The New York Public Library



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Douglas Coupland | Chuck Palahniuk

April 11, 2014

LIVE from the New York Public Library

live

Celeste Bartos Forum

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: My name is Paul Holdengräber, I’m the Director of Public Programs here at the New York Public Library, known as LIVE from the New York Public Library. My goal here at the Library, as you all know, is to make the lions roar, to make a heavy institution dance, and tonight to make it levitate. I think that will be easy with the balloons.

It is a great pleasure to welcome Douglas Coupland and Chuck Palahniuk tonight. After the event, which I think is going to be quite something, I don’t know what is going to happen. If this is the last event I do, what a great way to go. Douglas Coupland will be signing books. As always, we are grateful to our independent bookstore, 192 Books, for supplying the goods.

Doug Coupland is the author among many books of Generation A and JPod and Generation X and, just out, Worst. Person. Ever. It is published by Blue Rider Press. Last time I had a Blue Rider Press writer here on this stage it literally changed my life and has become my favorite interview ever. I’ve interviewed about two, three hundred people. My favorite interview ever was with Mike Tyson for Undisputed Truth, published by Blue Rider Press.

Chuck Palahniuk is the author of the novels Fight Club and Choke, both of them made into films. His newest novel coming out, mark your calendar, on October 21st of this year from Doubleday, is Beautiful You. I was intrigued by the title and so I read, this is what he says of it. “Beautiful You began with my vague memory of finding some pornographic paperback books in my father’s closet. I read on. I was six or seven and could hardly read. They had titles like”—excuse my accent now—“Hot Cowgirl Slut Ranch. None of what I read in them made sense, but neither did the soft-focus romance novels my mother read. The challenge in Beautiful You was to write an action-packed gonzo erotica book but using the overblown language of bodice-ripper romance. It’s a book I could only write with both my parents dead.”

(laughter)

Now for the last seven or so years I’ve asked my guests to give me a biography of themselves in seven words, a haiku of sorts, or if you’re very modern, and I’m sure many of you are very modern, a tweet. Doug Coupland submitted these seven words to me, which I hope he will explain: “Anywhere is everywhere is everything is anything.” Chuck Palahniuk submitted these seven words to me: “Former cynic. Falling is love was everything.” Please welcome them both to the stage.

(applause)

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: The world is filled with beautiful, elegant, poetic, insightful, profound, gorgeous, lovely stories. But tonight will not be. That is your warning.

How many of you have never been to an author event, never been to a book event? Wow. You’re so literate. This must be New York. (laughter) The way author events go, this is the way they always go. We are going to play some games. We are going to—Joyce Carol Oates plays great games. (laughter) We are going to hear Doug read from his new book, by proxy. I’m going to ask him some questions.

You’re going to ask him some questions. If you’re lucky you will win some prizes. If you’ve got questions, you were coached to write them on the beach balls that you’re holding. And periodically throughout the evening we’re going to mix them up and it’s going to be gorgeous. So, what’s going to happen is I’m going to ask Jeff to shut off all the lights and your job will be to throw your beach balls toward the center of the room. And you people in the center of the room, you are fucked, (laughter) because you will be—you will be buried in beach balls. And your job will be to throw the beach balls back to the edges of the room as quickly as possible.

So, Jeff, on the count of three. One. Two. Three. Balls in the air!

Okay, lights up! Jeff! I cannot tell you how disappointed I am. (laughter) You people in the middle have got a lot more work to do. Right now, get the balls distributed. We’re going to do this again three more times throughout the evening. Okay? It’s like dodgeball but without the hate.

Okay! Okay! Okay! It’s a job, get it done. Okay, from now on, quietly pass the beach balls, because we’ve got to move on. Ahh, somebody had so much time on their hands.

(laughter)

You know, for a long time I did not read books, because in high school and college I was made to read books by Henry James, and then I happened across a book in our library called Generation X, and I hadn’t bought a book in years. But I went out and I bought all of my friends copies of Generation X. I thought, “Oh my God, this is a book. This is how books should be.” I was so in love with that book. And I cannot believe how surrealistic it feels to be onstage tonight with the man who wrote that book and so many other good books, and this is really an opportunity to make him squirm. (laughter) So, ladies and gentlemen, Douglas Coupland.

(applause)

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Hello Charles. Thank you.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Are you up for a little scientific experiment? Scientific experiment. These are bags of candy. They won’t hurt, (laughter) much. Three Musketeers! Kit Kats! Twix! Twix! Milky Way! Right into the camera. Hit the camera. Boom!

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: All this here?

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: All of it. Boom! Candy! Candy! Candy! That was so yours! Now, when I throw candy in the U.S., people grab it and they hold onto it, and it’s their candy. (laughter) But when I throw candy in Toronto or Calgary or Vancouver or Victoria, someone came up to me and said, “Look, they’re opening the bags and they’re distributing the candy to everyone around them.” (laughter) They said, “That is so Canadian. That’s the ultimate Canadian thing.” (laughter) So what do you want to be? Do you want to be American or Canadian?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Go Canadian. You can never go back. Thank you.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Ladies and gentlemen, Douglas Coupland.

(applause)

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: I was feeling a bit hedge-fundy today, so I thought I’d throw on my suit.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: You look great.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Oh, thank you, thanks, Chuck.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: And would you like to deal with some questions right now?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Yes. Okay? Should we sit down, or you’re a stander, aren’t you? Oh dear.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Where to begin? So. Just to make sure that you are who you say you are, (laughter) I’m going to throw some really popular terms out that you may or may not have created.

What is Generation X?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Okay. Well, right now if you pick up a copy of Time or Newsweek or whatever the issue is, magazine, they’re currently writing all these articles trashing the Millennials. And if you go back exactly twenty-one years, they were saying exact same sort of things about people of a certain age, which I was, -ish. And I don’t—it’s like this meme that could not be killed. I mean, usually memes sort of burn themselves out in a day or a week or something. I feel vaguely guilty for starting this meme that cannot be killed, so that’s what X is. Thank you.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: That’s how I feel about Tyler Durden.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: It’s like, Okay, what’s Brad Pitt really like. I had to ask you. That’s the number one question you get that drives you nuts so I did that on purpose.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: I don’t know. Does anybody really know? Another question. (laughter) This is the lightning round. Veal-fattening pen.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Have you ever seen them in a documentary? You would never eat veal ever again if you did. They’re just horrifying. But that was basically the cubicle environment that we worked in, I worked in, at my last job ever which was 1988 in Toronto. It hasn’t changed much since then.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: And what was a veal-fattening pen?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Well, in real life, it’s where they put a little baby cow in this little pen where they can’t move or do anything with just enough nutrition until they become ready for lemon juice and cream and pepper and salt. And I grew up—my father has cattle out in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia and we used to get dragged out there every weekend instead of going to the mall or wherever, and if in all that time one single cow came up to me and went, “mmmm, be my friend,” I would probably be a vegetarian, but it never happened and I am a carnivore, (laughter) but I think little baby cows need some slack, so they get little pens and it’s just horrible. You’re not vegetarian are you? Okay.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: But you had defined veal-fattening pen in a different way.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: What did I say? Well, it was twenty-two years ago.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: It was a cubicle, those partitioned upholstered cubicles you got at work.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Oh, sound baffles, yeah.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: All of our friends, all of my peers, started calling our cubicles veal-fattening pens.

(laughter)

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: How are your friends, what are they up—what are your friends up to from that period of your life?

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: God. They’ve either become kind of house husbands—they have. (laughter) They all married women with government jobs.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: So they’re set for life then.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Yeah.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Okay.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Another one. Pull the plug and slice the pie. It’s a very timely one these days.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: That probably has something to do with the intergenerational transmission of wealth.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Right.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Isn’t that like something you do with Jane Fonda?

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: It’s when the Baby Boomers die and pass that enormous mass of wealth to the next generation.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Oh, Chuck.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: What do you think that’s going to look like?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Well, I remember growing up, we were always told that in the future you’ll have not just one career but five or six. And what we’re learning now that we’re in the future is that those five or six careers all happen at the same time so that you just can’t work at a magazine office anymore, you have to be able to do Photoshop, you have to know InDesign, you have to know about photography, typography, you have to be able to edit, there’s all these things you have to be able to do at one time and then, you know, tick tick tick time goes on and I’m realizing pension funds are never going to work. We’re working to the grave is what the reality is.

But the thing is they’ve made—McJobs, fast-food jobs are now welcoming senior citizens to work in them, so you’re going to be working as crew chief until the grave. Pull the plug, slice the pie. Quick question for you—I wish on the back of my license plate, or driver’s license they’ll pen DNR, that like, you know, if I get hit by a cosmic bus, say, I don’t want to be resuscitated. Do you want to be DNRed if you were in the hospital?

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Boy, you know, it depends on how hard I was hit.

(laughter)

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Right now, euthanasia is a big issue in Canada right now. How did we get there from where we were?

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: You took us right to death.

(laughter)

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Sorry, Charles, okay.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Another ball throw.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Gwyneth Paltrow?

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: No.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: What did you—did you say Gwyneth Paltrow?

(laughter)

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: If there’s a tunnel of light, I don’t want to be resuscitated, but if there’s not a tunnel of light, bring me back, okay?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Okay.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: So, in Generation X so much of the griping was about graduating from college into an environment where, really, every seat was taken. There was no opportunity left and the prices were kind of skyrocketing, because the Baby Boomers were choosing that point to buy all the property and it seems like people are facing so much of that same situation right now. And yet people of your generation created wealth, so many of them, through the Internet. What do you think will be the salvation of the current generation?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Well, the only salvation for anyone on an individual level, no matter where you are on earth and where you in history is find out what it is that you enjoy doing and then you do that. Because no matter what happens to the world—God only knows what’s going to follow the Internet. But whatever it is, if you enjoy cooking, if you enjoy making shoes, if you enjoy fixing animals, that’s going to take you through any technological curve that might come down the road. I think we are at a period in history where—when was the last crash, was it late 2007, early 2008?

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Too many to keep track of.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Okay. I think there’s sort of—for the next fifty, sixty years, we’re going to every five years or so burp X percent of the people out of the middle classes. And I think the last crash was about getting rid of people who will leave the middle classes and never come back, and this is probably going to happen again and again cyclically. Until we have just like two classes, well, three. People who know what they like and do it. People who don’t know what they like and probably work at the Department of Motor Vehicles. (laughter) And I don’t know, just people, hobos, living on railways going around the country. We’re entering a really weird period in history that way.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Do you have an app?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: An app? I do have an app! Thank you for asking! (laughter) It’s launched on April 5th and it’s available in iTunes, it’s only a dollar ninety-nine. And it’s called Snorrt!. And Snorrt! is a documenting and shaming program that allows you to under night light or daylight, takes an image of whoever might be snoring and then it gives it a decibel rating and it gives a subjective description of the snoring and then it allows you to paste it to whatever social media site you go to. Because the thing about snoring is the snorer never believes you. They just, “Oh, no, you’re just being—you’re being supersensitive. I don’t snore, nosiree, not me,” and of course—[Big snoring noise]. And I just, so I went online. There must be something out there. And what? Is this the rarest of things in a capitalist economy, a market opportunity? And I saw it and I went for it. No more books for me, nosiree.

(laughter)

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Are you sure this didn’t arise from a more personal—are you married to a snorer?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: No.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Have you done a book with Apple?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Why, thank you for asking.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Thank you for writing it down.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: It’s like being on Ellen. (laughter) They just—well, I did this book. As you know I like doing experimental fiction. I know that you do, too. And there’s this paper. They have—I think in the States they only have it in New York and Boston, but it’s all over the world in Canada and Europe and South America. It’s called Metro. And the thing about Metro is that every single copy gets read by six sets of eyeballs. It’s got this amazing imprint. And so their editorial offices are in Toronto and I did nine-thousand-word story called “Temp,” which is about a temp. In the end, I’m always going back to the workplace as a place of inspiration. And so we published it globally simultaneously in like Portuguese and Spanish, Dutch, and all these other languages, butm and we also made fake advertising that went in it, sort of corresponded to things that were mentioned in the story. It was this wonderful, wonderful overall experience.

And the other thing I realized is those papers—There’s a company out there called Shutterstock, and you know how when you’re always looking up an image online, it’s got the Shutterstock logo and watermark in it. Most newspapers now have an account with Shutterstock, which is why all the images are starting to look sort of generic and sort of bland and nowhere-y. So last Halloween as a costume I got a big sheet of plexi and a white pen and I put an X and Shutterstock and I went out as clip art for Halloween. (laughter) And my mom didn’t get it, but everyone else got it in my life. (laughter) “Shutterstock. What’s Shutterstock? Why are you holding that piece of plexi?” “Mom, it’s a costume.” “Well, in my days, people wore costumes to look attractive so that they might get a date.”

(laughter)

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Years ago, when we first met, you told me that you wished that you had been edited more closely when you were younger.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Can you talk about that?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Absolutely. The birth cycles of—well, Generation X, which was March 1991, so it’s say twenty-three years. It was commissioned to be a nonfiction book and I just sat down to actually. You know there’s that moment every day, you’re in the seat, you’re there and you have to do it, and I cannot do a nonfiction book about this. I just can’t. And the advance was 22.5, which you know wasn’t much now, it wasn’t much then, but, “I’m just going to write it as fiction. Screw it.” So I handed it in. And there’s just this silence that went on for about a month and a half. And I got this letter from my Canadian publisher saying, “We’ve chosen not to publish the book.” And okay.

And then the Americans, still more silence, and that went on for three months, then finally they said, “Well, we’ll publish it, grudgingly, because only the kids on the first floor think we have to.” And so they just took this manuscript I handed in and just verbatim, just published, with no, I don’t even think they—they didn’t even have spell checks back then, I mean, they did nothing, and then the second book came out and I think I thought the publishing industry is different than it really is. I thought they had this whole team of like Smurfs like going through manuscripts page by page. They had nothing.

Yet another book came out, went directly to print, like, “What the shit? No one even checked it?” (laughter) And then so finally, it took three or four books until I realized, Okay, the onus is on me always to make sure that it goes out there as clean as possible. Because I think the budget for that kind of editing is certainly gone now. It was leaving then, I think it’s gone now.

Can I ask you a question, writer to writer?

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Of course.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: I mean, your editorial relationship with your editor, who actually does the grammar and that like niggly stuff. Who does that?

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Some of it is done by editor and believe it or not a tiny bit is done by me. (laughter) But most of it is done by the copy editor.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: What’s the key command for a nonbreaking en-dash? You fraud! You fraud!

(laughter)

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: I don’t even know what a nonbreaking en-dash is. (laughter) I’m a journalist.

So, I was leaving on tour once years ago and your last message to me was, “Enjoy that hero sandwich alone in your room at midnight every night.”

(laughter)

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: That’s if they have room service.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: That was a long time ago. Can you speak to that kind of ennui of book tour?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Well, I mean, I really can’t complain. Thank you, Internet, book tours aren’t quite as long as they used to be. I had this tour on September 9, 2001, I had a show that opened down in, just on Tribeca. This was my first big break show, and the next day I flew to Madison, Wisconsin, to do the first of what was a forty-two-city tour. And, of course 9/11 happened, and I got grounded in Madison for about I think five or six days, and I’m Canadian so they wouldn’t rent a car to me, because they assumed all Canadians would just go for the border, which is probably what I would have done.

So I called Bloomsbury, who were my publisher then. And because the Verizon tower on the North Tower came down, they could only receive phone calls, they couldn’t make them, and so I called up, “Guys, I’m in Wisconsin, what the hell do I do?” And they did this really emotionally manipulative thing, which is like, “Doug, you’re the only reason we come to the office in the morning. You have to do the tour.” And if I could go back in time, I would do it differently, but, “you’re right, I have to be stoic, I have to do this thing.”

And so for the two months immediately following 9/11, I was in a plane every day that was either completely empty or chokingly full, and that was when there was like barbaric inspection of every level. And I got to the end of it and I just felt like this sponge that had been used to clean off a large wooden ballroom floor. And then what was left of it was just tossed away. And that was like my soul on book tours. (laughter) And ever since then I’ve scaled back. It’s a very first-world complaint, it’s not a complaint, but it just lost its charm over the years. I don’t want to be ungrateful because most writers would kill for any sort of book tour.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: So I’ve got more questions, but for right now, with Jeff’s help, we’re going to mix the balls up again, and we’re going to take some questions from you. So Jeff, remember you people in the middle, work, mix them balls up. Balls in the air! Come on, people in the middle! WORK! WORK, YOU BITCHES! Come on!

Okay, Jeff! It is obvious that you people in the middle have no work ethic whatsoever. (laughter) Spread the balls back out. And who’s got a good question? Who’s got a ball with a good question? And if you have a good question, then you get a severed arm! (laughter) Right in the camera from Douglas Coupland.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Do they throw balls up here?

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: No, you’re going to hold your ball in the air if you’ve got a great question. What is your question?

Q: (Inaudible.)

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: The question—the question is: What is your view on society in regards to the way consumer goods something?

(laughter/applause)

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: That was very good. Oh, I have to answer the question?

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: That’s your question.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Oh, consumer goods. I once—I had a friend ask me what is the most boring place on earth once, and I realized it’s Aisle 3 of the Staples at the corner of Capilano Road and Marine Drive in North Vancouver so I set a book there and sometimes when I think about sort of the end of consumerism, the end of capitalism, it’s this feeling like I’m just going down this endless row of Post-it notes and pens and little clampy things and whatever technology’s falling out of date, and it’s just sort of on this infinite loop and I went to China two years ago and I tried to find something, anything to buy, but everything they’ve got there is either fake or fake and there’s nothing there to buy, and so I ended up buying cigarettes and I don’t smoke, (laughter) but it was the only thing I could find that was actually from there. And the future of consumer goods. I think everything’s getting well, obviously customization. You’ll be able to go to into Staples and push a button and be able to design your own tube of glue stick. I do know, however, that most—oh, what’s he up to now? Charles, what are you doing?

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: We’re getting ready for another question.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Shall we have another question?

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Let’s have another question.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: I can throw this one.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Can you throw good? Okay. Who’s got a question, good question? You people in the middle, keep moving those balls! Move them, move them. All the good questions are buried right there.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: How do you know which one?

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: I’ll wait for somebody—you with your hand up, what’s your question? Okay, that’s a good question! How old will you be when you die? (laughter) And what will your last thought be?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: What’s your name? Pat? You’ve earned your arm. Hang on. Oooooh. My last thought, I’ll be seventy-two years old. Because I was told in 1967, that was statistically the year, or when I was in kindergarten I was told that was the age I was expected to die statistically. My last words will be, “Yes, I would like Jell-O with that.”

(laughter)

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: How about another question? See! Now you’re getting the hang of it. You, in the very back, with the ball in the air.

(laughter)

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Is that a good question?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: I can talk about my mother.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Can you throw the arm?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Okay, where be you? Oh, God, this is going to be hard.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: His mother is seventy years old, and she’s just started to collect knives.

(laughter)

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: That’s true. Oops, oh! Okay, my mother, she always told me that if you need sleep it’s more important to sleep than it is to go to school, so from kindergarten to grade twelve, I actually never once took advantage of that. But around grade nine, we never had breakfast. And, you know, Mom had been to other people’s houses, and I know it was a fact that other people eat breakfast. (laughter) And she was kind of like the Wicked Witch of the West cornered by a bucket of water, and she was like, “ooooh, breakfast is for losers!” And, like, no, according to television, breakfast is an important part of every working day, so she went out and she came home as if she was like mother of the year and kind of like “here,” and then put these boxes of Carnation Instant Breakfast on the table and like, “there! are you happy?” I was like, sorry I exist.

And then for the last three years of high school I had these really, really, I had, well, my brother had it worse, but pretty bad acne, and it went away with time. And then three years ago, “You know, I’d like to lose a bit of weight, maybe I’ll do it scientifically, maybe I’ll get Boost or Ensure or one of those things.” So I tasted it, it’s like Carnation Instant Breakfast. It totally is, it’s Carnation Instant Breakfast in a can. So I started and after like three or four days I got all these same zits back I got during high school and I realized it wasn’t glands, it was that stupid Carnation Instant Breakfast that ruined my senior year completely. So this all goes back—everything goes back to your mother in the end. That is the answer.

(laughter)

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: On the aisle, green ball.

Q: (inaudible)

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: When was that?

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: I’ll let you know.

(laughter/applause)

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Actually, Chuck.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Another question. Right there. You’re so quick.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Oh! How do you know when it’s done?

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: How do you know when it’s done?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: It’s the same. I’ve been doing a lot of projects lately with Lego and crowd sourcing and making things with Lego and the thing I learned about Lego is people build something and they get up to about that high and then, “Eh,” it’s like the song is over and like that building is dead to me and they push it away. When it’s done it’s just—well, how do you know when a book’s begun and with me, I can imagine being a woman and, like, “I think I might be pregnant.” And then I’ll be sitting there doing whatever and I’ll be, “Ooh, that’s the next book.” And it’s just like, boom, there it is, it exists all at once in my head and I go out and I do it. And when something is over, same feeling, “Okay, I’m out of love, it’s over, the song is ended, the Lego’s gone that high.” And I don’t think there’s any more scientific way of describing it. Is that anything like your experience? Well, you write too, come on!

(laughter)

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Boy. My editor is here, so it’s always difficult to talk about these things. Because for me part of when it’s over is when it’s gone too far, when I realize—when my partner no longer wants to hear about it. “No, I don’t want to hear what happens in the swimming pool. Bla bla bla.”

(laughter)

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Is that the story I’m thinking of?

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Yeah.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Okay.

(laughter)

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: That’s the story that destroyed the international calamari market. (laughter) But I have to go there. It’s the kind of Kierkegaard concept of dread that if you can conceive of this thing, you have to go there, and my job is to kind of coach myself to a place that I will not willingly go and to ultimately kind of confess or reveal some aspect of myself that I’m not really—that I’m not at all aware of. You know, there’s an old Henry James quote about, “Writing a novel is selling for six dollars the secrets about yourself that you would not tell your closest friend,” and that really is, you know, it’s only when I have revealed something absolutely personal that I was completely unconscious to that I realize I’ve gone far enough—so it’s only when I’ve gone too far that I feel like I’ve gone far enough.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Well, speaking of editors and going too far. My editor is here tonight and he’s going to if I don’t do something, say, “Doug, shouldn’t you be talking about this new book that you have?” So, thank you, segue, gods of the segue, I wonder if we might, can I say let me just talk about the book. This last book, it is about going too far deliberately. I actually did go too far in places, and a few things got removed, but it is a puerile, wonderful, exuberant exploration of vulgarity, and I cannot do an accent to save my life. So I’m fortunate to have a really great book on tape to play.

And we have our main character, his name is Raymond, and he’s off on this godforsaken island in the middle of the Pacific, and there’s a global nuclear crisis, and the jets aren’t flying, and the Internet is down and it’s towards the end of the book and all throughout the book he’s heard about this magical place called Thong Kong, where all the women are hot and there’s like sex twenty-four hours a day, and one of his great goals is to find Thong Kong. And so they’re about to leave for another island and they realize—I’m setting up the clip, that they’re leaving what is possibly the last flush toilet they’ll ever use in their life and so they’re having a farewell flush and then he comes out, it’s just nighttime, and I think this is clip number fifty-three, not twenty-nine, it’s fifty-three. Why don’t we lower the lights and enjoy a sound performance?

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Please.

AUDIOBOOK: Fifty-two. Dear listener, I know you are probably thinking, “Oh, poor Raymond! He finally encounters Thong Kong and now surely something is about to go horribly, horribly wrong.” But strangely, after flushing, I walked out onto Neal’s immaculately manicured lawn where—how does one even begin to explain?—an orgy like something out of the Scandinavian pre-condom porn era had converted his grounds into a carnal petting zoo. The girls were so mind-meltingly hot and largely unclad, except for those wearing the remains of Japanese schoolgirl outfits. Somewhere to the right I heard canisters of whipped cream being deployed, and then a hand grabbed me by the collar and hauled me into a tengy. What is a tengy? It is a fourgy with six more people added. (laughter) That is correct. I, Raymond Gunt, took part in a tengy. How many of you can say that? Yours, Raymond Gunt.

Okay, so there I was in the tengy. But at first, because it was dark out, I couldn’t tell whose body parts were rubbing me. But isn’t exploration a big part of the charm? Then, in light from one of the several tiki torches over by the infinity pool, I saw what were possibly the most melon-like breasts of my life coming toward me in a trajectory of unmistakable lust and I thought, Life is good, isn’t it, Ray? At which point my lower abdomen cramped like a Ford Fiesta slamming into a brick wall. Mother of God, the pain! I rolled over and went fetal in the hope that it was a one-off sensation, but then I cramped again and realized that my last flush was actually not the Last Flush. I ran back to the throne with no time to spare and proceeded to fire shit out of my ass like a space cruiser entering hyperspace, all the while listening to the moaning, simpering, taunting soundtrack of Thong Kong.

Fucking hell.

After I emptied my thruster of all remaining fuel, I ran out onto the lawn to enter what was by that point a fifteengy. Then a woman’s voice (who? no idea), said, “Uh, uh-uhhh . . . rules are you have to wash your winky before entering the fun. Pool’s over there.”

I am not an unreasonable man, and could, in fact, understand why a bit of hygiene might make the world a better place, so I scampered over the infinity pool, hopped in, and gave myself a Puerto Rican enema, then ran back over to the cluster, by then a twentygy.

I heard another woman’s voice—it was Tabs!—saying, “Hi, Raymond, the girls and I have all decided that we are going to collectively give you the most intense hours of sex ever imagined in the history of humanity. Right, girls?”

Giggles and taunts of “what are we waiting for, then?”

Tabs led me over to the sacred rock, which was now covered with a foam mattress. Around it vanilla-scented tea candles had been arranged and there was also a towel to the right on which were laid out anal beads, a buggy whip, and a selection of masks, feathers, and silk scarves of just the right length for binding limbs.

Tabs said, “Lie down, Raymond, and get ready for ultimate tantric pleasure.”

I thought my brain was going to explode. Tabs and ten other women formed a circle around me, and Tabs said, “Let the massage begin.”

Dear God, it began, and it was heaven.

Ahh . . .

Yes . . .

Mmm. Perfect.

The smell of Naugahyde.

Something musky.

Ahhh . . .

I heard a large crunching noise. What the fuck? I looked up and behind Tabs loomed Mother, wearing her hideous tarpaulin-like underwear. Her face was blank as she ate cheddar-cheese crisps one by one, taking time to lick her fingers thoroughly after each one. She caught me staring.

“Oh, don’t mind me. I’m just watching. Raymond! Is that you in there? Dear God!”

She approached the rock and inserted herself into my coven of erotic masseuses. Her repulsive Toby-mug face. Her skin, oh God, it was the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen, like folds of vanilla cake batter dotted with the occasional chocolate chip and raisin. (laughter) Colorless, dead, life-sucking.

“Mother, what the fuck!”

“I haven’t seen your willy, Raymond, since I caught you wanking in the loo at Sheila’s abortion party.”

“Get the fuck out of here!”

“No need to take that tone with me, son. Last time I looked this was a free island.”

My dick shrank to the size of a raisin, and my reptile cortex yanked my balls deep inside me. (laughter) The girls were giggling now, and the mood was totally shattered.

“Okay, Raymond, don’t worry,” Mother said, “I’m a modern woman. You girls go right ahead and pleasure my son. You just pretend I’m not here, even though I am.” (laughter) She looked into her left bra cup. “Fucking hell, I’m out of crisps.”

(applause)

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: I read this interview this once that there are many ways of going too far. I think William Buckley said to Oriana Fallaci once. I’m just making that up. What do you say, God. I tried reading that once live at the Yellowknife Literary Festival a few months ago and there’s that scene in the movie The Producers where there are all the people in the audience and “Springtime for Hitler” comes on and they’re just sitting there like and there was this “Springtime for Hitler” response for the entire thing and then it was like [one small sad soft clap] and I walked out of the room, and that’s when I decided I’m never, ever going to read from this book ever.

(laughter)

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: It’s a little off the subject, but the New York Times recently carried an interesting article in the business section and it stated that, according to Canadian broadcasting regulations, that Canadian networks had to carry at least 35 percent Canadian-sourced content. The problem was that porno channels in Canada could not find enough Canadian-produced pornography (laughter) that was identifiably tied to the Canadian heritage. (laughter) And this was prompting the CBC to encourage Canadian porn production to meet that need. (laughter) What would be identifiable, nationalistic, Canadian porn to you?

(laughter)

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Like Barely Legal in thermal underwear? (laughter) I was at this conference about a year ago and there was this guy there from Google and he hadn’t been to Canada before and he asked me, like, “what can you tell me about Fort McMurray Alberta?” “Fort McMurray, Alberta? It’s a natural resource, it’s where they take the tar sands and make this filthy disgusting oil, it’s just a disaster, and I think it actually has the highest ratio of men to women of anywhere in North America,” which it does, I looked up later. “Why do you ask?” “It has by far the highest porn streaming of any other constituency in North America.”

Sleds? (laughter) Toques? Thermoses? I don’t know, Chuck.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Maple syrup? Mooses?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: It would actually be, because it’s bureaucratic, it would be really strange, like the director could be American, as long as two of the three principal actors have to be Canadian, you could have one American, and there would actually be someone on set with a clipboard, you know, removing what joy there is to be had on a porn set, away with every little box being ticked in. It’s actually a moneymaking opportunity, Chuck. Would you ever—? Okay. (laughter) We’ll leave it there.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Do they really monitor that streaming thing? (laughter)

Adbusters. Some of my favorite work of yours is nonfiction that was written for Adbusters. What became of Adbusters, what’s happening?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: I mean, Adbusters, they were like the late 1990s, I think, that Kalle Lasn in Vancouver put together, and it was a magazine without advertising that really, really riding the No Logo wave of the time, and, I mean, you look back, I look back now on some of the things I wrote and some of the things other people wrote and they seem like from the point of 2014, very, very obvious, but at the time it was all kind of shocking and new, and there wasn’t really an Internet, so that magazine still gave you that sensation that you were getting something that other people weren’t getting, somehow.

They were wonderful to write for, because they just let you have whatever I wanted to do they would let it run as long as it—they would do a fact-check and a spell-check. Also, I collect art books, and the art director there, Mike Simons, and a friend of his, they would come over to my place and they’d go through my collection of art books to find images, which then they sourced and used in the magazine. And then I noticed after a while that they weren’t coming over to the house anymore, and then I realized, oh, you know, we have Google images now, and then boy I think the Internet, it’s taken over what Adbusters once had in that sensation of getting something from the inside, and also it so radically democratized making your voice heard as well as sourcing images that—I don’t know, I still collect art books, but very few now. But now we’re sort of veering off into what has the Internet killed? But it certainly—it denatured, or it took something away from Adbusters.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Another question? Who’s got a question? You, with a ball on the aisle. You want to take that one?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Is that for me? (applause) Well done, you must have done this before.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Hundreds of times.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: My biggest fear is accidentally revealing my biggest fear in public.

(laughter)

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Go on, Actors Studio, just peel it off, peel off the shell. Sean Penn, cry.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Well, you were talking earlier about running towards the light. What if there is no light? I think that’s maybe what I am afraid of the most, not necessarily live in fear of, but I do worry about it. I think we all do. What else am I afraid of? Getting sat—sitting beside the crying baby on a plane, I’m afraid of that. (laughter)

Just being alone. I was so lonely for so long and it made me creative in certain ways and it fueled a lot of my work, but you couldn’t give me a billion dollars to go back there. I’m the ripe old age of fifty-two, and I look back at life now. You know, when you pull out those little forms you get in like Men’s Health, or whatever magazine you’re reading and I am 16–21, 22 to whatever. There’s a reason that they have those ages there, they’re not arbitrary. It’s because I think scientists, by which I mean marketers, they know that human beings, at fantastically, humblingly predictable cyclical rates, go through these changes throughout their life and, for example, I don’t know who in the audience is twenty-six or twenty-seven? Hands up. Okay. It’s the worst two years of your life. (laughter)

Absolutely god-awful. Thirty is fantastic. At forty, I have this expression, everybody makes two and a half really bad decisions. You change your job, you quit your job, you go straight, you go gay, you go lesbian, you go bi, you go whatever. And then that burns itself out by around forty-six.

A weird fact, this is true—at the age that you get the most nostalgic for the music in your life is twenty-three and a half, so if you look back at what your playlist at twenty-three and a half, when you’re, you know, fifty, that’s the music you’re going to get all verklempt and teary-eyed over. For me, that probably would have been, oh God, I was sort of KROQ, so it was Depeche Mode and that sort of thing, Joy Division, New Order, and then Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys looks kind of like me, I kind of dress like him, and I kind of wanted to be a Pet Shop Boy for about five years. Can I ask you what music you get verklempt about?

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Yeah, the Psych Furs, you know “Heartbreak Beat,” I know, it’s got every cliché, it’s got the drum machine, it’s got the Bill Clinton saxophone, (laughter) it’s got every trope from that era and maybe that’s why I like it, you know, it just, you know, it sounds like it was made by a machine that didn’t care, (laughter) but I love it.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: I think it was actually Shampoo Planet, it’s like “songs about money written by machines,” was the category, and that’s where I saw the Pet Shop Boys and also the really, really icy stuff from Joy Division, New Order, that’s—I get really, really, like, it all comes back.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: It’s funny because a few years ago I saw a documentary with Billy Idol talking about punk, and he said that at one point he kind of fell out of love with writing songs because he realized that the punk aesthetic required that every song start really hard and fast, run for two and a half minutes, and then end really abruptly. That’s why I love the Flying Lizards, you know, and that’s why I write the way I write, I’m still holding on to this punk aesthetic where you start media res at full-tilt, and you run for nine pages and then you end abruptly. The punk aesthetic of starting hard, running fast, ending, you know, shapes all of my short stories.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Also Iggy Pop, sort of, like “Search and Destroy,” wham, and then it’s over. That was a lovely question.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Do you want to risk it again? Should we ask for another one, or should they mix it up a little bit?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Shouldn’t they be random, people throw balls up here and we pick one up at random.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Do you want to try that? It’s going to spill your water.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Okay.

(laughter)

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Jeff! Jeff! Jeff, save us!

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: This reminds me of an event I did with Margaret Drabble at the Hay Literary Festival.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: You would never do this to Margaret Atwood.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: How do we choose, just random? This one here, this one landed on my seat.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: They spelled my name right and your name wrong.

(laughter)

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: There’s no question on this one. What’s it? How do you feel your outlook on life has changed since your first publication? Who asked that? Okay Give them an arm.

(laughter)

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Okay. You’re right there. God, I hope I don’t flop this. Yay, I did it, Chuck!

(applause)

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: You want to take it first, how has outlook on life changed since first publication?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Well, hmm, the nice thing about being published is you get used to being published and the thing about being published is you get used to it and I’ll meet younger writers, say in their mid-twenties and they’ll say, you know, how do you get published, how do you do it? And what I say is, “The first thing you do, do anything but write and then start writing around the age of thirty or thirty-one.”

Since I began publishing, we’ve had the death of the independent, the rise of the superstore, Amazon, the death of the superstore, pirating mp3s, the Google book project, everything that’s happened, and the end result is that it’s exactly as hard or as easy to get published in 2014 as it was back in 1990. It seems to be this constant pie, or Moore’s Law or something like that, that it still, that seems to be about the rate that people get through.

I was in Reykjavik, Iceland, last August, and I learned that Reykjavik—or Iceland is the world’s most literate country and that one Icelander in ten writes a novel, which sounds really great but then you realize it only gets nine readers. (laughter) And it’s safe to put my glass back up here. And maybe what there’s just so many things to read out there, so many things to be distracted by and I think constantly fighting that urge to be distracted, which is human, I think everyone has it, that’s probably the most important thing and the hardest thing, it’s just so, it used to be so much easier to bunker myself away, it used to be so much easier to just completely hide from the universe, and there’s so many tempting things to do.

And also, I mean, I made this big decision around 2000 as well that I intellectualized it, but I did it nonetheless is that writing takes place in time and that visual artwork takes place in space, and I think the space part of my brain was like, “Doug, do something with me, please, because I’m going to die of atrophy back here,” and so I began doing visual work and I think now I’m able to partition my life up into visual and verbal, time and space, but the things which changed most, is that it, the thing that changed most, is just the fight to remain focused, the fight to find solitude is so much harder than it ever used to be, and I don’t read as much as I used to, and I don’t know if that’s just one of those things that happen naturally, but that’s kind of scaring me at the same time, so finding that quiet, that’s it. How about you? You’re two decades into this now.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: For me, not a lot has changed, because my impetus for writing was because I didn’t want to drink by myself, and being with a writers’ workshop, I got to get together with friends at least once a week and we would have a few glasses of wine and we would workshop our work, and it was a party I could go to every week that seemed to have a purpose, and I still would be going to that party, I still go to that party every Monday night, with the same people, more or less, that I’ve been meeting with since 1990. I have had no friendships that have lasted for twenty-four years where we see each other once a week at least and we’re in constant communication. And we’ve watched each other’s kids grow up. We’ve watched each other more or less grow old. And so I would keep writing, you know, just to stay part of that community that occurs around a shared passion, so it really is a social outlet, and writing is my ticket to participate in that, so that part of it is really why I still continue to write, to be part of that community of people.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: What have you done to your corrective headgear?

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: I can’t keep anything nice.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Did it blow up? Okay.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: I’m just too active.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: You had too much presweetened breakfast cereal.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: This ball says, “Doug, you’re my favorite.”

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: That’s so sweet, whoever wrote that. Well, Chuck, there might be chance to do one more segment from Worst. Person. Ever.?

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Please.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Okay, this is okay let me set this up real quick. So they’re on this island in the middle of the Pacific, and it’s Raymond, his trusty sidekick Neal, the woman who Raymond secretly lusts over, Sarah, and Elspeth, who’s a Cockney flight attendant, and they’re in this bus driving across the island and we go to the clip.

AUDIOBOOK: Twenty-nine.

“Sarah, we just passed our hotel.” (The hotel, I might add, resembled a detention facility in a cruel post-architectural world of cinderblocks and corrugated zinc sheeting. Dumpiness notwithstanding, I very much wanted to be there.)

Sarah was rubbing my head with PABA lotion.

“We’re going into town for supplies.”

“Why now? Shouldn’t we at least check in first?”

“No, I think it’s best to go now.”

The last thing I wanted was to displease Sarah, so I shut up. Sarah, Neal, Elspeth, and I were in a fifteen-seater Toyota van driven by a local. Owing to the escalating global nuclear situation, the private jet that had brought us here was forbidden to leave. Elspeth had now joined us as a prisoner of Bonriki until things cooled down. Most everyone was waiting for the heli-evacuation unit to take us to the island so that, nuclear crisis or not, we could start shooting our dreadful, dreadful, dreadful TV show.

Kiribati was basically Wake Island covered with palm trees, gray, highly flammable- looking thatched roofing, feral dogs, rusty trash barrels, and thousands of poor people smiling, though God knows why.

Neal said, “Supposedly, Kiribati will be the first country on earth to vanish with global warming. Saw that on the telly last year.”

“I can just imagine the ripple effect that news must be having at the United Nations,” I said. “Kenya and Kuwait will have to sit beside each other. Sparks will fly.” Sarah’s hands on my scalp felt heavenly, particularly when she worked the base of my skull. Such tenderness. It almost made me forget the X-ray sunlight and the stop-and-go jerking of the van on a road that suddenly became blocked by goats.

I yelled a command to the driver, “Fucking hell. Just throw rocks at them.”

“No, we must let goats do their thing.” Our driver apparently found goats sacred.

Sarah stopped her scalp rub and turned to Elspeth. “Why don’t you help me out with my shopping list. I can’t wait to see the delicious local treats this magic island has to offer.”

I was horrified. “No! My head isn’t fully lotioned!”

“Oh, Raymond, I’ll finish working on you later. Come on, Elspeth, my paper and stuff is at the back of the bus.”

Elspeth was excited. “I wonder if they sell bikinis here, I would have to shave my lady bits first. Looking a bit like a barbershop floor at the moment.”

As the women sat in the rearmost seats and bonded over shopping, Neal and I stared at the goats. “Neal,” I asked, have you ever, you know, wondered what it might be like with well, not a person?”

“You mean a goat, Ray?”

“Neal, those are your words, not mine, and I am appalled that that’s the first place your mind went, but a goat is as good a place to start as any.”

“So you are, then, thinking about goats?”

“No, no, I don’t want to fuck a goat, Neal.”

“Sheep, then?”

“Don’t be coarse. I’m trying to have an elevated conversation here.”

“So you’re wondering in a scientific sense about the physical sensation of the act.”

“Well, sort of.”

“Technically, a sheep would be better than a goat.”

“Why is that, then?”

“A sheep would take instructions from you.”

I let that sink in.

Neal asked, “Ray, you are talking about a female sheep, right?”

“No, Neal, there’s nothing wrong with fucking a male sheep, because if I did find something wrong with it, that would mean that I was insensitive to the needs of the gay sheep community. And, of course, I believe in equality and peace and freedom for everybody. Oi! Benders forever! But for the purposes of this discussion, yes, female sheep, definitely. And definitely not lambs, because that would be wrong.”

“Well, you couldn’t really just hop the fence and go at it. You’d have to establish some level of trust first.”

“Neal, I really think taking a ewe on a date is too much effort for too little payoff.”

“Like she might change her mind at the end and then you’re out ten quid for a plate full of clover and a zinc bucket of lager?”

“Neal, stop right now.”

“You’re right, probably all you’d need is a pile of alfalfa to keep the front end busy and maybe a leash to make sure it doesn’t bolt when you get to the good part.”

“That sounds about right.”

“I feel like I’m on the Discovery Channel, decoding animal intelligence like this. You bring out the best in me, Ray.”

“I’m touched. But back to my sheep. You’ve got past the first hurdles and now you’re well, ready to make the big move.”

“Wait, Ray, condom or unprotected? I don’t want to get mad cow or anything.”

“Neal, I think you should be more worried about your date. She’s only been grazing in a meadow for a few years whereas you’ve basically been the clogged bacterial centrifuge of West London since the days of Adam Ant.”

“Slight change of subject, Ray, what about all the daggy bits around the sheep’s ass? Kind of a turnoff, I’d say.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

At this point our driver lurched around to stare at us, purple of face, and then screamed at us to get out of his van.

Déjà vu.

“Sorry, mate, what are you talking about here?”

“You are unholy! I cannot have you in my van! Leave, right now!”

“What is he talking about?” Sarah called from behind us.

I was the picture of innocence. “No idea, we were just talking about our love of animals and boom, he’s lunging at Neal and me asking us to leave his van!”

Our driver escalated his screaming and began making threatening gestures at us, but Neal, with his dancer’s grace, seized the man and pushed him out the door in a flash and then leapt out after him. On the littered road’s edge, he put a chokehold on the incensed driver to the point where the man’s eyes bulged, his mouth frothed, and his oxygen supply was depleted enough to make him less of a threat. “Looks to me like we’re at a standstill,” said Neal, whereupon a motorcycle sounding like an amplified coffee grinder zoomed up from behind us at some insane speed and plowed directly into our driver, hurling him like a Muppet off into the taro shrub. The biker stopped, a young Australian hostel-goer.

“Fuck me! He’s not dead, is he?”

We all stared at the body, which seemed utterly still.

“Looks like a goner,” said Elspeth.

“No, he’s breathing,” said Sarah.

“Neal, you’re a former paramedic,” I said, “what should we do here?”

Neal crouched to do an assessment. “He’s definitely not dead, doesn’t seem to be anything broken. Let’s call the police when we get into town.”

Our Aussie friend was relieved. “You guys are the best.”

“Always happy to help a fellow traveler.”

“Good on ya! Here’s four hits of ecstasy, and if you get desperate, there’s exactly one flush toilet on this island that works. It’s in the Mormon high school building. If you act all serious and pretend to like God, you’re in, and there’s five minutes of heaven awaiting you. Cheers!”

And our fellow traveler was off.

(applause)

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Well, I think I just about offended everybody with that one.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: It’s New York. So I have lost track of time. We are at—past eight thirty and I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to end at eight thirty. Please give me a heads-up if we’re in trouble.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Twelve? Where did you get twelve from?

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Let’s say twenty. You once told me a long time ago that if a person is still practicing their art at the age of thirty-one, then he or she is only competing against his or herself. Would you talk about that?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Yeah, that is something I noticed. I went to art school and—I went to art school and throughout my twenties I began to see everyone I went to art school with get pulled away, by advertising or by doing something in film and TV locally, and I remember in my twenties always applying for things and never getting anything and I didn’t really connect all the dots until I realized that there’s thing that happens at thirty or thirty-one where “okay, I’ll do it on a job level here,” but a more personal afterwards. “We need someone to fill this job.” “Well, here’s this Coupland guy.” “How old is he?” “Twenty-eight.” “Fuck it.” Two years go by, “We need someone,” “Who’s this Coupland guy?” “How old is he?” “Thirty.” “Okay, he’s in.” Because employers know, people know that if you stick with it until thirty that it means you’re really doing it for real and it’s not something that you’re not sincere about it.

I mean, we talked about this last night a bit, I mean, in hindsight, the astonishingly stupid decisions I made, decisions based on a whim or no reason at all in my twenties, but I do think I had to go through all that to finally get to writing, which I did obliquely, but it did happen and sort of like that for you and then, like, oh, this is actually what I really do. That is something that crystallizes, gels, sets, hardwires, at thirty or thirty-one. And someone, a neuroplastic expert said once that thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three is when your brain makes its final, final hookups, which is why the rest of your life, when you ask people how old you feel in your head, everyone says about thirty-one or thirty-two, so that’s just some science behind that.

Writing—maybe bump into people who say, “Oh, I’m a writer.” “Oh, great, when do you write?” “Oh, whenever the spirit moves me.” I’m like, “Oh, God, probably not a real writer.” I think that the thing about writing is that you have to put yourself in the exact same position every day, exact same place, and nothing may come of it, but you have to be in that position in order to get something done. You know, on the best writing day ever, I’ll get maybe 2,500 words done, and it averages out to about 450. I do it in the morning. I used to be a nighttime writer, now I’m a morning writer. The thing is, if I get a thousand words done, like fuck it, the rest of the day could be a big flaming bag of shit, doesn’t matter, I got my words done. And it sort of gives me a protective coating all throughout the rest of the day. And then if it doesn’t happen, I cut myself some slack, but gotta be there to do it.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: And you had also years ago told me that you had this ritual for starting a new book that you had to go to the same booth in the same Denny’s in Las Vegas (laughter) to start from zero. Is that still the case?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: It was the International House of Pancakes, (laughter) just on the west side of I-15 facing what is now the Mandalay Bay, and it just—what are those things like lifelines, those points of energy in the earth, and there’s this magic convergence of energy, kind of like the Ghostbusters building (laughter) that takes place in that International House of Pancakes and I know the light and the time of day and the way the sun comes in at what angle and it just unlocks something in my head and now I can begin. I think that’s been five books. I haven’t been there in quite a while now because I haven’t done fiction in a long time, and this one got started while I was in England. So—

I mean, we were talking about this last night, looking at a bookshelf, books I’ve done in the last twenty years, and it kind of feels like I’m driving past a high school I used to go to long ago; it sort of feels like something that happened, that’s just over, and I’m just so much more involved in the visual art world now. If I’m not writing full time, does that make me not a writer? It’s sort of the crisis point that way for me. You know, you’ve got X amount of authentic energy and where are you going to put it?

I do find that even from the beginning, I would get interviewers asking like, “Gosh, your work’s very visual, isn’t it?” And it was never really sure if it was a put-up or a put-down or what it was and I think what they were really telling me is, “Doug, I’m not a visual thinker.” And when you’re not a visual thinker, you try to read visual writing, it’s just not going to work for you because you can’t think that way. You’re always told that adage show, don’t tell, and I think that what you have to do is you do, you have to show everything. There’s that wonderful first line, is it Amy Hempel?

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: It’s from “The Harvest,” and the line is, “The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.”

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: And it made me very sad. And I realized that’s what you have to do, you have to show people in a wonderful way and then you have to give them an emotional cue a the end of it. And then it would also meet, in the literary world, a fear of numbers, especially among men who were in the literary world, and in JPod, Microserfs, I did these things where I had like ten thousand random numbers or the first ten thousand digits of pi, and to me it was just like doing this wonderful sort of Warhol portrait of numbers, and these guys said, “like, oh my God, I can’t believe you put numbers in a book, like the moment I got out of high school I ran as far away as I could to get away from numbers and why are you putting them in books?”

And I realized that I’m a duck, and all these other people around me are, you know, going “moo,” and till finally I found this other sort of group of animals that also go “quack, quack,” which is sort of more the visual world. The magazine world as well. And you. You’re a very visual writer. But I’m wondering if you encountered that sort of, in an almost McLuhanistic sense, a sense bias, in the literary world versus any other community? Is this making sense to you?

(laughter)

Did I answer the question, which was—?

By the way, this is a beautiful room. This is one of the most beautiful. Thank you, New York Public Library, for having—

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Yes.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: —me and Chuck today.

(applause)

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Another rough segue. You broke your leg a while back. You were forced to write in a really different way. Would you talk about the physiology of that?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Okay. My dad’s a doctor, so if your dad’s a doctor, you’re not allowed to be sick or injured. And I was walking from the upper yard down to the lower yard. I slipped. And I was carrying some framed art. It’s a cliché, time slowed down, “Okay, I can either save the art or I can save myself,” so I saved the art, which I did. So it’s December 11th, and so I’m like facedown on the grass and my foot just went completely the other way, and “you’re just faking it, Doug, you’re just being—man up here, come on. I can’t really move any of my—come on.” It took me half an hour before I could pick up my cell phone and actually admit that something had gone wrong.

And I lucked out and got a really good surgeon that night and put a lot of metal in, so this leg’s all metal from about there down, and suddenly I couldn’t work in my office office anymore, and I couldn’t move properly, so I got really incredibly fast Wi-Fi installed in the house, and what happened is every room in my house became a different room. The bedroom became a work room, the dining room became a study, I started watching all my TV on laptops, the living room became like a, you know, nothing and everything shifted around and I think there’s something—what else did I say to you? Because I think there’s something I’m missing here.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: You talked about how you studied that if you wrote lying down or sedentary with your legs straight you activated a different part of your creativity, that it changed the way that you wrote.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Oh! The somatic experience of it. Absolutely. It opens some doors in your head, for lack of a better expression. I mean, one thing I can share with everyone here, sometimes at night you’ll be going to sleep and you’ll realize like your fingers are really sort of bunched up like that. Just open them up, and literally your blood pressure goes down, because your heart’s not working as hard to get blood out here, but like it gives you sort of an instant calm that you didn’t even know it was out there. I think there’s a lot of reasons writers take to their bed. I think that a very good one is that it just opens all these magic doors inside your head. Good magic doors, as opposed to bad ones like that are opened by Ouija boards or cocaine.

(laughter)

Please get off the stage, we’re running out of time.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Our host. Oh dear God. If you could fight anyone (laughter)—never got this one before—who would it be?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Me?

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Go for it.

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: Martha Stewart, (laughter) but she’d have to have like a handicap. She has to be wearing ski boots and her arms are wrapped up in blankets or something. And it’s on a hill and I’m up above. (laughter) Okay, who else could I fight fight, I’d like to fight? Gosh, I mean there are people I don’t like, but who I don’t necessarily want to get in a fight with. I can’t think of anyone except that bitch Stewart. (laughter) She’s a lovely lady, I just pulled her name out of the air. Okay. I honestly don’t think there is anyone I would like to fight. I can actually say that quite calmly. That was a nice little question, wasn’t it?

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Do you know that Doug wrote a song? And for our last melee with the balls, they’re going to play Doug’s song, so would you people near the front lend us a hand, and in heaving all of this back toward the back, and wherever you are, whatever ball you end up with, would you take it with you so that at least for a little bit the streets are like a Japanese festival?

DOUGLAS COUPLAND: I have a request—Crank it loud!

CHUCK PALAHNIUK: Okay, Jeff, lights up! How are we going to end this thing? How? How about throwing one hundred severed arms into the audience? That’s it! Thank you! Thank you, Paul! Thank you, Doug! Thank you, Library!

(applause)

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