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But SOC 2 does contain two of my favorite essays, both more than just a little sentimental. One concerns Terry Fox, a young man in the early 1980s who, having lost a leg to cancer, attempted a run across the country (effectively jogging the equivalent of a marathon every day for four months straight) to draw attention to and raise money for cancer. The other, which ends the book, involves a young Coupland, his siblings, and some baby geese that need nurturing. Only the hardest of hearts will be unmoved.

So as I did with Degrassi, I turn back to how I began this column, and once again ask “Wherefore nostalgia?” Coupland’s childhood was not my childhood. I don’t have grandiose notions of finding a Manifest Destiny by carving out a piece of Canada’s rugged terrain. And yet, Coupland’s prose evokes the heart of the universal with its laser-pointed specificity about his childhood and his geography, conversely allowing me to place myself as the protagonist in his first-person accounts, and feel as if I am re-experiencing them. The books are not even a decade old and yet I rent them religiously from the library and feel as if I have been reading them forever.

As I have written this, my mind keep returning to a pair of images from Francois Girard’s 1993 film Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (which is this week’s viewing recommendation; if you only know The Simpsons parody, see what inspired it). An unconventional biopic on the Canadian classical pianist, it begins and ends with Glenn (Colm Feore) stepping out of and then back into the frozen Canadian distance. It is a moment both tender and sad and yet defiant and optimistic. In a way, it stirs my heart like Degrassi Junior High (even if it hasn’t aged terribly well) and Souvenir of Canada (even if it is just a coffee-table book) do. And for all my reasoning and rationalizing, I must simply conclude that they all pull at something indefinable in me.

Next time: Chapter Two 2012 edition kicks off with the first of a two-part series I am playfully calling ZAZ (Not ZAZ). And, in a little bit of self-promotion, check out my new BOP column Sole Criterion which debuted last week, and which I will be alternating with Chapter Two.

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