The annual Massey Lectures are presented by CBC and since 1961 have featured a noted Canadian academic or scholar delivering a lecture on the topic of their choice each year. This year’s lecturer is West Vancouver’s Douglas Coupland, perhaps best known for his fiction writing but also a prolific artist and designer of all sorts of things (and a fan of platonic solids, I’m told.) His Digital Orca is a beautiful and welcome addition to Vancouver’s selection of public art. Coupland and I share a Lego fetish.

I’ve never been fond of Coupland’s fiction. Girlfriend in a Coma was the first book written by Coupland I read: it was horrible. It may be as simple as us having gotten off on the wrong foot, but I tend to think of him as writing witty dialogue wrapped in bad fiction. The slavish devotion of his fans to his wildly inconsistent body of work annoys me (though slavish devotion to anything tends to do so—it’s not specific to Coupland.) I’ve enjoyed his non-fiction and am particularly fond of pointing out that his role as an unrepentant whore for Vancouver and its charms is something I’m rather fond of.

I won tickets to see the lecture though, and so I went. He’s an engaging person in no small part because he sees the world through multiple prisms—including those platonic solids—and doesn’t narrowly define himself as a writer or a painter or a designer. Our world needs more of these people, before we develop too many silos.

Posted by skooter at 7:33 PM This entry is filed under Books, Canada.
This entry is tagged: Chan Centre, Douglas Coupland, Massey Lecture, Paul Kennedy