An All Too Common Occurance: The Accessibility of a High School Shooting as Subject Matter

Douglas Coupland’s decision to use a high school shooting as a central idea in Hey Nostradamus! is genius. This tragic, previously foreign and shocking concept has become a cultural reference, one that is understood and recognized. Similarly, “Chick flicks” (or lit!) sprung from the likes of Pride and Prejudice, and what once must have been a little known concept has formed its own niche as a fictional genre. High school shooting is now just as familiar; Columbine has expanded into a well-known tragedy. Like “chick flicks”, where you don’t have to see the movie to know that boy meets girl, there’s a conflict, and they get together at the end, you know immediately from the mention of “high school shooting” in the novel’s description that a handful of alienated teenagers decide to get revenge and make a point by massacring their classmates. This familiarity, the way high school shootings are now globally recognized, makes Coupland’s decision to use this theme as a vessel for the messages he is trying to get across a brilliant one. Yes, it’s pretty sickening how this scenario is now internationally identified, not only itself as a whole, but its individual parts as well: estranged students, their reaction to their isolation, their destruction- but that’s what makes this topic so perfect for Coupland’s cause. He has chosen a perfect medium to appeal to the widest spectrum of people, to pique the interest of the general public, in the way that a compilation of essays with the same purpose couldn’t. By making the high school shooting a central aspect, he can almost guarantee the general public’s interest- a massacre in their own backyard? Looks interesting…
Once he’s captured interest on a large scale, he can easily get his messages across; the need for open minds, the call for reducing cynicism, and increasing doubt. By choosing a fictional high school shooting to play on reader’s emotions, and giving them something they can relate to and recognize, Coupland displays his views perfectly, and he has chosen the ideal method to do so.

Technology More Harm Than Good?!

By reading All Tomorrow's Parties by William Gibson we get a little insight into our possible future. This made me think about whether technology is all good and beneficial. Of course we would not be able to do half the research the we do and have the amount of knowledge that we possess but it can also cause problems.

In the novel Rei Toei is created as being the perfect woman. She is stunningly beautiful and sweet. Men fall in love with her even though they know that she is unattainable. But this is the problem because although she exemplifies this perfection she is not real. She is simply a series of digital images. What good is it creating something that is so perfect that is it impossible in the real world. Being in the presence of such perfection will make everything else seem inadequate. Nothing that is real will ever been good enough. No other woman could ever live up to the same standards as Rei Toei.

What good is it having this creation when it will just make the real world more difficult. Wrapping ourselves in a digital world is not a good idea because its not real. This form of technology definitely has a negative aspect because it prevents us from living what is real because real is hard. It allows us to take an easy way out because we don't have to face the hardships that we are surrounded by.

Another harmful part of technology is presented in a 2006 movie called Idiocrasy with Luke Wilson. This movie shows the world 500 years into the future. Although the movie is quite ridiculous is shows the effects of technology on human intelligence. There are outstanding machines and programs that are invented but as a consequence no one can think for themselves. Machines can do anything and everything so there is no need to even use the brain. As obscure as this thought may sound it is not that unrealistic.

Already we are creating things that prevent us from using our full mental capacity. Things such as spell check and calculators minimize the amount of work we have to do. This technology makes things faster and simpler but i already notice that i cannot spell well and i cannot do mental math. Then again why would i even bother if i have something that can do it for me? These things are minimal but the more creative that we get with technology the less work we will have to do. Therefore the technology that William Gibson is so wrapped up in may cause end up causing us quite the amount of harm.

All Tomorrow's Parties: The Not-Too-Distant Future?

William Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties is about a futuristic world, but one that is really not too far into the future. The new technologies described in it, the dystopic society where capitalism and consumerism have gone to the extreme, and the merging of various cultures into one are all a little foreign to us, yes, but still foreseeable. This makes the novel realistic, for it is not hard to imagine such a world.

There are numerous examples in the novel of the combining of cultures, such as "Dirty is God"(Gibson 67), the restaurant that serves Mexican food while playing Japanese music. This is simply an extension of our current "global village" idea, of bringing the world closer together. The Internet is supposed to do this; it gives us access to news and information from around the world, allows us to chat and communicate with people from distant countries, and serves as a universal database, where anyone with a set-up can access the same things as anyone else.


Ironically, what was meant to bring people closer together has in many ways alienated us further from each other. People spend hours alone in a dark room staring at a computer screen instead of interacting with "real" people. We can send e-mails instead of seeing others in person, or even instead of hearing their voice over the phone. This cold alienation is evident in Gibson's novel, in the dystopic society he depicts. The world he describes seems very detached and cold. It is a world based even more on capitalism, consumerism and technology than our world today, but it is not so far exaggerated that we cannot fathom such a place existing. The Lucky Dragon convenience stores, for example, which are the same worldwide, are only a slight exaggeration of our 7-11's and other globalized companies.

Even the major advancements in nanotechnology in the novel are not inconceivable. In last Monday's Vancouver Sun, the headline on front page article read, "Welcome to the world of nanotechnology." The story is about advancement in the science being made at a new facility in Alberta. "It's reasonable to say it's the next technological revolution," one of the physicists says in the article, adding that it could take as little as ten to forty years. This is not referring to the exact advancements Gibson describes, of course, but the idea of nanotechnology creating major changes, and soon, is evident.


It seems that Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties shows us a highly possible future. His "tomorrow" could come sooner than we think.

Playing Into the Sterotype

William Gibson has taken the easy way out with All Tomorrow’s Parties. He has played perfectly into the stereotypical science fiction novel, which must have been simple, techno geek that he is. So, he likes technology—we could probably go so far as to say that he’s obsessed with it. So why then, is All Tomorrow’s Parties written with a obsessively pessimistic outlook on this technology that he supposedly loves and respects? If he loves technology, where does he get this dystopia of what we are going to become from? While he is playing into this stereotypical sci-fi genre, he’s taking the simple route, the one where humanity falls into chaos. When he created Rei Toei, he played on the innate desire of humanity for perfection, but in doing so, he unintentionally implied that humanity in its natural state, with its imperfections, is useless. And, while we are in pursuit of this perfection, we are destroying ourselves. Gibson isn’t challenging himself by stepping off the beaten path and finding the potential happy balance between nature and technology. We don’t need another sinister, chaotic portrayal of where the world is headed, with technology at the helm. What does it do for us, make us feel depressed when we read a very feasible scenario for our planet? That’s how I felt when I read this novel. What’s the point? Instead, lets see a scenario where there is a natural balance between the preoccupation with achieving perfection, and the appreciation of things that aren’t perfect, but are instead original and beautiful that way. Show us how to achieve that, a feasible utopia, and then I will be impressed. I don’t want an unoriginal novel, full of unoriginal, copied gadgets; I want something new, something inspiring- I want something more.

Hey Nostradamus! and the Capacity for Evil

"I believe that what separates humanity from everything else in this world - spaghetti, binder paper, deep-sea creatures, edelweiss and Mount McKinley - is that humanity alone has the capacity at any given moment to commit all possible sins" (Coupland 3).

The opening sentence of Douglas Coupland's Hey Nostradamus! sets up an important theme: the capacity we all have for evil. Everyone has the ability to commit violence, as we see many times throughout the novel. In the school shooting, a group of students in the cafeteria kill one of the gunmen by laying a table flat on him and jumping up and down, crushing him to death. Jason, who, as Cheryl says, is generally "gentle" and "forgiving" (p.28), throws a rock at the head of one of the gunmen, killing him. Heather gets so frustrated and angry at the psychic, Allison, that she says, "I'm ready for murder" (p.184). Barb wants so badly to have a baby with Jason that, when a man in Las Vegas seems to get in the way, she murders him.

These people are not psychopaths or serial killers; they are average, "normal" people. And yet there is this darkness that comes out of them when they are pushed to the brink. As Cheryl says, "We're all equally on the brink of all sins" (p.34). We all have the potential to commit violent, savage acts at any given moment, because of the underlying darkness that exists within us all.

Coupland, however, is not saying that all of humanity is evil. We must realize that darkness is there, for otherwise we are being naive. But the fact that we all share this trait of always being just one step away from evil, this "capacity for slipping at any moment into great sin and eternal darkness" (p.33), makes us the same. It makes us equal.

This quotation from Chery sums up this topic nicely:

...the sun may burn brightly, and the faces
of children may be plump and achingly sweet,
but in the air we breathe, in the water we
drink and in the food we share, there will
always be darkness in this worl d.

(p. 42)

There will always be darkness in the world, for there will always be this darkness in us.

Is Religion Being Taken Too Literally?

Religion is a big aspect in the lives of many people. Since I was raised a Catholic, and spent nearly 13 years of my life at a Catholic school, religion is definitely a part of my life. But after reading Hey Nostradamus I realised that sometimes people take religion to literally. The view of religion is beginning to become a fundamentalist view. Once someone has this view they start to believe that only their beliefs are the correct ones and that everyone else is bound to hell. They also begin to look down upon people who are not religious. These traits are not good ones to have and they are far from religious. The effect of taking religion to this drastic literal level actually accomplishes the opposite of what is intended.

The character Reg from Hey Nostradamus is a prime example of taking religion to a negative level. Reg wants everyone around him to be religious, not only in the way they are but in the way he wants them to be. He shuns people that do not follow his ideal type of person. Therefore the only person he did not shun is his eldest son Kent, because everyone else does not fit into his ideal mold. He is unbelievably stubborn and close minded. By taking religion to his level, Reg is left alone and hated by everyone. It is not till the end of the book that he realises how wrong he is. In realising this he does not loose his sense of faith he simply develops a deeper understanding of compassion, understanding and forgiveness, which are basically aspects of religion.

Having a character like Reg helps Douglas Coupland inflict more doubt into people because it shows the audience the negative affects of a fundamentalist view. It is very important that Coupland does inflict doubt because religion is not meant to be taken that literally. Religion is ultimately a guideline on how to live our lives as good people. When taken too literally, like with Reg, the outcome is not positive. The more doubt that can be inflicted on people the less fundamentalist views there will be and the world has a potential being filled with more open minded accepting people. Yes, this does sound cheesy, but a chain effect will happen and it could possibly become the case.

Why I don't like Poetry

Poetry, I don’t get it! I don’t get it and really, I don’t think I ever will. I came to this conclusion reading select poems from Margaret Avison’s collection of poems and I’m alright with this. I’m okay with not spending my time delving into the intricacies of one person’s take on a simple yellow hydrant like in her poem “Cement Worker on a Hot Day”. In actuality, that type of poetry goes against what I think language is about. I think that language is a tool, to get meaning across to other people, not an end-point in and of itself; to marvel and confuse other people. There is a place for it in the world, like all art, but just not in my world.

I think that’s what poetry really is, art. It is language that is taken beyond its utilitarian function as a tool and gone beyond that to become its own entity, to become the end instead of the means to an end. I think that to really understand a poem one has to know who is writing it and why they’re writing it; the context. Because we don’t usually have this information readily available this makes poetry a rather inefficient way of communicating.

As long as people keep this in mind, that poetry is a form of art, we can enjoy it for what it is. If one goes too far, however, and takes it too seriously then we have lost the purpose of the art.