Non-Retrievable Memory

"God only knows how many trillions of memories are stored inside us-memories we’ll never retrieve simply because we don’t have a device that allows us to browse them properly."

- Douglas Coupland The Gum Thief. Random House, pg 193.

Stories Knit Everything Together

"How can we be alive and not wonder about stories we use to knit together this place we call the world? Without stories, our universe is merely rocks and clouds and lava and blackness. It's a village scraped raw by warm waters leaving not a trace of what existed before."

- Douglas Coupland. Generation A pg 1

Nothing is Random

"Identity. I go by the Tootsie theory; that if you concoct a convincing on-line meta-personality on the Net, then that personality really IS you. With so few things around nowadays to loan a person identity, the palette of identities you create for yourself in the vacuum of the Net—your menu of alternative “you’s” – actually IS you. Or an isotope of you. Or a photocopy of you."

- Douglas Coupland Microserfs pg 327

Externalized Memory

"The one thing that differentiates human beings from all other creatures on Earth is the externalization of subjective memory – first through notches in trees, then through cave paintings, then through the written word and now, through databases of almost otherworldly storage and retrieval power."

- Coupland, Douglas. Microserfs. HarperCollins Books: Toronto, 1995. pg 359

We Remember Everything!

“Their extraordinary and consistent detail, which was evoked each time the cortex was stimulated, and exceeded anything which could be recalled by memory, suggested to Panfield that the brain retained an almost perfect record of every lifetime’s experience.”
- Oliver Sacks. The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Other Clinical Tales. HarperCollins: New York, 1985. pg 137

This reminds me of another quote from Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs.

“Karla believes that human beings remember everything. “All stimulation generates a memory – and these memories have to go somewhere. Our bodies are essentially diskettes,” she says.”

Okay, so if any of this is true, I think my diskettes have been erased or something. My memory stinks. I don’t know why but it just does. I’d like to believe that the memories are there somewhere. I think they’d have to be. Accessing them might be the real problem. Maybe there really is something to this idea.

Online Persona

“Identity. I go by the Tootsie theory; that if you concoct a convincing on-line meta-personality on the Net, then that personality really IS you. With so few things around nowadays to loan a person identity, the palette of identities you create for yourself in the vacuum of the Net—your menu of alternative “you’s” – actually IS you. Or an isotope of you. Or a photocopy of you.”
- Douglas Coupland. Microserfs. HarperCollins Books: Toronto, 1995. pg 327

Nothing is Random

“Ethan said . . . that he didn’t believe in randomness . . . He said he’d prove it tonight . . .

We drove up to Redwood City and played electronic darts at a bodega there . . . Karla, Ethan, and I. Ethan and I grew up in suburbia, and we’re both pretty good dart players (those nutty rumpus rooms). Karla’s never played darts before tonight”

Anyway, it was three darts per person, per round. Ethan put in four quarters and selected a four player round. We asked him why, and he said, “You’ll see”

Karla went first, me second, Ethan third, and then for the forth round we had what Ethan called, the ‘Random Round’ where instead of any of us trying, we’d each huck a dart standing on one foot, gulping a beer, throw it backwards . . . as silly as possible. Ministry of Silly Walks.

Needless to say, the Random Round won every single game, and always by a minimum of 100 points. It was scary.

Ethan said randomness is a useful shorthand for describing a pattern that’s bigger than anything we can hold in our minds. Letting go of randomness is one of the hardest decisions a person can make.

Ethan!”
- Douglas Coupland. Microserfs. HarperCollins Books: Toronto, 1995. pg 326-327

Finding is More Important that Memory

“There’s one thing computing teaches you, and that’s that there’s no point to remembering everything. Being able to find things is what’s important.”

- Douglas Coupland. Microserfs. HarperCollins Books: Toronto, 1995. pg 303

Finding is More Important that Memory

“There’s one thing computing teaches you, and that’s that there’s no point to remembering everything. Being able to find things is what’s important.”
- Douglas Coupland. Microserfs. HarperCollins Books: Toronto, 1995. pg 303

Externalized Memory

“We’ve reached a critical mass point where the amount of memory we have externalized in books and databases (to name but a few sources) now exceeds the amount of memory contained within our collective biological bodies. In other words, there’s more memory “out there” than exists inside “all of us.” We’ve peripheralized our essence.”
- Coupland, Douglas. Microserfs. HarperCollins Books: Toronto, 1995. pg 253

Have a Life

“Maybe thinking you’re supposed to ‘have a life’ is a stupid way of buying into an untenable 1950s narrative of what life’s *supposed* to be.”
- Coupland, Douglas. Microserfs. HarperCollins Books: Toronto, 1995. pg 187

No Life

“You never heard about people “not having lives” until about five years ago, just when all of the ‘80s technologies really penetrated our lives.”
- Coupland, Douglas. Microserfs. HarperCollins Books: Toronto, 1995. pg 164

Coupland has a way with words. His characters can say things in regular conversation that just say so much about our own reality. This is just one of those shining gems that I have found in his novels.

Illusion of Authorship

“With interactivity, one tries to give the “illusion of authorship” to people who couldn’t otherwise author.

Thought: maybe the need to be told stories is like the need to have sex. If you want to hear a story, you want to hear a story – you want to be passive and sit back around the fire and listen. You don’t want to write the story yourself.”
- Coupland, Douglas. Microserfs. HarperCollins Books: Toronto, 1995. pg 140

Annoying!

“I agree with Susan that Ethan is annoying, but it’s hard to peg exactly why – there are all these little things that he does that just add up to ANNOYING.”
- Coupland, Douglas. Microserfs. HarperCollins Books: Toronto, 1995. pg 147

I bet we all know people like this in our lives. People that are just annoying and it is hard to peg why. You know what I find annoying? J-pod was cancelled by the CBC last week. We finally get a uniquely Canadian Drama based on a novel by an excellent writer and it only lasts a season. Too bad.

Stories End

“Narratives (stories) traditionally come to a definite end (unlike life); that’s why we like movies and, literature – for that sense of closure – because they end.”
- Coupland, Douglas. Microserfs. HarperCollins Books: Toronto, 1995. pg 139

Secret Desires

“I remembered something Antonella from Nintendo once told me about her job at a day-care center, about storytelling to kids – about how stories the children liked best were the ones in which the characters fled their old planets amid great explosions, leaving everything behind them to start a new world.

And then I remembered this book-writing program my mom told me about from someone in her library. The big deal in book writing is to quickly establish at the very beginning what it is that the characters want

But I think that the books I really enjoy are the ones in which the characters realize, only in the end, what it was that they secretly wanted all along, but never even knew. And maybe this is what life is really like.”

- Coupland, Douglas. Microserfs. HarperCollins Books: Toronto, 1995. pg 102

Our Bodies are Diskdrives

“Karla believes that human beings remember everything. “All stimulation generates a memory – and these memories have to go somewhere. Our bodies are essentially diskettes,” she says.” - Coupland, Douglas. Microserfs. HarperCollins Books: Toronto, 1995. pg 92

Douglas Coupland is a brilliant writer. It’s strange how I discovered him. I had heard of him prior to this book but I had never read anything by him. Then one day when I was at the library with some kids, one of them spun around the bookrack with a lot of force. This book fell to the ground.

I had wanted to find a good novel to read. I picked up the book from the floor and looked at it. I flipped through it and it seemed strange and unique. I couldn’t put it back on the shelf. I knew that I had to sign it out since it had quite literally fallen into my lap.

I love this book. I have collected hundreds of great thoughts from it. The story revolves around a group of people who work at Microsoft. I know every little about computer programming and this wouldn’t have been a book I normally would have read. But it was a great character driven drama.