About Polaroids by Douglas Coupland

In a Douglas Coupland burp, I reread Shampoo Planet and now Polaroids.

What strikes me now: Coupland’s style and subject matter could never be European.

The description of “stuff”

Bret Easton Ellis exaggerated it in American Psycho with the overly exuberant description of the brands of Bateman’s stuff. But even in Coupland you notice that strange for us Europeans yet somewhat exotic way of describing consumer goods.

Polaroids, Douglas Coupland

His world is so unimaginably young to us

A legacy of a few hundred years is already immeasurably deep. After the freedom struggle, suddenly the most important event in the history of the United States (yes I know Coupland is a Canadian) is 9/11. And 9/11 is described as an attack on the United States. European history is teeming with 9/11 events. In the US, a president is assassinated every now and then, but Delaware, Arizona or even Texas did not secede from the US. In a documentary on illegals, I hear Americans talk about “our country” as something based on centuries of history. But most Americans have immigrated to the country in the last hundred years.

Rehab

Coupland (paraphrasing – I lost the exact quote):

When there is an electricity outage, we sing songs, but as soon as electricity is back, we disappear in a haze again.

So it is during this vacation. For example, there is no television. You find that you read a book more easily and chat more, and feel much freer than when that blue eye demands its attention. It’s like quitting drinking or smoking: a TV addiction is in your daily pattern, and it takes a paradigm shift to get rid of it.

About legacy: a little further on, I read that Palo Alto is 100 years old. I rest my case.

Rereading, and Derek Sivers’ Hell Yeah or No

Halfway through December, I received my signed copy of Hell Yeah Or No. A good motive to re-read the book.

Derek Sivers - Hell Yeah or No - book cover

I had already read the ebook. I purchased the same offer: an ebook and a signed paper copy. Given the work Derek has put into producing and distributing the signed hardcover version, I cannot imagine he made much money on it.

I seldomly re-read books. But this one is definitely in the re-reading category. As a sidenote, my re-reading category includes: Gerrit Krol (Dutch writer (probably one of the first people writing on Artificial Intelligence in De Man Achter Het Raam (1982!), definitely in the Netherlands, but probably also internationally), Douglas Coupland, Haruki Murakami, Tom Peters (not everything, but definitely The Little Big Things).

Purity vs Dark Brown suppression – The Noise of Time

I somewhat randomly bought The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes. Barnes is one of the writers on my ‘read anything they write’ list (another one is Haruki Murakami, yet another Douglas Coupland).

So, I did buy the book for its main topic—a fictionalized biography of Dmitri Shostakovich. Actually, as I had not read any review of the book or its cover, it took me a couple of pages to realize this was about Shostakovich—or, probably more precisely, about his moral struggle with the Soviet government.

The beginning breathes the dark brown stifling atmosphere of Kafka’s The Trial. Desperate, helpless, surrendering to the untouchable power of bureaucratics.

Barnes writes how Shostakovich became famous as a composer but could not enjoy his success. He gets to visit the United States as a puppet of the USSR politics. He holds speeches drenched with political statements but includes nothing of his own vision. The composer seems to half realize what he is doing and seems to justify it for his family. So the story turns to Shostakovich’s courage, or lack thereof, his cowardness, betrayal, and moral shame.

Barnes describes wonderfully how the oppression permeates every hole in Shostakovich’s life. It makes me wonder how he could still write such wonderful music.

Who does art belong to? The people? The state? The ‘big goal’?

Music in the USSR is played ‘as meant by the artist’ or ‘ strategic’—that is, in accordance with the norms of socialist art.

But in music, there is a purity. Something that can not be washed away by norms, politics, ethics, or violence. A purity that stands The Noise of Time. Eternal. Context-free. An undebatable truth.

And this purity in music probably explains how Shostakovich was able to continue to make his wonderful music, while being oppressed by this totalitarian regime.

Kitten Clone and the Engineer’s Lost Soul

Coupland - Kitten Clone

Coupland’s Kitten Clone is written in Coupland’s sort of nonchalant style. Entertaining and ironic, without giving the impression of not being serious. And it has a few typical nerdy typographical jokes like making a paragraph brake with

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This very well written documentary (leave that up to Coupland), is beautifully illustrated with photo’s from Olivia Arthur, a famous Magnum photographer. A piece of art, this book. Coupland documents his thoughts as he travels over the globe, interviewing staff from the company Alcatel-Lucent, one of the few organizations providing the backbone technology for the Internet. Without this technology and maybe without this company our (cyber) lives would look quite different.

With Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine (“the original nerd epic”), I will add ano my earlier post on Kidder’s book here, and Coupland’s own JPod, one of the best books on the soul of engineers.

Kitten Clone is the most analytical and philosophical.

The zeitgeist of the twenty-first century is that we have a lot of zeit but not much geist. I’m appalled I just wrote that sentences, but it’s true;
there’s something emotionally sparse about the present era, and the world just keeps spinning faster and faster. Optical fibres carry forty billion phone calls at once, and soon ten terabits. And I want my Dexter, Season 4, and I want it now, and that’s what’s driving all of this: we want it and we want it now. And on top of that, it sort of feels like we’re all being chased by monsters.

I found the formulation smelling a bit like cultural pessimism, and it feels like every generation has developed this sort of fatigue. However this feeling of this ever increasing speed of need I definitely share, but still I am not convinced this may be a generational gap. And Coupland not just wonders what all this speed is necessary for. This company is mostly invisible to the public, while their product is so fundamentally changing society. It does continue to improve their technology, without seemingly wondering what this technology really enables.

“All of the scientists I spoke with were almost endearingly surprised even to be asked the question of how people will use what they invent.

And while the company does not bother much about the application of their technology, the people using their product create a complete new reality with it.

Right now, half of humanity – the younger half – believes the Internet is the reality.

This lack of apparent self reflection from the this technology company as well as from the people using their stuff, is what Coupland seems to fear most. And with that the conclusion of this documentary story is positive and alarming at the same time. Possibilities of people connecting globally are developing at an increasing speed, but this seems to develop on itself and there is a no grand plan, vision or idea guiding this advancement. Coupland for a moment even longs for religion.