{"id":348998,"date":"2021-10-05T21:55:55","date_gmt":"2021-10-05T18:55:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/bingeing-into-the-21st-century-with-artist-douglas-coupland\/"},"modified":"2021-10-05T21:55:55","modified_gmt":"2021-10-05T18:55:55","slug":"bingeing-into-the-21st-century-with-artist-douglas-coupland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/bingeing-into-the-21st-century-with-artist-douglas-coupland\/","title":{"rendered":"#Bingeing into the 21st century with artist Douglas Coupland"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Bingeing into the 21st century with artist Douglas Coupland<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n Anyone who has tried to cram about nine hours of <\/span>Squid Game<\/a><\/span><\/i> into a day or two of viewing\u2014that would be millions of people recently\u2014can only agree with Douglas Coupland\u2019s thought process in naming his first work of fiction in eight years. \u201cIt\u2019s called <\/span>Binge<\/span><\/i> for a reason,\u201d he says in an interview. \u201cI really wanted to pick up on that because one of the many things that define our present era is the bingeing impulse. Where does that come from? What is it, what drives it? In the end I\u2019m still not quite sure what\u2019s in the binge secret sauce.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Maybe so, but he certainly knows how to manipulate it into life. The 60 pieces of micro-fiction found in <\/span>Binge<\/span><\/i>\u2019s 251 pages\u2014sometimes linked, occasionally by plotline, but mainly by recurring characters\u2014are precisely honed. Narrated by male, female or binary-fluid characters of all ages, some are pleasing tales of escape from an intolerable situation, while many more are often wry accounts of being stuck therein. But they are almost all blackly funny screenshots of our world, making up \u201can X-ray of a culture at a certain time, like a contemporary version of <\/span>Winesburg, Ohio<\/span><\/i>,\u201d says Coupland, in reference to the linked short stories of Sherwood Anderson\u2019s 1919 classic.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Hooks abound in <\/span>Binge<\/span><\/i>, pulling readers from one bite-sized story\u2014average length, 4.2 pages\u2014to the next. There are compelling characters like the unnamed narrator who manages to arrange the murder of her husband, personally murder the man she hired for that and, as a kind of afterthought, kill her daughter\u2019s disapp<\/a>ointing boyfriend, and sail happily through it all. And compellingly <\/span>appealing<\/span><\/i> characters, too, like 18-year-old Olivia, forlornly hoping for a sex life before her early death from cystic fibrosis, and Erik\/Trashe Blanche, the acid-tongued but kind-hearted drag queen who appears in more stories than anyone else. \u201cYeah. those two\u2026\u201d comments Coupland, trailing off, \u201cI kind of think they want to break out and become their own book.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s pure reader curiosity: just how many times will the coffin-reminiscent cargo holders now found on car roofs be used by murderers with a disposal problem? (Twice, actually.) And how many people have reason to worry when a close relative mails off their DNA to a genealogy firm? \u201cOh, I\u2019m always waiting for the knock on the door,\u201d says a laughing Coupland in regards to the recent spate of cold cases cracked via police access to DNA banks. \u201cJust imagine, there is a bit of your DNA out there somewhere, and then your sister-in-law announces, \u2018Hey, guess what? I signed us all up for 23andMe.\u2019 Like, f\u2013k.\u201d All in all, it is very hard indeed not to binge on <\/span>Binge<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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For all the fun Coupland had crafting his vignettes, their core theme in the author\u2019s mind lies in the digital search histories so frequently revealed, in both <\/span>Binge <\/span><\/i>and the real world. Those trails are \u201cthe eighth deadly sin,\u201d according to one narrator, a laptop repairman who sneaks a look at all his clients\u2019 activities\u2014particularly their porn collections\u2014indulging a curiosity that has made him aware everyone has \u201can inner world as complex and f\u2014ed up and noisy as your own.\u201d The one story Coupland himself raises when discussing <\/span>Binge<\/span><\/i> is \u201cClickbait,\u201d narrated by a man visiting his mother, who has her computer open on her kitchen table. \u201cWhen she goes upstairs, well, do you ever wonder, what does Mom look up when you\u2019re not there?\u201d (The narrator takes a peek, to his intense mortification.) \u201cI think the whole book is about getting to see everybody\u2019s search history,\u201d Coupland says.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In \u201cClickbait,\u201d \u201cSearch History,\u201d \u201cLaptop\u201d and other stories, what we seek online is as unerasable as our missteps\u2014<\/span>Binge<\/span><\/i>\u2019s tributes to the latter include a masturbating man on a rooftop immortalized by a drone camera and CCTV footage of a vegan teen girl vomiting in a 7-Eleven after a hotdog is shoved in her face. Together they make up our very public \u201cdata stain,\u201d Coupland says, and provide onlookers with \u201cwhat a 20th-century metaphor might have expressed as a glass-bottomed boat tour through somebody\u2019s brain.\u201d In the 21<\/span>st<\/span> century, search history itself is the metaphor for our innermost selves.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Binge<\/span><\/i>\u2019s 60 stories mark Coupland\u2019s return to fiction in his 60<\/span>th<\/span> year, after a long hiatus, and in a manner very different from his 12 novels. The 60-in-60<\/span>th<\/span> coincidence is just that, a coincidence, says the author, but it does serve to highlight that Coupland, like every other North American child born in 1961, is a baby boomer. Despite his protests\u2014\u201cI am not [a boomer]. I hate my allotted generation so much that I invented my way out of it\u201d\u2014Coupland is not a member of the generation whose name he coined in his landmark 1991 novel, <\/span>Generation X<\/span><\/i>. Regardless of their number, though, the micro-stories may represent the only possible return route to fiction currently open to Coupland, mirroring as they do his artistic interests, which tend to focus on gathering small and disparate elements into larger structures.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the early years of his public prominence, after <\/span>Generation X<\/span><\/i> exploded in the zeitgeist three decades ago, Coupland was always described as \u201cwriter and artist.\u201d But as artworks took more of his attention, his media<\/a> label reversed to \u201cartist and writer.\u201d Coupland\u2019s own preference is \u201cartist, writer, author, designer.\u201d By art he means \u201cwhat you do in your studio, for no other reason than you want to do it,\u201d while \u201cpublic art or commission\u2014the non-fiction version of art\u2014is design, tethered to a dimension of the real world or to some sort of reality.\u201d Fiction, \u201cwhich is whatever you want it to be,\u201d is author work, while writer Coupland handles the non-fiction of news<\/a>paper columns and essays. His life in words and images can be plotted, Coupland helpfully adds, \u201clike a Punnett square,\u201d the diagram biologists use to display, according to probability, the genotypes that could emerge from a particular crossbreeding. And there is also the small matter of a comfort zone, a striking selection for so gifted a writer: \u201cI feel much more a part of the art world than I do the writing world. I\u2019ve never really felt at home there.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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In 2010, Coupland wrote a series<\/a> of 45 predictions regarding the next decade for the <\/span>Globe and Mail<\/span><\/i>. Last Christmas, the newspaper reprinted them, giving Coupland, and the rest of us, a chance to evaluate his prophetic prowess. (Not bad at all, it turns out: who can argue with, \u201cThe future of politics is the careful and effective implanting into the minds of voters images that can never be removed\u201d?) More germane, his attitude hasn\u2019t changed over the decade. The man who predicted, \u201cExpect less\u2014not zero, just less,\u201d in 2010 remains one of the more hopeful pessimists around, in the face of burgeoning AI and deteriorating climate, and despite believing the prevailing tenor of our times is \u201cunfocused rage.\u201d Yes, the \u201cdata stain\u201d will fully emerge, saddling all of us with virtual selves we may \u201cneither like nor recognize,\u201d but this too shall pass, says Coupland. \u201cI\u2019m high on humanity. Was it Oscar Wilde who said the last thing in life you ever understand is the way others see you? We\u2019ll stop caring about that. Things will be just fine.\u201d<\/span>
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