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and then a few weeks later I was doing a reading at
the University of Iowa and they were driving through
and heckled me from the back and it was great fun.
They’d just done this chocolate rating system on Canadian
chocolate bars (essentially identical to England’s
– Kit Kat, Aero… ) and they gave the bars really low
ratings, which sucked because have you ever tried
US chocolate? Hork! They had just come back from
Devil’s Tower monument (Close Encounters Of The
Third Kind) where, after they finished a chocolate bar,
they tossed it out to the prairie dogs. If the dogs ate it,
the bar got an extra point. If they wouldn’t eat it, the bar
lost a point.
I decided that I had to defend my nation’s chocolate’s
honour, so I bought about 12 US bars at the Circle-K
Mart and then we went to my hotel room and had a
Tasting Session. I’d take a bite of a bar, make comments,
spit it out into a waste paper basket and take
a drink of water and move on to the next bar. I described
the Three Musketeers bar as having a definite
log-in-the-toilet aspect. They printed this in the chart
in their magazine and the company that makes Three
Musketeers bars went ballistic and pulled their ads and
the magazine folded shortly thereafter. Whew! What a
long story. So, hi.
Americans are obsessed with putting peanut butter
in virtually every chocolate bar – why? It smells
like dog doo.
You have to watch it because Americans go nuts if
you slander their chocolate. They really do. I guess it’s
because it’s such a gratifying signal that goes in early
and deep into the child’s mind.
I wasn’t quite sure about this email interview
business. I had this vision of you sitting there with
stock answers ready to paste in…
Not at all. That would be a fax interview (which this
is not) or an interview with Duran Duran (or rather, their
people). My large problem with interviews (and I do
have many problems) is that my brain won’t allow me
to do serial interviews. Once a question’s been asked,
then my brain rebels against having to answer the same
question again. This makes me appear grouchy. I’m
hoping the WWW will allay some of this repetition.
I’m always amazed at actors and how they can charmingly
spew forth studio agendas. But then that’s what
they do for a living – they’re actors.
Did you travel a lot when younger?
Probably too much. I lived in too many places in
the 1980s (in no order: Vancouver, Toronto, Sapporo,
Tokyo, Milan, Los Angeles, Montreal, Stuttgart).Then
in my 30s I visited too many cities with work but was
frustrated because I’d ‘be’ in a city just aching to tour
around, but instead I was stuck in a hotel room. I don’t
know how sports teams don’t go mad travelling around
as much as they do. I suppose it’s okay because they’ve
plenty of company.
BUY Douglas Coupland books online from and
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