the 2010 Massey Lectures

This past weekend the Globe & Mail offered its readers a preview of the 2010 Massey Lecture series. Giving the lectures this year is Douglas Coupland, the Canadian writer whose novels (Generation X, Microserfs, All Families are Psychotic, etc.) are full of pop culture trivia and (used to be full of) zeitgeist. Last year, Coupland authored a book on media prophet Marshall MacLuhan for Penguin's "Extraordinary Canadians" series. Before I graduated from high school and became an English major, Douglas Coupland was my favourite author. I even had some of the marginal slogans from Generation X ("nostalgia is a weapon," for example) made into stickers and proudly displayed them on my furniture. Our breakup was tough and I haven't had much success with him since. Coupland's lectures take the form of a short novel and are entitled Player One. What is to Become of Us? The series begins tonight in Vancouver.

Here's the winter biking essay I submitted to the Globe three months ago. Always a little weird reading something you've written a while back. At least, the comments on the website are very, very amusing. I'm sensing a little hostility.

with fruit surcharg'd

First things first: the date's been set for my essay in the Globe and Mail. On February 20th I have to buy my own copy. That's right. It's completely pro-bono. Not even a free issue. I don't know why they call it "Facts & Arguments," anyway. None of the featured essays I've read argue anything other than the worth of reading a few linked anecdotes. No, I'm not bitter. I'm over-joyed.

I'm currently in the middle of writing a paper on the relationship between Satanic pride and the surveillance in Milton's Paradise Lost. Shame and paranoia overtake the happy couple after their notorious ingestion, which at first ignites their eyes and loins. Visual stimulation alone is out of step with the Garden of Eden's utility and perverts the pro-creative impulse that ties each object to the image of its Maker. The flipside of pornography, it turns out, is the feared surveillence of God, whose previously celebrated omniscience is reduced to a pair of eyes that gaze like Satan: the post-lapsarian God, for Adam and Eve, is detached from the world (how else can he maintain perfection) and ego-centric (no wonder no one likes him).

Writing a review of Animal Collective's latest is my reward for getting the paper finished and sliding it under the door of my prof. I've totally cut myself off from Merriweather Post-Pavillion until then. It's far too infectious. "My Girls" keeps pummeling you and my attention span is fragile enough already. Until then, here's a nice piece by Simon Reynolds (over at blissblog) on the recently inhabited space of mid-mainstream popularity that AC have achieved with MPP. Deserved accolation, I'd say.

And now, back to work.