Generation A is the thirteenth novel from Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland. It takes place in a near future, in a world in which bees have become extinct. The novel is told with a shifting-frame narrative perspective, shifting between the novel's five main protagonists. The novel mirrors the style of Coupland's first novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, which is also a framed narrative. On September 30, 2009, Generation A was announced as a finalist for The Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize by The Writer's Trust of Canada.^[1]

Synopsis[link]

Coupland's website has a synopsis of the novel:

"In the near future bees are extinct—until one autumn when five unconnected individuals, in Iowa, New Zealand, Paris, Ontario, and Sri Lanka, are stung. Immediately snatched up by ominous figures in hazmat suits, interrogated separately in neutral Ikea-like chambers, and then released as 15-minute-celebrities into a world driven almost entirely by the internet, these five unforgettable people endure a barrage of unusual and highly 21st-century circumstances. A charismatic scientist with dubious motives eventually brings the quintet together on a remote Canadian island. But their shared experience unites them in a way they could never have imagined."

— Generation A on Coupland.com^[2]

Characters[link]

Zack Lammle

Zack is the first character to be stung by a bee. He is a corn farmer in Mahaska County, Iowa. He has Attention Deficit Disorder, and a fondness for cursing and acting against the social grain. For instance, when he is stung, he is currently carving a large image of a penis and testicles into his corn field, so that it could be photographed from space.

Samantha Tolliver

Samantha is the second character to be stung. She is from Palmerston North, Wanganui, New Zealand. Her parents had recently told her that they do not believe in anything anymore, such as God and religion. When she is stung, she is creating an Earth Sandwich, where two people place two slices of bread on exactly opposite sides of the planet using GPS coordinates. (The Earth Sandwich is in reference to a May 2006 challenge issued to viewers by Internet performance artist Ze Frank.^[3]).

Julien Picard

Julien is the third character to be stung. He was at the 12th Arrondissement in Paris, France. He was an avid World of Warcraft player whose characters had recently been deleted from the gaming world without notice or cause. He is the child of European intellectuals: his father works for CERN in Geneva. His disposition to the world is similar to Zack's, but he is more withdrawn from the world, where Zack embraces it.

Diana Beaton

Diana is the fourth character to be stung. She is from North Bay, Ontario. She has Tourette's, which leads her to have many strange outbursts of profanities. She claims that her Tourette's causes her to speak the truth about people, no matter how profane the truth is. She is stung in the moment in which she leaves her church over her priest's defense of an animal abuse.

Harj Vetharanayan

Harj is the last character to be stung. He is from Trincomalee, Sri Lanka. His family was washed away in the 2004 tsunami. He is working at a call center for Abercrombie & Fitch. He had created a prank commerce site which sold "silence" MP3s, which were bogus sound files of the putative silence in celebrity rooms . The New York Times was interviewing him at the moment of his sting, from the other side of the planet.

Style[link]

The novel "mirrors the style" of Coupland's breakthrough first novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture^[2] The story is told through non-numbered chapters, just as the first was. The book is told with a shifting narrative perspective. Each chapter title announces whose perspective the rest of the chapter will be in. The book rotates in the order of Harj, Zack, Samantha, Julien, and Diana for most of the work. Some changes happen due to the plot.

The novel is also, like Generation X, a framed narrative. However, as this novel mirrors the style, the framed narrative style is also reflected. The first novel has stories in a frame, where the stories are the important part of the tale. In this novel, the stories help to bring out the characters. Throughout the novel, the importance of stories in a person's life is discussed, and in this novel, the stories are important only so much as they bringing out and expand on the character's stories.

Title[link]

The title is also a reference to Coupland's first novel, and it comes from a quote by Kurt Vonnegut. It is listed in an epigraph:

"Now you young twerps want a new name for your generation? Probably not, you just want jobs, right? Well, the media do us all such tremendous favors when they call you Generation X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. I hereby declare you Generation A, as much at the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago."

— Kurt Vonnegut

Syracuse University commencement address

May 8, 1994^[4]

References[link]

This article about a 2000s novel is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Douglas Coupland (pronounced COPE-lund)^[2] (born December 30, 1961) is a Canadian novelist. His fiction is complemented by recognized works in design and visual art arising from his early formal training. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized terms such as McJob and Generation X. He has published thirteen novels, a collection of short stories, seven non-fiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television. Coupland has been described as "...possibly the most gifted exegete of North American mass culture writing today."^[3] and "one of the great satirists of consumerism".^[4] A specific feature of Coupland's novels is their synthesis of postmodern religion, Web 2.0 technology, human sexuality, and pop culture.

Coupland lives in West Vancouver, British Columbia with his partner David Weir.^[1] He published his twelfth novel Generation A in 2009. He also released an updated version of City of Glass and a biography on Marshall McLuhan for Penguin Canada in their Extraordinary Canadians series, called Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan.^[5] He is the presenter of the 2010 Massey Lectures, and a companion novel to the lectures, Player One – What Is to Become of Us: A Novel in Five Hours. Coupland has been longlisted twice for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2006 and 2010, respectively.,^[6] was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize in 2009,^[7] and was nominated for the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 2011 for Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan.^[8][9][10]

Early life[link]

Coupland was born on December 30, 1961 at Royal Canadian Air Force base RCAF Station Baden-Soellingen (later CFB Baden-Soellingen) in Baden-Söllingen, West Germany, the second of four sons to Dr. Douglas Charles Thomas Coupland, a medical officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and homemaker C. Janet Coupland, a graduate in comparative religion from McGill University. In 1965, the Coupland family relocated to West Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where Coupland's father opened private family medical practice at the completion of his military tour.

Coupland describes his upbringing as producing a "blank slate".^[11] "My mother comes from a sour-faced family of preachers who from the 19th century to well into the 20th scoured the prairies thumping Bibles. Her parents tried to get away from that but unwittingly transmitted their values to my mother. My father's family weren't that different."^[11]

Graduating from Sentinel Secondary School in West Vancouver in 1979, Coupland went to McGill University with the intention of (like his father) studying the sciences, specifically physics.^[12] Coupland left McGill at the year's end and returned to Vancouver to attend art school.

At the Emily Carr College of Art and Design (now the Emily Carr University of Art and Design) on Granville Island in Vancouver, in Coupland's words, "I … had the best four years of my life. It's the one place I've felt truly, totally at home. It was a magic era between the hippies and the PC goon squads. Everyone talked to everyone and you could ask anybody anything."^[13] Coupland graduated from Emily Carr in 1984 with a focus on sculpture, and moved on to study at the European Design Institute in Milan, Italy and the Hokkaido College of Art and Design in Sapporo, Japan.^[13] He also completed courses in business science, fine art, and industrial design in Japan in 1986.

Established as a designer working in Tokyo, Coupland suffered a skin condition brought on by Tokyo's summer climate, and returned to Vancouver.^[13] Before leaving Japan, Coupland had sent a postcard ahead to a friend in Vancouver. The friend's husband, a magazine editor, read the postcard and offered Coupland a job writing for the magazine.^[13] Coupland began writing for magazines as a means of paying his studio bills.^[14] Reflecting on his becoming a writer, Coupland has admitted that he became one "By accident. I never wanted to be a writer. Now that I do it, there's nothing else I'd rather do."^[15]

Coupland's work regimen has been characterized as anti-slacker. He works seven days a week, with no vacations. Coupland is quoted as saying: "I've never taken a holiday. To lie on a beach someplace seems almost sinful. What's the point of being around unless you're working on something?"^[2]

[edit] Generation X to Life After God

From 1989 to 1990, Coupland lived in the Mojave Desert working on a handbook about the birth cohort that followed the baby boom.^[16] He received a $22,500 advance from St. Martin's Press to write the nonfiction handbook. Instead, Coupland wrote a novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture.^[17] It was rejected in Canada before being accepted by an American publishing house in 1991.^[18] Reflecting on the writing of his debut novel years later, Coupland said, "I remember spending my days almost dizzy with loneliness and feeling like I'd sold the family cow for three beans. I suppose it was this crippling loneliness that gave Gen X its bite. I was trying to imagine a life for myself on paper that certainly wasn't happening in reality."^[19] Not an instant success, the novel steadily increased in sales, eventually attracting a following behind its core idea of "Generation X". Over his own protestations, Coupland was dubbed the spokesperson for a generation,^[20] stating in 2006 "I was just doing what I do and people sort of stuck that on to me. It's not like I spend my days thinking that way.".^[21] Terms popularized by Coupland in the novel, including Generation X and McJob, ultimately entered the vernacular.^[22]

His second novel, Shampoo Planet, was published by Pocket Books in 1992. It focused on the generation after Generation X, the group called "Global Teens" in his first novel and now generally labeled Generation Y.^[17] Coupland permanently moved back to Vancouver soon after the novel was published. He had spent his "twenties scouring the globe thinking there had to be a better city out there, until it dawned on [him] that Vancouver is the best one going".^[23] He wrote a collection of small books, which together were compiled, after the advice of his publisher, into the book Life After God. This collection of short stories, with its focus on spirituality, initially provoked polarized reaction before eventually revealing itself as a bellwether text for the avant-garde sensibility identified by Ferdinand Mount as "Christian post-Christian".^[24]

[edit] Microserfs to All Families are Psychotic

In 1994, Coupland was working for the newly-formed magazine Wired. While there, Coupland wrote a short story about the life of the employees at Microsoft Corporation. This short work provided the inspiration for a novel, Microserfs. To research the culture that the novel depicted, Coupland had moved to Palo Alto, California and immersed himself in Silicon Valley life.^[25] By coincidence, Coupland released Microserfs in the same week that Microsoft released the Windows 95 operating system.

Coupland followed Microserfs with his first collection of non-fiction pieces, in 1996. Polaroids from the Dead is a manifold of stories and essays on diverse topics, including: Grateful Dead concerts; Harolding; Kurt Cobain's death; the visiting of a German reporter; and a comprehensive essay on Brentwood, California, written at the time of the O. J. Simpson murder case and the anniversary of Marilyn Monroe's death.

That same year Coupland toured Europe to promote Microserfs, but the high workload brought on fatigue and mental strain.^[26][27] He reportedly incorporated his experience with depression during this period into his next novel, Girlfriend in a Coma. Coupland noted that this was his last novel to be "…written as a young person, the last constructed from notebooks full of intricate observations".^[28]

In 1998, Coupland contributed the short story "Fire At The Ativan Factory" to the collection Disco 2000, and in 2000, he published Miss Wyoming.

Coupland then published his photographic paean to Vancouver, City of Glass. The book incorporates sections from Life After God and Polaroids from the Dead into a visual narrative, formed from photographs of Vancouver locations and life supplemented by stock footage mined from local newspaper archives.

Coupland's next novel, All Families Are Psychotic, tells the story of a dysfunctional family from Vancouver coming together to watch their daughter Sarah, an astronaut, launch into space.

In 2004, the dormant Saarinen-designed TWA Flight Center (now Jetblue Terminal 5) at JFK Airport briefly hosted an art exhibition called Terminal 5,^[29] curated by Rachel K. Ward^[30] and featuring the work of 18 artists^[31] including Coupland.

[edit] Souvenir of Canada to Player One

The promotional rounds for All Families are Psychotic were underway when the September 11 attacks took place. In a play called September 10 performed later at Stratford-upon-Avon by the Royal Shakespeare Company, Coupland felt that this was the last day of the 1990s, and the new century had now truly begun.^[32][33]

The first book that Coupland published after the September 11 attacks was Souvenir of Canada, which expanded his earlier City of Glass to incorporate the whole of Canada. There are two volumes in this series, which was conceived as an explanation to non-Canadians of uniquely Canadian things.

Coupland's second book in this period, Hey Nostradamus!, describes a fictitious high school shooting similar to the Columbine High School in 1999^[34] Coupland relocates the events to school in North Vancouver, Canada.

Coupland followed Hey Nostradamus! with Eleanor Rigby. Similarly to the titular original written and sung by The Beatles, the novel examines loneliness.^[35] The novel received some positive acclaim as a more mature work, a notable example being novelist Ali Smith's review of the book for the Guardian newspaper.^[19]

Using the format of City of Glass and Souvenir of Canada, Coupland released a book for the Terry Fox Foundation called Terry. It is a photographic look back on the life of Fox, the result of Coupland's exhaustive research through the Terry Fox archives, including thousands of emotional letters from Canadians written to Fox during his one-legged marathon across Canada on Highway 1.

The third work of fiction in this period, written concurrently with the non-fiction Terry,^[36] is another re-envisioning of a previous book. jPod, billed as Microserfs for the Google generation, is his first Web 2.0 novel. The text of jPod recreates the experience of a novel read online on a notebook computer. jPod was a popular success, giving rise to a CBC Television series for which Coupland wrote the script. The series lasted one season before cancellation.

Coupland's next novel, The Gum Thief, followed jPod in 2007. The Gum Thief was Coupland's first foray into the standard epistolary novel format following the 'laptop diaries'/'blog' formats of Microserfs and jPod.

Coupland published his eleventh novel, Generation A, in late 2009. In terms of style, Generation A "mirrors the structure of 1991's Generation X as it champions the act of reading and storytelling as one of the few defenses we still have against the constant bombardment of the senses in a digital world".^[37] The novel takes place in the near future, after bees have become extinct, and focuses on five people from around the globe who are connected by being stung.

Coupland's contribution for the 2010 Massey Lectures, as opposed to a standard long essay, was 50,000 word novel entitled Player One – What Is to Become of Us: A Novel in Five Hours. Coupland wrote the novel as five hour-long lectures aired on CBC Radio from Nov. 8–12, 2010.^[38] According to Coupland, the novel "...presents a wide array of modes to view the mind, the soul, the body, the future, eternity, technology, and media." and is set "In a B-list Toronto airport hotel’s cocktail lounge in August of 2010."^[39]

The lecture/novel was published in its own right on October 7, 2010.^[40][41] House of Anansi Press' advance publicity for the novel stated that "Coupland's 2010 Massey Lecture is a real-time, five-hour story set in an airport cocktail lounge during a global disaster. Five disparate people are trapped inside: Karen, a single mother waiting for her online date; Rick, the down-on-his-luck airport lounge bartender; Luke, a pastor on the run; Rachel, a cool Hitchcock blonde incapable of true human contact; and finally a mysterious voice known as Player One. Slowly, each reveals the truth about themselves while the world as they know it comes to an end. In the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut and J. G. Ballard, Coupland explores the modern crises of time, human identity, society, religion, and the afterlife. The book asks as many questions as it answers, and readers will leave the story with no doubt that we are in a new phase of existence as a species – and that there is no turning back."^[40] On September 20, 2010, Player One was announced as part of the initial longlist for the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize literary award,^[42][43][44] Coupland's second longlisting for the prize after being longlisted in 2006 with jPod.^[45] However, the book didn't make it any further than the longlist^[46] and Coupland was denied the honour a second time, with the prize being eventually won by Johanna Skibsrud for her novel The Sentimentalists (novel).^[46]

Awards and recognition[link]

Coupland received an honorary degree from the University of British Columbia on May 27, 2010.^[47] with The University of British Coumbia having announced that it has acquired Coupland's personal archives on May 20, the culmination of a project that began in 2002.^[48] The archives, which Coupland plans to continue to add to in the future, currently consist of 122 boxes and features about 30 metres of textual materials,^[49] including manuscripts, photos, visual art, fan mail, correspondence, press clippings, audio/visual material and more.^[49] One of the most notable inclusions in the collection includes the first hand-written manuscript of ‘Generation X,' scrawled on loose-leaf notebook paper and strewn with margin notes.^[48] In a statement issued on the UBC website Coupland said, “I am honoured that UBC has accepted my papers. I hope that within them, people in the future will find patterns and constellations that can’t be apparent to me or to anyone simply because they are there, and we are here...The donation process makes me feel old and yet young at the same time. I’m deeply grateful for UBC’s support and enthusiasm.”^[49]

Coupland received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Simon Fraser University in 2007.^[50] Coupland also received an honorary Doctor of Letters from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2001.^[51]

Coupland is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.^[52]

Visual arts[link]

This article or section contains a list of works that does not follow the Manual of Style for lists of works (often, though not always, due to being in reverse-chronological order) and may need cleanup.

In 2000, Coupland resumed a visual arts practice dormant since 1989. His is a post-medium practice that employs a variety of materials. A common theme in his work is a curiosity with the corrupting and seductive dimensions of pop culture and 20th century pop art, especially that of Andy Warhol. Another recurring theme is military imagery, the result of growing up in a military family at the height of the Cold War. He is represented by the Clark & Faria Gallery in Toronto. In June 2010 he announced his first efforts as a clothing designer by collaborating with Roots Canada on a collection that is a representation of classic Canadian icons. The Roots X Douglas Coupland collection was announced in The Globe and Mail and featured clothing, art installations, sculpture, custom designed art and retail spaces.

In September 2010, Coupland, working with Toronto's PLANT Architect, won the art and design contract for a new national monument in Ottawa. "The Memorial" is to be erected for the Canadian Fallen Firefighters Foundation, and will be completed in April 2012.^[53]

2010[link]

In Dialogue with Carr

Douglas Coupland, Evan Lee, Liz Magor, Marianne Nicolson

The Vancouver Art Gallery

Vancouver, BC

July 1, 2010 to January 3, 2011

Vancouver Art Gallery Website Article

Digital Orca

A steel and aluminum Public art commission

Vancouver Convention Centre

Vancouver, BC

Coupland.com Images

2009[link]

Image of Canoe Landing Park

Douglas Coupland's 'Monument to the War of 1812' (2008) Toronto

Canoe Landing Park

8 acre space adjacent to the Gardiner Expressway

Contains the Terry Fox Miracle Mile

Downtown Toronto, Ontario

Supernova

Clock Tower Public art commission

Don Mills, Ontario

Dittwald.com Article and Images

Coupland.com Images

Atelier

Gallery exhibition

Clark & Faria Gallery

Toronto, Ontario

Mixed media works

Clark & Faria Gallery Website

Coupland.com Images

Mom & Dad

Mixed media works

Gallery exhibition

Monte Clark Gallery

Vancouver, British Columbia

Monte Clark Gallery website

2008[link]

A Monument to the War of 1812

Public art commission

Toronto, Ontario

Dittwald.com Article and Images

Coupland.com Images

2007[link]

Fifty Books I Have Read More Than Once

Sculptural installation

Simon Fraser University Gallery

Burnaby, British Columbia

Simon Fraser University Gallery Website

The Penguins and Luxury Factory Number One

Clark & Faria Gallery

Toronto, Ontario

Clark & Faria Website

Coupland.com Images

2006[link]

Play Again?

The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery

St. John’s, Newfoundland

The Rooms Website

Coupland.com Images

2005[link]

Super City

An interior architectural installation exploring the excesses and programmatics of Modernity as expressed in building kits made in Western nations during the peak years of Modernism.

The Canadian Centre for Architecture

Montreal, Quebec

CCA Website

Coupland.com Images

I Like the Future and the Future Likes Me and Retranslation

Clark & Faria Gallery

Toronto, Ontario

Clark & Faria Gallery Website

Coupland.com Images

Do It

Coupland contributed to DoIT, a book edited by Hans-Ulrich Obrist

Co-published by e-flux and Revolver Press

Frankfurt, Germany

e-flux Website

2004[link]

Terminal 5

Group show

JFK Terminal 5, NY

http://www.terminalfive.com/

Canada House

The Design Exchange

Toronto, Ontario

Also travelled to: Canada House, London, England

Coupland.com Images

Also featured in the Souvenir of Canada film

Baja to Vancouver

Catalogue Essay

CCAC Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, California

Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California

Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington

The Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia

CCAC Wattis Website

2002[link]

The Canada Pictures

Photography Exhibition

Clark & Faria

Toronto, Ontario

Clark & Faria Website

Coupland.com Images

School Spirit

A book collaboration with Pierre Huyghe

Artbook.com Article

Coupland.com Article and Images

2001[link]

Spike

Sculptural installation

Monte Clark Gallery

Vancouver, British Columbia

Monte Clark Website

Coupland.com Images

Design work[link]

In the summer of 2010, Coupland, in collaboration with Roots Canada designed a well-received collection of summer streetwear for men and women, and a line of leather and non-leather accessories. The collection was sold in the avant garde clothing store Colette in Paris in September 2010.

Television[link]

In 2007 Coupland worked with the CBC to write and executive produce a television series based on his novel jPod. Its 13 one-hour episodes aired in Canada in 2007. The show was cancelled despite a major viewer-initiated campaign to save it.^[54]

Film[link]

2005 marked the release of a documentary about Coupland called Souvenir of Canada. In it, Coupland works on a grand art project about Canada, recounts his life, and muses about various aspects of Canadian identity.

2006 brought the release of Everything's Gone Green, a comedy film starring Paulo Costanzo, directed by Paul Fox, and written by Coupland. The film was produced by Radke Films and True West Films. The distributor is THINKFilm in Canada and Shoreline Entertainment elsewhere. The film, Coupland's first screenplay, won the award for best Canadian feature film at the 2006 Vancouver International Film Festival.

Upcoming works include All Families Are Psychotic^[55] and the Extinction Event miniseries.

Charity[link]

Coupland is involved with Canada's Terry Fox Foundation. In 2005, Douglas & McIntyre published Terry, Coupland's biographical collection of photos and text essays about the life of legendary one-legged Canadian athlete Terry Fox. All proceeds from the book are donated to the foundation for cancer research. Terrys format is similar to that of Coupland's City of Glass and Souvenir of Canada books. Its release coincided with the 25th anniversary of Terry Fox's 1980 Marathon of Hope.

Coupland codesigned Toronto Park, eight-hectare urban park called the Canoe Landing Park in downtown Toronto adjacent to the Gardiner Expressway. The park, opened 2009, is embedded with a one-mile run called the Terry Fox Miracle Mile. The Miracle Mile contains art from Terry.^[56]

Coupland has also raised money for the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Western Canada Wilderness Committee by participating in advertising campaigns.

Bibliography[link]

Fiction[link]

• Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991)
• Shampoo Planet (1992)
• Life After God (1994)
• Microserfs (1995)
• Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)
• "Fire At The Ativan Factory" (1998), short story featured in Disco 2000
• Miss Wyoming (2000)
• All Families Are Psychotic (2001)
• God Hates Japan (2001) (Published only in Japan, in Japanese with little English. Japanese title is 神は日本を憎んでる (Kami ha Nihon wo Nikunderu))
• Hey Nostradamus! (2003)
• Eleanor Rigby (2004)
• jPod (2006) (1st Hardcover Ed. ISBN 0-679-31424-5) (longlisted for the Giller Prize)
• The Gum Thief (2007)
• Generation A (2009) (finalist for the 2009 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize)
• Player One (2010) (Novel adapted from 2010–2011 Massey Lectures, longlisted for the Giller Prize)
• Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People (2011) (with Graham Roumieou)

Non-fiction[link]

• Polaroids from the Dead (1996)
• Lara's Book: Lara Croft and the Tomb Raider phenomenon (1998)
• City of Glass (2000) (updated version 2010)
• Souvenir of Canada (2002)
• School Spirit (2002)
• Souvenir of Canada 2 (2004)
• Terry (2005)
• Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan (2009)

Drama and screenplays[link]

• Douglas Coupland: Close Personal Friend (1996)
• September 10 (2004)
• Inside the Light (2005)
• Souvenir of Canada (2005) (writing and narration)
• Everything's Gone Green (2007)
• All Families Are Psychotic (2009)

Announced on 9 February 2006, based on the novel of the same name.

• jPod (2008) (TV series)

Premiered January 8, 2008 on CBC. Canceled on March 7, 2008. Final airing April 4, 2008.

Criticism and interpretation[link]

Essays[link]

• Dalton-Brown, Sally. "The Dialectics of Emptiness: Douglas Coupland's and Viktor Pelevin's Tales of Generation X and P." Forum for Modern Language Studies 42.3 (2006): 239–48.
• Forshaw, Mark. "Douglas Coupland: In and Out of 'Ironic Hell'." Critical Survey 12.3 (2000): 39–58.
• Katerberg, William H. "Western Myth and the End of History in the Novels of Douglas Coupland." Western American Literature 40.3 (2005): 272–99.
• McGill, Robert. "The Sublime Simulacrum: Vancouver in Douglas Coupland's Geography of Apocalypse." Essays on Canadian Writing 70 (2000): 252–76.
• Tate, Andrew. "'Now-here is My Secret': Ritual and Epiphany in Douglas Coupland's Fiction." Literature & Theology: An International Journal of Religion, Theory, and Culture 16.3 (2002): 326–38.

Books[link]

• Tate, Andrew. Douglas Coupland. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.
• Zurbrigg, Terri Susan. X = What? Douglas Coupland, Generation X, and the Politics of Postmodern Irony. VDM Verlag, 2008.

See also[link]

Novels portal

• Postmodern literature
• Marshall McLuhan

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Douglas Coupland

• Douglas Coupland's homepage
• Douglas Coupland's NY Times Blog: Time Capsules
• Douglas Coupland at the Internet Movie Database
• Douglas Coupland's entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia

Michael Moore
Moore in New York to promote his memoir Here Comes Trouble, September 2011
Born	Michael Francis Moore (1954-04-23) April 23, 1954 (age 58) Flint, Michigan, United States[1]
Alma mater	University of Michigan–Flint
Occupation	Actor, director, screenwriter, producer
Years active	1972–present[2]
Religion	Roman Catholic[3]
Spouse	Kathleen Glynn (1991–present)
Website
michaelmoore.com

Michael Francis Moore (born April 23, 1954) is an American filmmaker, author, social critic and activist.^[4] He is the director and producer of Fahrenheit 9/11, which is the highest-grossing documentary of all time.^[5] His films Bowling for Columbine and Sicko also place in the top ten highest-grossing documentaries.^[5] In September 2008, he released his first free movie on the Internet, Slacker Uprising, which documented his personal quest to encourage more Americans to vote in presidential elections.^[6] He has also written and starred in the TV shows TV Nation and The Awful Truth.

Moore criticizes globalization, large corporations, assault weapon ownership, U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton^[7] and George W. Bush, the Iraq War, the American health care system, and capitalism in his written and cinematic works.

Personal life[link]

Moore was born in Flint, Michigan,^[1] and raised in Davison, a suburb of Flint, by parents Veronica (née Wall), a secretary, and Frank Moore, an automotive assembly-line worker.^[8][9][10] At that time, the city of Flint was home to many General Motors factories, where his parents and grandfather worked. His uncle LaVerne was one of the founders of the United Automobile Workers labor union and participated in the Flint Sit-Down Strike.^[11]

Moore was brought up Catholic,^[12] attended parochial St. John's Elementary School for primary school and later attended St. Paul's Seminary in Saginaw, Michigan, for a year.^{[13][8][14][15][16]} He then attended Davison High School, where he was active in both drama and debate,^[17] graduating in 1972. As a member of the Boy Scouts of America, he achieved the rank of Eagle Scout.^[8] At the age of 18, he was elected to the Davison school board.^[18]

Since 1990, Moore has been married to producer Kathleen Glynn,^[19] with whom he has a stepdaughter named Natalie. Moore is a Catholic,^[3][20] but has said he disagrees with church teaching on subjects such as abortion^[21] and same-sex marriage.^[22]

Following the Columbine High School massacre, Moore acquired a life membership to the National Rifle Association (NRA). Moore said that he initially intended to become the NRA's president and dismantle it, but he soon dismissed the plan as too difficult.^[23][24] Observers such as Dave Kopel noted that there was no chance of that happening;^[25] authors David T. Hardy and Jason Clarke wrote about how Moore failed to discover that the NRA selects a president not by membership vote but by a vote of the board of directors.^[26]

In 2005 Time magazine named Moore one of the world's 100 most influential people.^[27] Also in 2005, Moore started the annual Traverse City Film Festival in Traverse City, Michigan.

Career[link]

After dropping out of the University of Michigan–Flint following his freshman year (where he wrote for the student newspaper The Michigan Times), Moore worked at the local Buick plant.^[28] At 22 he founded the alternative weekly magazine The Flint Voice, which soon changed its name to The Michigan Voice as it expanded to cover the entire state. In 1986, when Moore became the editor of Mother Jones, a liberal political magazine, he moved to California and The Michigan Voice was shut down.

Moore at the 66th Venice International Film Festival in 2009

After four months at Mother Jones, Moore was fired. Matt Labash of The Weekly Standard reported this was for refusing to print an article by Paul Berman that was critical of the Sandinista human rights record in Nicaragua.^[29] Moore refused to run the article, believing it to be inaccurate. "The article was flatly wrong and the worst kind of patronizing bullshit. You would scarcely know from it that the United States had been at war with Nicaragua for the last five years."^[30] Moore believes that Mother Jones fired him because of the publisher's refusal to allow him to cover a story on the GM plant closings in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. He responded by putting laid-off GM worker Ben Hamper (who was also writing for the same magazine at the time) on the magazine's cover, leading to his termination. Moore sued for wrongful dismissal, and settled out of court for $58,000, providing him with seed money for his first film, Roger & Me.^[31]

Directing/producing[link]

Roger & Me

Moore first became famous for his 1989 film, Roger & Me, a documentary about what happened to Flint, Michigan, after General Motors closed its factories and opened new ones in Mexico, where the workers were paid much less. Since then Moore has been known as a critic of the neoliberal view of globalization. "Roger" is Roger B. Smith, former CEO and president of General Motors. Harlan Jacobson, editor of Film Comment magazine, said that Moore muddled the chronology in Roger & Me to make it seem that events that took place before G.M.’s layoffs were a consequence of them. Critic Roger Ebert defended Moore's handling of the timeline as an artistic and stylistic choice that had less to do with his credibility as a filmmaker and more to do with the flexibility of film as a medium to express a satiric viewpoint.^[32]

Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint

(1992) is a short (23-minute) documentary film that was aired on PBS. It is based on the feature-length film Roger & Me (1989) by Michael Moore. The film's title refers to Rhonda Britton, a Flint, Michigan, resident featured in both the 1989 and 1992 films who sells rabbits as either pets or meat.^[33]

Canadian Bacon

In 1995, Moore released a satirical film, Canadian Bacon, which features a fictional US president (played by Alan Alda) engineering a fake war with Canada in order to boost his popularity. It is noted for containing a number of Canadian and American stereotypes, and for being Moore's only non-documentary film. The film is also one of the last featuring Canadian-born actor John Candy, and also features a number of cameos by other Canadian actors. In the film, several potential enemies for America's next great campaign are discussed by the president and his cabinet. (The scene was strongly influenced by the Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove.) The President comments that declaring war on Canada was as ridiculous as declaring war on international terrorism. His military adviser, played by Rip Torn, quickly rebuffs this idea, saying that no one would care about "... a bunch of guys driving around blowing up rent-a-cars."

The Big One

In 1997, Moore directed The Big One, which documents the tour publicizing his book Downsize This! Random Threats from an Unarmed American, in which he criticizes mass layoffs despite record corporate profits. Among others, he targets Nike for outsourcing shoe production to Indonesia.

Bowling for Columbine

Moore's 2002 film, Bowling for Columbine, probes the culture of guns and violence in the United States, taking as a starting point the Columbine High School massacre of 1999. Bowling for Columbine won the Anniversary Prize at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival^[34] and France's César Award as the Best Foreign Film. In the United States, it won the 2002 Academy Award for Documentary Feature. It also enjoyed great commercial and critical success for a film of its type and became, at the time, the highest-grossing mainstream-released documentary (a record now held by Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11).^[5] It was praised by some for illuminating a subject avoided by the mainstream media.

Fahrenheit 9/11

Fahrenheit 9/11 examines America in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, particularly the record of the Bush administration and alleged links between the families of George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden. Fahrenheit was awarded the Palme d'Or,^[35] the top honor at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival; it was the first documentary film to win the prize since 1956. Moore later announced that Fahrenheit 9/11 would not be in consideration for the 2005 Academy Award for Documentary Feature, but instead for the Academy Award for Best Picture. He stated he wanted the movie to be seen by a few million more people via a television broadcast prior to election day. According to Moore, "Academy rules forbid the airing of a documentary on television within nine months of its theatrical release", and since the November 2 election was fewer than nine months after the film's release, it would have been disqualified for the Documentary Oscar.^[36] However, Fahrenheit received no Oscar nomination for Best Picture. The title of the film alludes to the classic book Fahrenheit 451 about a future totalitarian state in which books are banned; according to the book, paper begins to burn at 451 degrees Fahrenheit. The pre-release subtitle of the film confirms the allusion: "The temperature at which freedom burns." At the box office, as of 2010 Fahrenheit 9/11 is the highest-grossing documentary of all time, taking in over US$200 million worldwide, including United States box office revenue of almost US$120 million.^[5] In February 2011, Moore sued producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein for US$2.7 million in unpaid profits from the film, claiming they used "Hollywood accounting tricks" to avoid paying him the money.^[37]

Michael Moore at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival receiving a standing ovation for Sicko

Sicko

Moore directed this film about the American health care system, focusing particularly on the managed-care and pharmaceutical industries. At least four major pharmaceutical companies — Pfizer, Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca, and GlaxoSmithKline — ordered their employees not to grant any interviews to Moore.^[38][39][40] According to Moore on a letter at his website, "roads that often surprise us and lead us to new ideas—and challenge us to reconsider the ones we began with have caused some minor delays." The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 19, 2007, receiving a lengthy standing ovation, and was released in the U.S. and Canada on June 29, 2007.^[41] The film was the subject of some controversy when it became known that Moore went to Cuba with chronically ill September 11th rescue workers to shoot parts of the film. The United States is looking into whether this violates the trade embargo. The film is currently ranked the fourth highest grossing documentary of all time^[5] and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature.^[42]

Captain Mike Across America

Moore takes a look at the politics of college students in what he calls "Bush Administration America" with this film shot during Moore's 60-city college campus tour in the months leading up to the 2004 election.^[43][44] The film was later re-edited by Moore into Slacker Uprising.

Capitalism: A Love Story

On September 23, 2009, Moore released a new movie titled Capitalism: A Love Story, which looks at the late-2000s financial crisis and the U.S. economy during the transition between the incoming Obama Administration and the outgoing Bush Administration. Addressing a press conference at its release, Moore said, "Democracy is not a spectator sport, it's a participatory event. If we don't participate in it, it ceases to be a democracy. So Obama will rise or fall based not so much on what he does but on what we do to support him."^[45]

Writing[link]

Moore has written or co-written eight non-fiction books, mostly on similar subject matter to his documentaries. Stupid White Men (2001) is ostensibly a critique of American domestic and foreign policy but, by Moore's own admission, is also "a book of political humor."^[46] Dude, Where's My Country? (2003), is an examination of the Bush family's relationships with Saudi royalty, the Bin Laden family, and the energy industry, and a call-to-action for liberals in the 2004 election. Several of his works have made bestseller lists.

Acting[link]

Moore has dabbled in acting, following a 2000 supporting role in Lucky Numbers as the cousin of Lisa Kudrow's character, who agrees to be part of the scheme concocted by John Travolta's character. He also had a cameo in his Canadian Bacon as an anti-Canada activist. In 2004, he did a cameo, as a news journalist, in The Fever, starring Vanessa Redgrave in the lead.

Television[link]

Between 1994 and 1995, he directed and hosted the BBC television series TV Nation, which followed the format of news magazine shows but covered topics they avoid. The series aired on BBC2 in the UK. The series was also aired in the US on NBC in 1994 for 9 episodes and again for 8 episodes on Fox in 1995.

His other major series was The Awful Truth, which satirized actions by big corporations and politicians. It aired on Channel 4 in the UK, and the Bravo network in the US, in 1999 and 2000. Moore won the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award in Arts and Entertainment for being the executive producer and host of The Awful Truth, where he was also described as "muckraker, author and documentary filmmaker".

Another 1999 series, Michael Moore Live, was aired in the UK only on Channel 4, though it was broadcast from New York. This show had a similar format to The Awful Truth, but also incorporated phone-ins and a live stunt each week.

Music videos[link]

Moore has directed several music videos, including two for Rage Against the Machine for songs from The Battle of Los Angeles: "Sleep Now in the Fire" and "Testify". He was threatened with arrest during the shooting of "Sleep Now in the Fire", which was filmed on Wall Street; the city of New York had denied the band permission to play there, although the band and Moore had secured a federal permit to perform.^[47]

He also directed the videos for R.E.M. single "All the Way to Reno (You're Gonna Be a Star)" in 2001 and the System of a Down song "Boom!".

Appearances in other documentaries[link]

• Moore appeared in The Drugging of Our Children,^[48] a 2005 documentary about over-prescription of psychiatric medication to children and teenagers, directed by Gary Null a proponent of Alternative Medicine. In the film Moore agrees with Gary Null that Ritalin and other similar drugs are over-prescribed, saying that they are seen as a "pacifier".
• Moore appeared on fellow Flint natives Grand Funk Railroad's edition of Behind The Music.
• Moore appeared as an off-camera interviewer in Blood in the Face, a 1991 documentary about white supremacy groups. At the center of the film is a neo-Nazi gathering in Michigan.^[49]
• Moore appeared in The Yes Men, a 2003 documentary about two men who pose as the World Trade Organization. He appears during a segment concerning working conditions in Mexico and Latin America.
• Moore briefly appears in Alex Jones's documentary Martial Law 9/11: Rise of the Police State. Jones criticises Moore for not going into more depth about the World Trade Center attacks in Fahrenheit 9/11, particularly about NORAD standing down, and for portraying George W. Bush as an unassuming frontman instead of an active conspirator in 9/11. Jones manages to ask Moore why he didn't mention NORAD standing down, and Moore swiftly answers that "it would be un-American".
• Moore was interviewed for the 2004 documentary, The Corporation. One of his highlighted quotes was: "The problem is the profit motive: for corporations, there's no such thing as 'enough'".^[50]
• Moore appeared in the 2006 documentary I'm Going to Tell You a Secret, which chronicles Madonna's 2004 Re-Invention World Tour. Moore attended her show in New York City at Madison Square Garden.

Political views[link]

Moore lampoons George W. Bush's reaction to the September 11 attacks notification

Although Moore has been noted for his liberal political activism,^[4] he rejects the label "political activist" saying such a description is redundant as a citizen of a democracy: "I and you and everyone else has to be a political activist. If we're not politically active, it ceases to be a democracy."^[51] According to John Flesher of the Associated Press, Moore is known for his "fiery left-wing populism,"^[52] and publications such as the Socialist Worker Online have hailed him as the "new Tom Paine."^[53]

Moore was a high-profile guest at both the 2004 Democratic National Convention and the 2004 Republican National Convention, chronicling his impressions in USA Today. He was criticized in a speech by Republican Senator John McCain as "a disingenuous film-maker." Moore laughed and waved as Republican attendees jeered, later chanting "four more years." Moore gestured his thumb and finger at the crowd, which translates into "loser."^[54]

During September and October 2004, Moore spoke at universities and colleges in swing states during his "Slacker Uprising Tour". The tour gave away ramen and underwear to students who promised to vote.^[55][56] One stop during the tour was Utah Valley State College. A fight for his right to speak resulted in massive public debates and a media blitz.^[57] The Utah event was chronicled in the documentary film This Divided State.^[58]

Despite having supported Ralph Nader in the 2000 presidential election, Moore urged Nader not to run in 2004 so as not to split the left vote. On Real Time with Bill Maher, Moore and Maher knelt before Nader to plead with him to stay out of the race.^[59]

Moore drew attention in 2004 when he used the term "deserter" when he introduced Retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark at a Democratic Presidential debate in New Hampshire. Noting that Clark had been a champion debater at West Point, Moore told a laughing crowd, "I know what you're thinking. I want to see that debate" between Clark and [George W.] Bush -- "the general versus the deserter." Moore said he was referring to published reports in several media outlets including The Boston Globe which had reported that "there is strong evidence that Bush performed no military service as required when he moved from Houston to Alabama to work on a U.S. Senate campaign from May to November 1972."^{[60] [61][62]}

On April 21, 2008, Moore endorsed Barack Obama for President, stating that Hillary Clinton's recent actions had been "disgusting."^[63] Moore is an active supporter of the Occupy Wall Street protest in New York City and spoke with the OWS protesters on September 26, 2011.^[64] On October 29, 2011, he spoke at the Occupy Oakland protest site to express his support. ^[65]

Published work[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Moore, Michael (1996). Downsize This! Random Threats from an Unarmed American. New York: HarperPerennial. ISBN 0-06-097733-7. 
• Moore, Michael; Glynn, Kathleen (1998). Adventures In A TV Nation. New York: HarperPerennial. ISBN 0-06-098809-6. 
• Moore, Michael (2002). Stupid White Men ...and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation!. New York: Regan Books. ISBN 0-06-039245-2. 
• Moore, Michael (2003). Dude, Where's My Country?. New York: Warner Books. ISBN 0-446-53223-1. 
• Moore, Michael (2004). Will They Ever Trust Us Again?. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-7432-7152-1. 
• Moore, Michael (2004). The Official Fahrenheit 9/11 Reader. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-7432-7292-7. 
• Moore, Michael (2008). Mike's Election Guide 2008. New York: Grand Central Publishing. ISBN 0-446-54627-5. 
• Moore, Michael (2011). Here Comes Trouble: Stories from My Life. New York: Grand Central Publishing. ISBN 0-446-53224-X. 

Filmography[link]

• Roger & Me (1989)
• Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint (1992) (TV)
• Canadian Bacon (1995)
• The Big One (1997)
• And Justice for All (1998) (TV)
• EDtv (1999) (cameo as himself)
• Lucky Numbers (2000) (as actor)
• Bowling for Columbine (2002)
• Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)
• Sicko (2007)
• Captain Mike Across America (2007)
• Slacker Uprising (2008)
• Capitalism: A Love Story (2009)

Television series[link]

• TV Nation (1994)
• The Awful Truth (1999)
• Michael Moore Live (1999)

References[link]

External links[link]

This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. (December 2010)

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Michael Moore

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Michael Moore

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Michael Moore

• Michael Moore at the Internet Movie Database
• Works by or about Michael Moore in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• The Populist: Michael Moore Can Make You Cry / New Yorker (16 February 2004)
• America's Teacher by Naomi Klein, The Nation, September 23, 2009
• A 2007 NOW on PBS interview with Michael Moore
• Michael Moore on His Life, His Films and His Activism - video interview by Democracy Now!
• Michael Moore on 2010 Midterm Elections, the Tea Party, and the Future of the Democratic Party
• In Depth interview with Moore, October 2, 2011