Hello Lacan!

Hello Lacan! Welcome to reading two excerpts from Douglas Copeland’s second novel. And you! Yeah, you! I hope you enjoy it. I did.

“You’re the sun,” I yelled to Anna-Louise, “and I’m Earth. The pumpkins and peas are the relative sizes of the two bodies. And the distance between us is the relative distance.”

“This game is so male,” Anna Louise shouted back. “What happens next?”

“I don’t know. Shine. Go supernova. Be a black hole.”

Anna-Louise picked up her pumpkin, carried it against her chest, and huffed like a locomotive over to where I stood with my little green pea sitting on the dry gray dirt. She then threw the pumpkin down on the pea, squishing the pea and crushing the pumpkin.

“Tyler,” she said to me, scrapping seeds from within the shell, putting them into her down-vest pockets for later roasting and planting, “name me one other possible way this game could have ended. Just one.”

- – – – – -

Pocketing the man’s cash, I absentmindedly lower my hand onto Lennon’s star, heated all morning, its brass like a stove element from having baked in the sun. I sear my palm and the flare of pain is like a spike.

I lift this hand to the sky, idiotically waving it in the wind. Strangers in passing cars wave back. I then race my scorched palm up to my tongue, close my eyes, lick my wound and kneel under the noon sun. In my ears I hear a noise, and this noise is the color of the sun.

- Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet, 1993

The first excerpt on the future, or rather the lack of it, always seem apt to kick off new beginnings – hence the first post for this blog. The second excerpt’s narrative levels of self-awareness, is what I guess my writings aim for.

I am now reading Coupland’s third book “Life After God” and his highly conscientious writing about life – and life after anything – makes it as hard it is to put down as it is to finish. Kudos, Mr Coupland.

Tagged as: Douglas Coupland, Literature