[BRIEF NOTE] More on Coupland

I rediscovered Ryan Bigge's 2000 essay "What Else Can I Say? Everyone Is Gay" recently.

I've always found something rather peculiar -- queer even -- about the ruminations of Douglas Coupland. It was shortly after Microserfs was released that a nagging, indescribable unease started buzzing about my cranium. There was something, well, wrong with his fiction -- the literary equivalent of watching a slightly out of focus film.

It was only after reading Girlfriend in a Coma that I pinpointed my problem with Doug's oeuvre. None of his heterosexual relationships rang true for me. In any of his novels.

There are a limited number of explanations for this perceived shortcoming.

Door Number One: I'm an idiot unfit to breathe the same brilliant air as Sir Doug.
Door Number Two: Doug is a bad writer, despite the big advances he commands.
Door Number Three: Doug has had limited experience in the romantic world, a contingency which has been accurately reflected in his writing.
Door Number Four: Doug has violated the first commandment of fiction: Write about what you know.

Bigge's 2001 review of All Families Are Psychotic goes into somewhat more detail.

[K]icking the irony habit maybe impossible for Coupland. A few years ago, Oliver Bennett, writing for London's The Independent, pondered the popularity of irony and sarcasm during the 1990s. Bennett namechecked the fiction of Coupland and the ironic detachment within. The same article noted that "[T]he ironic attitude as we know it today probably started as a Masonic code among like-minded people -- often gay, and bound up in camp -- to differentiate themselves from lumpy, literal straights."

As Bigge notes quite correctly, the question of Douglas Coupland's sexual orientation is largely irrelevant to his novels. When I first read Microserfs, the question of sexual orientation came up rarely, and always in connection to Microserfs' larger theme of the need to be fulfilled personally, particular after long periods of self-denial. Even so, footnotes are fun.

[NON BLOG] Unexpected Visit

Dad came to Toronto Saturday night, following the unfortunate but expected death of a relative.

We spent Sunday afternoon together, brunch at the Coach House and then walking down Yonge towards the Eaton Centre.

It was odd to see Dad in the places I've grown familiar with.

[GNXP] New Post Up: Dutch Migration Figures

I'm afraid that my most recent post on GNXP, "The allochtonen are leaving" wasn't very original, merely a publicization of Silt 3.0's "Witamy!". Said worthy blogger noted that, yes, a hundred thousand people half left the Netherlands in the previous year, but half of them were ethnically non-Dutch. Which, considering that at most a tenth of the Netherlands' population is non-Dutch, and that most of the incoming immigrants were Europeans, undermines the thesis of the Islamization of the Netherlands rather dramatically.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] On American Imperia

piratehead's post about Le Tigre got me thinking about my reaction to Le Tigre's song "New Kicks" (downloadable in mp3 format here).

The music remains compelling, and so long as I don't listen to the lyrics Le Tigre's sampled anti-war speeches are fun.

( The Lyrics. )

Reading them, I cannot help but be reminded by their terribly blinkered banality. "We need freedom in this nation"? The United States has issues, but it has rather fewer issues than most comparable global hegemons, aspirant or otherwise. "This is what democracy sounds like"? Democracy sounds like a lot of things. "We will not sell out. We will not back down. We will not compromise. We will go forward until Peace is on the World Agenda." Ah, but a peace deprived of any moral content: I am reminded, insidiously, of Marcel Déat's "Mourir pour Danzig?".

I'm somewhat surprised to announce that I have to admit some qualified support for certain recent American foreign-policy initiatives. I profoundly disapprove of the bungled lead-up to the Iraq war--there could have been fewer gratuitous insults, there could have been better planning, there could have been stronger justifications--but if the Ba'athist regime is overthrown and if (perhaps a big if) conditions for Iraqis continue to improve, I won't have cause to complain. I've read my Kanan Makiya; I know what Iraq's Ba'athist regime did.

Similarly, missile defense. While I admit to a male sci-fi geek's fascination with the idea of vast arrays of orbiting weapons, the boost-phase intercept technologies currently being mooted--anti-missiles which would intercept and destroy missiles soon after their launch, not in space or immediately before their arrival--seem viable. The actual systems being developed, rather less so at our current state of technology. Deterrence worked, barely and tenuously, in a Cold War marked by two major nuclear-weapons blocs. In a more multipolar world where nuclear-weapons technology is broadly dispersed and deterrence cannot work nearly as easily as it did before, anti-missile technologies are a good thing. It would be nice if these worked, and especially nice if the United States made all of these technologies public domain, and I do think Canada was within its sovereign rights to opt out. These caveats aside, though.

Are we heading towards an American imperium?* Perhaps, and if it's a well-functioning American imperium--one that's permeable to outside influences, one that's responsible towards the world--I wouldn't mind altogether, particularly if the alternative was anarchy. I don't trust the United States to be so competent, though; I think there's a serious risk of a dysfunctional American world empire. If, as I wrote earlier, the United States did something completely stupid like attack Iran preemptively--or worse, invade Iran--then the world will pay the price. Dysfunctional imperia and failing imperia always end in torrents of blood, cf. the various imperial states of Eurasia in the early 20th century.

Here's hoping.

* Myself, I have to say that my favoured future history would involve the United States joining the Post-Eurasian Union, following the then-European Union's previous expansions into Eurasia, North Africa, and South America, sometime in the mid-to-late 21st century after gentle and sustainable growth and modernization and democratization worldwide.