The Coupland paper is done. I now have four days to write my Race and Cinema paper, and eight to write my Tragedy paper. Two more papers to go.

I watched a few episodes of Flight of the Conchords yesterday, plus The Snowball Effect, which is one of the more creativity-inspiring documentaries I've seen. It's nice to have films to watch that give a little creative boost. I got some more writing done.

Lame entry, I know. All I can think about is handing that paper in, so I'd better go do it and move on.

I got a text from Andrea this morning. While I was lazily snoozing in bed she climbed the CN Tower steps in 34:34. That's my girl. Take THAT, global warming.

I wrote ten pages of the Coupland paper yesterday at Pratt and returned an armload of library books. Hopefully I'll get another ten or so done today so that I can wrap it up tomorrow. I'm putting a fair bit of information into it but I have to manage the flow a bit better. It's not like another paper in that it's more like a story than a series of arguments. Plot developments, not points.

Last night I watched Speed 2: Cruise Control for the first time. What an astoundingly ridiculous piece of crap film. It was painful to sit through. I kept yelling at the TV to be less stupid. Sandra Bullock is just one of those actresses that steps on my last nerve.

So it looks like a transit strike is immanent, which would really put a kink into library work. I don't know how I'd get to campus. I suppose I might have to ask Jay to drop me off at insanely early times before he heads to work. But hopefully things will get resolved and it won't come to that.

I finished transcribing the Coupland interview. I'm heading to campus today to write at least the bulk of it. As much research as I need to pull in for it, it's also heavily narrativized, so it should be fun to write. I sent him a few of the pictures I took and he responded with a nice email saying he hoped to see me many more times in the future.

I need to track down a copy of Twelve O'Clock High for my Race and Cinema essay. I'm abandoning the structure I had in place for it and doing two sets of comparisons, one on Twelve O'Clock High and The Tuskegee Airmen, the other on Stalag 17 and Hart's War. I'm going to take a look at the generic changes that occur in a WWII film when a plot concerning race is grafted on to the narrative.

I got some more writing done last night. I don't want to jinx it, but hopefully this marks the start of a new routine.

I got through an hour of the interview yesterday in about 5-6 hours. I'm hoping to have it fully transcribed by the end of the day. Tomorrow I'll start making daily trips to campus so that I can study and start putting in some real essay time. I should portion out the work I do each day the way I did with the papers I had to write last week. Thank goodness classes are over.

I got some writing done last night. I felt the need to before I went to bed. It's encouraging. I'm trying to have more faith in my ideas and explore them a bit more. I don't know what will come of it, but the main thing is I'm getting it done.

Here's a bit of advice from the man:

Scenes just tend to burn themselves out. The art scene here in Vancouver was fantastic until the year before Expo, and then Expo came in and hired everyone up. And what happens, and this is true for any art form but really for writing and visual art, is the moment you get a day job to pay for the weekends, you never go back. No one ever goes back. Ever. It’s kind of like this decision. I saw that really young, and I really made a vow to stick with it. And I learned that by the time you’re 30, if you’re still doing what you’re doing, two things happen, maybe three: All your competition falls away. Suddenly, you’re doing it, and there’s no more competition. You submit something and great, you’re in. That’s because if you’re doing it at 30 people realize you’ve stuck with it and that you’re committed to it. And the people who weren’t committed to it have fallen off. They’re now doing corporate brochures or working on whatever, the Bingo newsletter. That’s the magic year. Stick to it until 30. You’ve got two more years to go.

This was part of a response to a question about art communities. I didn't even tell him I was a writer.

I'm excited for Ottawa.

Douglas Coupland's front door looks like part of the outside wall to his house. He seemed genuinely surprised I wasn't able to find it.

In the morning I left the hostel and took a bus across the Lions Gate Bridge. It spit me out right in front of the Staples at Capilano Road and Marine Drive, the store in which The Gum Thief is largely set. I took a picture of the store, went inside, and bought a notebook and pen. Then I went to a nearby Denny's for breakfast. After the meal I walked down Marine Drive to the Park Royal mall and killed some time reading City of Glass before getting on the bus that would take me most of the way to Coupland's house. I got off a bit earlier than needed and walked the few remaining blocks up the mountain on which his house sits, buried in foliage at the end of a cul-de-sac. An oversized plastic Windex bottle in the window gave the place away instantly.

He made some coffee and gave me a tour of the place, showing me where he writes and works on his visual work. The place was a mishmash of stuff that he's worked on over the years, chaotically scattered on floors, bookcases and tabletops. He recently bought the house behind his with plans to turn it into a gallery space and guest house, and he showed me how it was being gutted, and how he had discovered a spot in the kitchen that had become his favorite place to sit and read. He showed me projects he was working on, and gave me clover from the garden that had fallen into overgrowth due to his gardener becoming pregnant and having to take time off.

We talked for about two and a half hours despite the effects of a cold he was enduring. I asked him most of the questions I had come armed with, but the conversation would often take new paths into areas I was just generally curious about. He told me a couple of things off the record, adding on one occasion that he'd never told what he was telling me to an interviewer before. I gave him a bottle of wine I'd brought. He had to leave at 5:30 to attend a retirement party for his father, so he gave me a ride back to Marine Drive where he stopped off for another bottle at a shop ("Now I only have to buy one!"). He walked me to the bus and told me to let him know when I'd be in Vancouver next so that I could check out the new house after it's finished. I told him I'd send him some pictures of the trip. We shook hands. He pointed out my Amsterdam shoulder bag, equating it with me telling him about my trip to Europe earlier.

I got back on a bus, dizzy after it all. I got off at Park Royal and walked back to the hostel - over the Lions Gate Bridge, around Stanley Park and into downtown. The bridge was extraordinarily high and it took some getting used to. I took a ton of pictures.

Crossing that bridge back into the city with the North Shore mountains at my back was one of the most significant moments I've experienced in my life thus far. This whole day has made me feel as though I've been reborn. I need to channel that feeling into something brand new.

I've got a new pen, and a new notebook. That's all I need.

Today was the first day I've been able to walk around outside without a coat in months.

To begin at the beginning: I caught the 44 bus to UBC, which is a bit of a haul from downtown Vancouver. On the bus I listened to people talk about this and that. It was strange hearing Seattle come up in conversations as a location to travel to like Toronto or Montreal. When I got to the UBC campus there was a huge party happening outdoors. Booths were setup, games were being played. There was also a stage set up for a show that was happening in the evening, and Stars came on to soundcheck a few songs. I walked around a bit and took some pictures. I was having a coffee when two people, one dressed like a penis and one like a vagina, passed by giving out free condoms. Then two MORE people passed, one dressed up like Pac-man and the other like a ghost, chasing each other.

Unfortunately I couldn't catch up with them afterwards as I had an interview to attend to. Gisele Baxter and I talked for over half an hour about Coupland, Canadian literature, Gothic literature, modern technology, and the future of the novel. She was excited to talk and I got some great material from her that should help out with my Biography paper. After the interview I walked around campus for a bit before I hopped a bus back downtown.

After dropping some stuff back at the hostel, I went for a stroll up Bute Street to the harbour and took loads of pictures. Vancouver is beautiful. Even downtown has tranquil and removed sections that appear out of nowhere. Its sidestreets travel either down or uphill, providing vistas to horizons that beg to be discovered. There are flowers EVERYWHERE. Heading north leads to a sublime view of the North Shore mountains and the cargo ships and seaplanes coming and going from the city. I walked back and had dinner at a nearby restaurant called Characters, which was a tad expensive but serves a ton of food for the price. I ate chicken souvlaki while also devouring Coupland's book on Terry Fox. I swung by a 7-11 for some chocolate and returned to the hostel exhausted, finishing the book and passing out at the late hour of 9 PM (12 AM EST).

This morning I woke up and had breakfast with Heidi at a Denny's two blocks away. She was in town for a job interview which apparently went very well. We talked for an hour or so over breakfast and parted ways. I decided to visit the Museum of Anthropology, which meant that I had to return to the UBC campus. I caught the 4 because the 44 doesn't run on the weekend. Once I was on campus I asked the bus driver for some directions, and he told me that I was lucky I was asking him because he bikes around the area just to provide answers to questions like mine. He also told me to walk AROUND the museum before I enter to check out the carvings. A man sitting on a bench by the bus door corroborated the advice, so off I went.

It was a gorgeous day with the sun full in the sky. Campus was alive and beautiful, with rows of cherry blossom trees adorning the occasional sidewalk. I've never breathed air like there is here; when you breathe, you breathe air that's coming down out of the mountains, in from the sea, and filtered through the city's greenery.

The view around the museum was fantastic, with mountain ranges stretching along the coast. The carvings turned out to be a recreation, in part by 20th century Haida artist Bill Reid, of a Haida mausoleum and burial ground with enormous totem poles and door/wall posts. The museum contained more of the like plus drawers and drawers full of artifacts from countries all over the world. I found out what Haida, Salish, Tsimshian, and Kwakiutl totem poles signify: the creatures carved into them are characters from the stories produced by the family who displays them. Only the family has the license to tell their own stories and impart their significance. Totem poles are indications of identity and place.

I left the museum and bussed back downtown to take off for Stanley Park. My intention was to cut the park into an 'S' shape, making my way up to Lions Gate Bridge. I had a bit of trouble finding a path that cut through the causeway and had to double back, but I'm glad I did, because it gave me an opportunity to see Beaver Lake. It was peaceful, covered with water lilies and silence. A group of young people sat nearby listening to their friend play guitar.

I continued towards a destination I'd been looking forward to seeing - the hollowed-out tree. Coupland has a story about how his car was stolen by teenagers and parked in the tree while he was out of town. His mother phoned him and asked him if he did it as an artistic gesture. Approaching it I noticed it had been surround by 7-foot-high blue fencing, so access to it directly was impossible. As I was taking it in a car pulled up and an older woman and middle aged man got out. She wanted a picture of the tree. We both got pictures by snapping them over the fence. I took two before my camera battery died. As they were leaving I overhead the man say that the city is tearing it down. I asked him why, and he said it was becoming a safety hazard - the top of the tree was visibly held in place by cables and slats. The tree was just too old to keep acting as a tourist attraction. I said it was too bad, and he said, "Yeah. Time takes everything away eventually." I wrote those words down on my map. A limousine pulled up and some kids dressed for a formal got out. They had wanted their pictures taken with the tree. The driver snapped them lined up with their backs to the fence, and everyone climbed back in the car and took off.

I decided I'd better call it a day as I was getting tired and the sun was starting to go down. I had one more point of interest - cherry popsicles. In his entry on Stanley Park, Coupland talks about how nice it is to walk the perimeter and grab a cherry popsicle at Lost Lagoon when all is said and done. I found a sign pointing the way. I walked through the forest, running into only the occasional person. At the end of a trail called Lovers Walk I found a view with an infinite expanse of water like the one I'd seen on Long Island five years ago, where the sea and the sky meet almost indiscernably.

I found a concession stand, ordered a cherry popsicle, and went to sit at Ferguson Point. When I was eating a plane flew by with a marriage proposal on a banner attached. I watched people playing on the beach far down below and tried to figure out which of the houses on the North Shore belonged to Coupland. Satisfied, I kept walking down the western coastline of the park. The number of people grew the closer I got to the downtown area. People sat on the beach and on massive stones on the shoreline and walked their dogs and biked and rollerbladed. All in front of an astounding view. I've never seen anything quite like it.

My last point of the day: breaking my refusal to eat fish. Sushi seems to be the meal of choice in this town because it comes in so fresh. I looked up some restaurants in the area and settled on Urban Sushi at Hornby and Dunsmuir. When I got to the restaurant it was closed, so I wandered around looking for a substitute. I finally chose Tsunami Sushi on Robson. They sat me at a bar in front of a little river on which boats of food passed by. You could take stuff at will, but since I've only eaten sushi twice in my life before I ordered off the menu with a list of food Coupland recommended in City of Glass and ate while reading Life After God. Reading Coupland in this city makes me feel like a total tourist. It was all delicious. I had to spy on the people next to me to figure out how to mix the wasabi and soy sauce, and my first attempt made my eyeballs pop out, but I got the hang of it.

I've spent a fair bit of money on meals, but it's been worth it. I mean, my diet typically consists of cereal, soup and bread, so it's nice to eat differently for a change. Tomorrow I'm heading north through Stanley Park and over the Lions Gate Bridge to North Van. I have one more attraction in particular that I want to check out: the Staples at which Coupland set his last novel. From there it's interview time.

I have a lot to talk with him about. More than I thought, given the experiences I've had in the last couple of days. I'm back at the hostel now and as exhausted as I was yesterday, if not more so. Time to hit the sack.

April is here. Finally. March felt shorter than February, so at least things are picking up speed.

Coupland sent me his home address, and I'm officially meeting with him on Sunday the 13th. From now until then I'm going to have to put some worthy questions together. This weekend I have a conference paper and a presentation to work on, so it will have to come after I finish those. I was up late working on a Tragedy response because even though I had tons of time to do it during the day outside of reading the essays, I apparently can't write until my back is against the wall. I'm the kind of student who shouldn't be cornered.

Yesterday was a busy day, as I had to deliver the two presentations on Hejinian and Coupland, both of which involved the use of my laptop and speakers, which I had to drag around all day. I'm glad to have them done, I'm just hoping I did an all right job on them.

I'm taking today off to spend time with Andrea. We're currently lying in bed at a Holiday Inn on Lombard Street. She's asleep and looks peaceful and beautiful. We had dinner at C'est What and walked around in the rain.

It's been a long day and I can't sleep.

My motivation hit a brick wall yesterday. I watched a couple of Coupland interviews and took some notes, but did little else. I made a batch of vegetarian chili, watched Speed and stayed up late watching David Cross stand-up videos on YouTube.

I have to get on the workhorse today. I'm meeting Matt at 7 for drinks, so I should try to get a healthy bit of work done, because I know I'm not going to be feeling it tomorrow.

I still think that Terry Lee Hale's "Dead is Dead" is one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard.

I got a lot of work done on preliminary research for my Race and Cinema essay, and I should be able to hand in the prospectus this week (a week early). It will be nice not having to worry about it when Andrea's in town. And it actually seems like it will be an interesting essay to write - I'm going to look at representations of African-Americans in WWII on film, so I'll be looking at old propaganda films and then examining the gap between the war and narrativized accounts of how they were actually treated.

I bought a bunch of Coupland books I didn't have previously: Souvenir of Canada, Terry, and City of Glass, which I've been reading obsessively to get an idea of what to expect in Vancouver. I ran across a video online of Coupland giving what he announced as the last reading he'll ever give back in October (it's right here). At the end of the clip he says, "That part of my life is over." It makes me wonder what part of his life he views as beginning.

I woke up at 7 this morning, which is kind of neat, though I'll probably need a nap sooner than later. I'm hitting Canadian Tire for a new mattress today, and I'm also picking up a digital recorder to use for my Biography interviews. I'm going to ask Linda Hutcheon for one, as well as perhaps a prof at Carleton who has put Coupland on his syllabus in the past. I've heard from Coupland a couple of times since the first email and we're trying to hammer out the specifics of time and place for the interview.

I've been getting some good marks lately, which of course makes my opinion about the future feel like a yo-yo upswing. I really need to get to work on the papers and presentations I have to do, especially considering that I may be heading to Vancouver for one of the few remaining weekends I have.

Yesterday I sent a cheque to Ash for the room I'm subletting over the summer in Ottawa. Everything seems pretty official at this point. Less than two months to go.

Hi David.

Thank you for your interest and I'm sure we can work out something. I
don't do phone interviews and email interviews feel like the worst
sort of homework assignment so ...we could do something in person.
I'm based out of Vancouver but travel frequently, so things would have
to be scheduled in advance. Life is always busy, so I can't say that
one time is better than another. Your call.
Give me a shout any time at this email address,
Doug

So I didn't dream it. Good.

Yesterday I read Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, a pretty violent and emotional book that seems almost ripped from space and time given its hesitance to identify where and when the events are taking place. I need to plow through Othello today and get some shorter essays read. My parents' shower is being re-grouted so I have to take a bath. Thankfully they have one that shoots jetstreams.

I made it out to Chumleigh's and picked up a copy of Hot Fuzz along with Pure's Feverish and a Matthew Jay single. After dinner I went out for a drink with my siblings at Mexicali Rosa's for some hangout time. My brother told me this huge plan he has to "financially stabilize a country" by the time he's in his 60's. He has some big ideas, which is good for a young guy like him to have. He just needs to apply himself and finally take the step to go to school.

I stayed up late finishing off Coetzee while watching Offbeat Cinema, which was screening The Wild Ride with Jack Nicholson. I finished the book a little after 3:30 and couldn't bring myself to stay up and see how the movie ended, though I imagine there was probably a car crash and hep language.

I spent the entire bus ride (with two seats to myself) to Peterborough reading The Gum Thief over again, since it's been awhile since I last picked it up. Coupland's writing style is still among my favorites. His latest book admires the idea that people deserve a second look before they can be considered understood or even really seen in the first place. We all remain so relatively invisible to one another, lumped into categories based on our appearances and social positions. Meanwhile there's so much going on inside everyone. It's a fascinating contradiction.

I just emailed him, asking for an interview. I'm already nervous as shit. In any event I have to go with the flow of what comes of it, if for nothing else than for the sake of my mark in Biography.

It snowed heavily in Peterborough. I have a hankering to check out Chumleigh's. We'll see if I can slog my way down there. I do have a fair amount to read this weekend, including work by Coetzee, and a Shakespeare play I had to rescue from the boxes of stuff in my parents' basement. Every time I visit my dad announces his plans for spring cleaning. There are decades worth of junk in this place that would make a nice addition to someone else's junk pile.

Last night my folks and I watched Judgement at Nuremberg with Spencer Tracy and a slew of other stars. Really well directed and didn't drag at all in its three-hour length. There's a fascinating scene in which Marlene Dietrich and Tracy are walking through the streets of Nuremberg and a band of men are singing "Lily Marleen," a song that Dietrich made popular. She lightly sings a couple of bars herself but otherwise translates its meaning into something Tracy can understand. It's a wonderfully scripted scene.

I have Douglas Coupland's email address. It's surprisingly plain and straightforward. I googled it and it isn't posted anywhere on the Internet. I've been informed that he'd be interested in talking to me after Professor Sullivan pitched the PhD thesis angle. Now it's a matter of drafting a formal letter that I can send to him and his agent to hopefully set up a time and mode of interview.

No wonder I can't sleep.

My analysis on Knud Rasmussen is due at 6 PM today and I still have to watch the bloody film. It's a scene analysis, though, which typically writes quickly. I just have to make sure I put more of me in it. That's my new strategy for the semester. No more summaries. Me me me. You want my opinion, you've got it.

To work.

Brad Renfro died, which really is too bad. I'm most familiar with his role in Ghost World, in which he plays an angsty convenience store clerk named Josh who's at the constant mercy of Enid and Rebecca's whims and demands. He was only 25 but had been through pretty rough experiences with drugs and alcohol by the sounds of it.

I had a good day at school yesterday. I spoke up lots in class and involved myself in the material. I also brought up Coupland in my biography class and volunteered to go to Vancouver at some point during the semester if I could secure an interview with him. That would definitely be something.

Amusingly enough, my friend Marco is looking at Atom Egoyan for the course, and I spotted Egoyan on Bloor Street a couple of hours before class. I had to resist the urge to turn around and tackle him, shouting at him for contact information, insisting it wasn't for me personally.

Marks are starting to come in, but I have yet to pick up any papers. I'm nervous. If I didn't do well it might cast a pallor over this semester. Marks won't officially be posted online until a week from today because the people at U of T are sadists.

Since I returned from Europe I've been waking up under my own power at 7 AM, including today, though I chose to sleep in until 9. I have the feeling I won't be able to sustain this pattern.

WHAT I'M IN FOR (PART ONE)

Day one back at U of T is in the can. My first class on Tragedy in African and American Literature under Professor Quayson has a pretty intimidating workload: 2-4 page responses due every week, a presentation, a thesis proposal, a paper, plus a 40-item annotated bibliography. He also made it clear that he can't stand lateness or laziness. I should probably just live at the library like I was originally planning.

The Avant-Garde: Theory and Practice with Professor (call me Tim) Yu sounds amazing. I can already tell his lecture style is comprehensive and that the material is going to be thought-provoking (with even some Canadian content thrown in - Steve McCaffrey's Seven Pages Missing). Five 250-word response papers, presentation, paper, a 5-7 item annotated bibliography, plus a participation mark.

The Pragmatics of Writing Bibliography is helmed by Professor Sullivan, who knows many famous people and their relatives. She's also written biographies for Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Smart and Gwendolyn MacEwen. It's my smallest course by way of population (eight people) and according to Sullivan will be run like a workshop. Fine by me. Because I was late in registering for the course, I missed the email instructing the students to have a subject picked for a research project to work on. I'd really like to do Coupland in preparation for my PhD but it might be tricky given that we're ideally supposed to choose a subject whose records are kept in Toronto. I'll think on it. The course has a short reading list (four texts) and further requires a project bibliography, a paper and a presentation of research.

In between classes I went to the Varsity and saw Atonement, which blew me away with its technique of telling a story visually before gradually setting it to words. It brought to mind the atmospheric elements of Picnic at Hanging Rock and the brutal scope of Cold Mountain.

Tonight from 6-8 I have my final course in Race and Cinema. After that I'll pack a tent and make my way for Robarts.

Essay done. Let's get at that new semester:

Tuesday

11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
THE DIALOGICAL IMAGINATION: TRAGEDY IN AFRICAN AND AMERICAN LITERATURE

1:00 – 3:00 p.m.
THE AVANT-GARDE: THEORY AND PRACTICE

6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
THE PRAGMATICS OF WRITING BIOGRAPHY

Wednesday

6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
RACE AND CINEMA

Tuesdays seem to have the potential to feel pretty crushing. However, classes are an hour shorter than they are at Carleton. I do recall having one 9-hour day in second year undergrad, though I also recall opting to watch the last three-hour block on TV.

I watched Reality Bites last night, a pretty crazy film in the sense that it features a group of very talented actors screaming and crying about shit that really isn't that important. My early twenties wasn't that long ago. I suppose I was kind of cuckoo in a similar way, and I'm sure if I could go back and watch myself I'd have to suppress the urge to give my younger self a slap. The script is kind of brainless in certain areas but there's something about the movie I have an affection for. I have a memory of watching it on cable really late one night and getting caught up in how it glamourizes slackerhood.

I never really felt a part of Generation X, though I was born at the tail end of its supposed wave. Gen X'ers were always people I kind of looked up to. Now they're all entering or soon to be entering their mid-life crises. I started reading Coupland's latest novel, and it features a character who has definitely reached the point where he realizes that life isn't suddenly going to end at 32. Of course, he's in his early 40's when he makes this discovery. Strange generation.

Speaking of Coupland, I ran into Professor Hutcheon on campus yesterday. She's still open to reading my research proposal. I'll have to use one of these five-day weekends to pull it up and remind myself of what, exactly, I proposed.

To class. I hope I get to read some novels this term.