Agent Palmer

Of all things Geek. I am…

Spoiler Free Review

Reading Player One Post-Pandemic Challenges Its ‘New Normal’ Narrative

What happens when one of the most inventive novelists of contemporary modern literature writes about the future in the context of new ideas and their future repercussions in a five-chapter book, each representing one hour? In this case, you get Player One: What Is to Become of Us (The CBC Massey Lectures), which was created for the 2010 lectures.  “Five disparate people are trapped inside an airport cocktail lounge during a global disaster: Karen, a single mother waiting for her…

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A Perfect Pairing of Extraordinary Canadians, McLuhan and Coupland

Feb. 29, 2024
In: Media, The Written Word
A Perfect Pairing of Extraordinary Canadians, McLuhan and Coupland

On at least three different occasions, I have picked up my parents’ hand-me down paperback of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media and I have not gotten past page nine or ten yet. So I was happy to get a biography of the man and a cliffnotes of his career from of one of my favorite contemporary authors, Douglas Coupland.

Coupland was selected to write about Marshall McLuhan for the series Extraordinary Canadians. Now that I know more about McLuhan, at least more than I knew from friend Professor Sara Netzley and my parents, I now see the wisdom of series editor John Ralston Saul in pairing him with Coupland.

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School Spirit, Like the Yearbooks that Inspired it, is a Neat Narrative Time Capsule

Jun. 8, 2023
In: Media, The Written Word

Time capsules aren’t often great at relevance, but this book as “a construct amassed from American High School Yearbooks” by Pierre Huyghe and Douglas Coupland is a time capsule that endures.

School Spirit is “an excursion through the soul of a dead and disembodied student lost inside the memories and infrastructure of a California High School.” That’s the premise, but as explained in the book, Kelly, our dearly departed guide, can visit other high schools.

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Spoiler Free Review

Spoiler Free Douglas Coupland The Gum Thief

The Gum Thief Wears the Rose-Colored Glasses of Nostalgia Well

Roger is not where he wants to be, working at Staples well past the age where that would have been noble. Bethany is Roger’s much younger co-worker who discovers that he’s a writer, or at least he’s attempting to be. What follows is a collection of letters and emails written by the characters that move the story along revealing the world as we know it.

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