be addressed over the course of the two hour discussion last night that was being recorded for an upcoming episode of North By Northwest, hosted by Sheryl MacKay and Georgia Straight’s John Burns for CBC Radio Studio One’s Book Club.

Vancouver, as much as we wish to ignore it, has a rather notorious underbelly – and not just the open and festering wound exposed on the Downtown Eastside. As Coupland pointed out, we don’t really make all that much here aside from pushing a few pixels around on a screen and some high-end real estate. And yet, no one asks a lot of questions about where all the money is coming from; instead we remain complacent, like a good mafia wife. “We are living in a unique place, at a unique time” Coupland stated. That is one of the main reasons that he based his latest novel J-Pod here. (Well, that and the fact that he was feeling too lazy to travel).

So it should come as no surprise to anyone that the discussion tonight veered onto such topics as “where is the best place to dump a dead body” It was in relation to the passage he read in which the main character’s mother kills a biker who tried to extort her for a share of her basement grow op. But Coupland is visibly pleased to be sitting up in front of us, relating his experiences during the research phase of driving around Vancouver looking for the perfect place to get rid of a corpse. From the novel:

It’s strange how everything in the world changes the moment your focus becomes extremely specific. Hmmmm….is that a good place to bury a body? No, soil’s too thin.

Mom suggested Stanley Park, on the edge of downtown. “If there was ever a place to dump a body, the park is it. At this point in history, there are probably more bones there than soil.”

His choice of reading, he told us, was inspired by a report on NEWS1130 of three grow ops exploding out in New Westminster earlier in the day. “This is the only place in the world that they don’t have to explain the term ‘grow op’ on the news” he wryly observed. And then, in the same way that he had done at the last reading I had attended, he stumbled over an explanation in the attempts to set up the scene of the selected passage, loose thoughts trailing after one another with starts and pauses until suddenly it all seemed to gracefully take flight and you realized that he was reading.

There were a lot of those last night, trailing loose thoughts and quirky starts and pauses, as Coupland took questions from the audience about his take on programmers, micro-autism, the Google phenomenon and our divorce from history. This is the first time in the world that we have nothing to look back on and learn from, he told us. “History cannot help us anymore. We must begin fresh and figure it out as we go”. Which is exciting, in my opinion, and optimistic. And it ultimately ends this entry ..on a positive note.

Posted by Kevin Broome

Tags: Events, Pop Culture, Reading, Vancouver, We love