Five things you didn’t know about Douglas Coupland, who has a cool new exhibition and a novel on the way

Five things you didn’t know about Douglas Coupland, who has a cool new exhibition and a novel on the way

Couplandia
(Image: Mark Peckmezian)

1 | He’s not a morning person
“I sleep in every single day until 11. As long as I sleep in, I will be creative. If I get up even one hour earlier, the day is a waste. When I take a morning meeting, I lose a whole day of creativity. A meeting isn’t worth that. Very little is worth that.”

2 | He’s not a face-to-face kind of guy, either
“All of the weddings I’ve been to since 2000 have been for couples who met online. Do people meet IRL anymore? I even hate talking on the phone. Phones were just this really boring tool that was required to get us through to the era of texting.”

3 | He loves the Group of Seven
“When I was a kid, I was forced to memorize the names of the Group of Seven members. The first time I saw their sketches at the AGO when I was eight, they blew my mind. The references to the Group in my new show are not at all ironic—they’re like coded messages that would be meaningless to most people outside of Canada.”

4 | He thinks writers and artists come from different worlds
“Book people comment on how visual my writing is. They say it as if it were an insult. Most literary people are clinically nonvisual. If you ask them to picture a plate of spaghetti in front of them, they simply can’t do it. Their brains aren’t wired that way. Artists, on the other hand, drink too much and do too many drugs and burn out the reading part of their brains by 25.”

5 | He’s a big fan of dumb jokes
“I love stuff like Jackass and Tosh.0. It goes right to my brain’s reptile stem. My upcoming book, Worst. Person. Ever., came about because I was tired of all the worthy, tragic, meaningful, earnest novels out there. People forget that books can be flat-out fun.”

ART
Douglas Coupland: The 21st Century Continues
Daniel Faria Gallery
to July 27