A dapper-looking Douglas Coupland is interviewed on The New York Times’ book blog about his next book (“a new novel set in the near future when bees are extinct”), his thoughts on the web and reference librarians, and the authors shelved next to him on bookstore shelves.

(Read the comments to be reminded that hell hath no fury like a reference librarian scorned.)

Preliminary reviews of CBC TV’s jPod are in, and so far critical reception of the new hour-long comedy-drama series – based on the novel by Douglas Coupland – is decidedly mixed.

The only wholeheartedly favourable review is by Toronto Star critic Vinay Menon, who says the series’ premiere episode, which airs tonight at 9 pm, left him “craving” the second. At the other end of the spectrum is fusty National Post columnist Robert Cushman, who confesses his befuddlement regarding the series’ title (“You might guess that a jPod would be the next thing up from an iPod. Guess again.”) and offers a wholesale rejection of its premise, which unites a rag-tag group of eccentric video game producers on the basis of a random computer glitch. As Cushman puts it:

I mean, by my simple arithmetic the show’s co-workers, employees of a huge Vancouver company called Neotronic Arts, have been herded now for seven years, time enough for even the most intransigent organization to have acknowledged that its computer had bungled and to have done something to put it right.

In the past, the CBC’s attempts to appeal to the under-30 demographic have often been disastrous (Freestyle, here’s looking at you), so producers are clearly looking to the series for big things. If it catches on, it could benefit Canadian publishing as well, by directing TV viewers to Coupland’s novels and even promoting an image of CanLit as urban and contemporary – a view that’s not exactly widespread.

That trickle-down effect might be too much to hope for, however, if an interview with actor Alan Thicke is anything to go by. Thicke, who is most famous for playing Jason Seaver on Growing Pains and has a supporting role on jPod, says that he hasn’t read the book and isn’t planning to either. “Nothing against Douglas – I don’t read books,” he tells the Post.

The final three YouTube video trailers for Douglas Coupland’s new novel, The Gum Thief, were released last week. The series has been attracting steady traffic since the campaign started a month ago.

CBC.ca reports:

[Coupland’s publisher] Random House worked with marketer Crush Toronto to produce the nine viral shorts, which they hope will attract people to Coupland who don’t usually read fiction.

The most popular videos, which have collectively logged over 3,000 views, are the ones based on Glove Pond, the novel-within-the-novel at the heart of The Gum Thief; they feature Coupland deadpanning over an animated collage of late 1970s-style advertisements for cigarettes and scotch (excerpts from the novel are cleverly worked in as ad copy). The result is surprisingly stylish, casual, and hip, and oh so Couplandian.

The irony, of course, is that Coupland’s viral campaign is itself embedded with ads – whether intentionally or not – for Staples, the office supply superstore in which the novel is set. Three of the videos are filmed in the aisles of an anonymous Staples outlet, while two others feature stop-motion animation using thousands of small “s” staples – what a marketer might call subliminal metonymy.

Whether the real-life Staples is privy to – or paying for – any of this is yet unclear, but Coupland could take a cue from author Jim Munroe, who in 2002 invoiced real-life brands lampooned in his novel Everyone in Silico for (admittedly unwanted) product placements.

Winner of this week’s clever design sweepstakes comes to us from Britain. It’s this’s TankBooks project, in which several classic novellas and stories are being released in cigarette-style packages. (Thanks to the design site Veer for the link.) The titles include Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, all “packaged in flip-top cartons with silver foil wrapping and sealed in cellophane.”

TankBooks pay homage to this monumentally successful piece of packaging design by employing it in the service of great literature. Cigarette packs are iconic objects, familiar, tried and tested, and over time Tankbooks will become iconic objects in their own right.

As noted by Torontoist earlier this week in a post about Douglas Coupland’s latest art project, Penguin founder Allen Lane initially wanted his firm’s now-famous paperback line to be sold next to cigarettes.

Douglas Coupland is opening an art exhibit, aptly named The Penguins, in Toronto tomorrow, which features collages he has created with old covers of Penguin paperbacks. The show is the first of several he is planning that examine the “relationship between books and visual culture,” according to an enthusiastic post on the Torontoist.

The new show takes moldy, dusty and yellowed mass-produced Penguin paperbacks, and attempts to imbue them with the sense of vitality and energy that they once possessed. In 1935, The Penguins were famously successful on all levels: they were academically revered and founder Allen Lane wanted the books sold alongside cigarettes, at the same price.

….

Coupland is a visual writer who excels at many arts; the myth says that he hasn’t mastered any one form. Bollocks! Artist/poet William Blake had the same image problem back in the eighteenth century.

Drawing parallels with William Blake is heading into high altitudes, but photos of a few of the works shown on the Torontoist site and Coupland’s own do look pretty cool. Maybe not as avant-garde as the pages of Generation X that he “hand-chewed” and formed into a wasps’ nest, but still pretty cool.

The CBC has officially announced that it is turning Douglas Coupland’s novel JPod into a 13-part TV series. Written by Coupland and directed by Mike Clattenburg of Trailer Park Boys fame, the show is slated to air on CBC in January 2008. The series, like the book, will follow the wackily postmodern lives of a group of video-game designers. Its pilot was shot back in November 2006, and most of its stars are Canadian, including some young starlets and the erstwhile Growing Pains Seaver patriarch, Alan Thicke.

The Globe and Mail’s John Doyle wrote last week about his visit to the pilot’s Vancouver set, where he claimed to be befuddled by the kooky goings-on.

I ask Thicke what kind of comedy he’s involved with here. How would he describe it? “This comedy is avant-garde,” he says emphatically. “It’s like Weeds or Arrested Development. It’s family fun gone bad.”

Next I ask J.B. Sugar, who is an executive producer (along with his father, Larry Sugar) and a co-writer of the series with Coupland. “I’d call it smart comedy,” Sugar says. “Dark comedy, maybe, but ‘dramedy’ is the best word.”

I’m still at a bit of a loss, but some of what’s happening around me is definitely weird. In Coupland’s book, mind you, a lot of the fun is in the text – wacky e-mails and slogans or gibberish printed in wildly different typefaces. How will that be translated to a TV series, I ask Sugar. “Very abstract cutaways will be used. Some visual, some just text.”

By way of an introduction to a fairly gushing Washington Post review [registration required] of David Adams Richards’ most recent novel, The Friends of Meager Fortune, reviewer Ron Charles asks a question that many Canadian authors, editors, and agents have likely been asking themselves for a long time now:

Why do Canadian writers get so little respect south of the border? Unless they’re caught writing “color” as “colour” or “center” as “centre,” you’d think they could waltz into the unsuspecting arms of American book buyers. But the tendency to dismiss them is so strong that not long ago an American publisher told me she was stripping all mention of a novelist’s Canadian identity from her publicity material in hopes of increasing the writer’s chances.

Yes, of course, there are exceptions: Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro can always get in. But most Americans probably think Michael Ondaatje is British (try selling “The Canadian Patient”); although Douglas Coupland lives in Vancouver, he says he’s often introduced at book events as German. Meanwhile, Canadian treasures such as Guy Vanderhaeghe, Frances Itani and Alistair MacLeod garner so little attention here that they’d be lucky to get arrested. And the most shameful American blind spot of all may be for David Adams Richards, who keeps piling up awards in Toronto but can’t find a stable publisher in New York.

Fair enough, though we’re sure there are many, many American writers who pile up the awards but can’t get a New York editor on the phone, either.

(And now we can’t get the image of Guy Vanderhaeghe, Frances Itani, and Alistair MacLeod together in a holding cell somewhere over the border….)

Read Q&Q’s review of The Friends of Meager Fortune here.

When trying to expand a personal library or find a few books for the winter months, lists help narrow down the endless possibilities. But, as Lev Grossman points out in an article for TIME, there are inherent problems with creating “a best of” list. “Literature is the realm of the ineffable and the unquantifiable; lists are the realm of menus and laundry and rotisserie baseball,” he writes. Grossman actually calls literary lists “an obscenity” but even he could not resist J. Peder Zane’s book, The Top 10.

Zane asked 125 prominent authors, from Douglas Coupland to Norman Mailer, for their personal top 10 lists of favourite books. Zane’s book includes the individual lists as well as the ultimate top 10, made up of the most frequently mentioned works from the authors’ lists combined. While The Top 10 will not help narrow down the choices for reading, Quillblog agrees with Grossman that the results are bound to be interesting.

Curious about the final count? Here’s the top, top 10 list:

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
9. The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
10. Middlemarch by George Eliot

Douglas Coupland can add celebrity endorser to his list of roles. The Vancouver author, screenwriter, artist, and all-around Renaissance dude is one of the five “extraordinary people” endorsing Rogers’ Blackberry Pearl.

Not only does the product’s website feature a still of one of these phones with a shot of Coupland on its screen (how deliciously meta) but by clicking on it, you can discover all of the exciting things he does with his new toy, and at what time he does them. For even more Coupland-Blackberry fun, watch a video in which he extols the product’s virtues and tells us that the Blackberry is a part of the future finally feeling like the future that was promised by sci-fi — “I mean, just the fact that I can get e-mail in a parking lot is sexy,” he tells us.

In addition to perusing Coupland’s technological, company-approved itinerary, you can also take a look at a posting on flickr photo sharing titled, “WTF douglas coupland!?” that features, in addition to a shot of a two-page magazine ad of Coupland, Blackberry in hand, a thread of outraged fans bemoaning his corporate stint.

(Thanks for the tip, Bookninja.com.)

Related links:
To see Douglas Coupland’s Blackberry, visit this website, then click the “LIFE” button.
The magazine ad and flickr conversation are here

A story in The Toronto Star asks whether contemporary Canadian literature is or isn’t “anti-urban and anti-modern in spirit, and inimical to experimental writers” – like Douglas Coupland, who sparked the debate with an online rant he penned for an article on New York Times Select, an online service available only by subscription. Coupland charged that CanLit “is when the Canadian government pays you to write about life in small towns and/or the immigrant experience.”

The Star’s publishing reporter Judy Stoffman writes that Coupland “blamed entrenched, aging authors (none named) who suck up all the attention. The piece also takes aim at the system of government grants, supposedly limited to those who ‘follow CanLit’s guidelines.’ (Coupland has never received Canada Council money.)”

Publisher Patrick Crean of Thomas Allen & Son and Melanie Rutledge, head of the Canada Council writing and publishing section, argue in Stoffman’s piece that CanLit is edgy and that emerging writers are funded and published. But Toronto author Andrew Pyper, who has received grants from the council and also sat on a peer jury, agreed with Coupland up to a point. “We have done a very good job of creating a brand, a tone of fiction about distinctive Canadian topics,” he says. “But now, on the occasion of a new century, it might be useful to expand that brand, if not explode it altogether. Where I would part with Coupland is the blaming of the granting bodies.”

Quillblog reserves judgment until we can ask Alice Munro what she thinks about all this.

Related links:
Read The Toronto Star story here.

Douglas Coupland is out promoting jPod, and among the media coverage is this reader Q&A on Britain’s Telegraph site. The Vancouver author gets whimsical now and then: asked how he’d like to be remembered, he says, “He had the power to obliterate Earth with the push of a single button, and yet he chose to exercise mercy and decided not to.” But he’s also serious and thoughtful. When one reader asks about his monologue “September 10, 2001,” which posits a pill that could take people to a world where 9/11 never happened, he says, “I wonder what 2006 would be like if the hijackers had screwed up and nothing had come of the 9/11 flights. I think the world we’d be inhabiting would be a false paradise. That world might, in its own way, be far worse than the one we inhabit now. So, no, I wouldn’t take the pill.”

(Thanks to Bookninja.com for the link.)

Related links:
Click here for the Coupland Q&A
Click here for a Q&Q Coupland profile from January/February 2006

A few months ago, Douglas Coupland popped up in the news when it was reported that he was planning to incorporate “the world’s biggest toboggan run” into the plans for a park that he and an architect were designing for Concord CityPlace, a downtown Toronto development. Well, now that the plans are a bit closer to fruition, it seems that the massive toboggan run is a no-go. Susan Kirwin of the National Post writes: “There will definitely be a place for tobogganing, Mr. [Alan] Vihant [vice-president of development for CityPlace] said, though Mr. Coupland’s earlier vision of ‘the world’s biggest toboggan run’ might not happen.” Instead, the primary feature of the new eight-acre park will be a one-mile running track devoted to the memory of Terry Fox.

Related links:
Click here for the National Post article