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| Hearsay: |
Douglas Coupland has taken the stuffing out of the pillow of CanLit. Perhaps it was replaced with pudding, I’m not sure. But he wrote an article for an NYT subscription-only online source (so probably only about 100 people read it) saying that the grant system in Canada sucks and that old writers are taking up too much of the limited resources.
Coupland describes Canadian literature as being at a dangerous moment right now, as the younger generation is set to break out.
“There is a grimness around CanLit — the same sort of grimness that occurs when beautiful young adults are forbidden to leave home and are forced to tend to aging and dying family members, when they are forbidden to lead their own lives,” he wrote in the article on New York Times Select, an online service available only by subscription.
After the article was published, he reportedly stuffed a sock in his grandmother’s mouth and forced her into a questionably-run private nursing home.
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August 28th, 2006 at 3:42 pm
kudos to coupland for shit-disturbing. He’s right: the water’s much too calm in here.
I’ve depended on grants and sat on juries, but I still pretty much agree with him. Even though I know everyone in the system works on good faith – which I didn’t beleive before`my experience.
August 28th, 2006 at 7:18 pm
If the water is calm here, I’m not sure Douglas Coupland is
the antidote. Nevertheless, there’s not going to be much
agitation in the water as long as the majority of booksellers
in Canada are ringing up toys, stemware, yoga mats, candles, etc.
August 29th, 2006 at 6:15 pm
don’t be ridiculous. don’t blame the timidity of our writers on the retail system.
September 1st, 2006 at 10:49 am
Copeland is just upset because he’s gone almost completely bald. That can make a man crazy. Look at Dick Cheney.
September 7th, 2006 at 6:27 pm
Personally, I find that Douglas Coupland always writes about the same topic/type of character/location… so who exactly has made Canlit tale and boring other than himself?
September 7th, 2006 at 6:27 pm
*Stale, not tale!
September 8th, 2006 at 7:45 am
The fonking baby boomers, of course. Canadian fiction is bunged up by a generation that is well past its prime but won’t die and won’t retire. Instead, they linger like the smell of rancid cooking fat, churning out memoir after memoir of small-town childhood in the 60s, moody novels about flinty Maritime women whose dreams have perished and long-winded tales of middle-aged couples too alienated to have sex but too lame to do anything about it. Without role models whose experience and preoccupations even remotely resemble their own, what greatness can the country’s young writers hope to attain except by weak emulation?