Wednesday 18 May 2016
Thursday 12 May 2016
The Evil of Banality
Anything, per Flaubert's dictum, becomes interesting if one looks at it for long enough. Including, apparently, to me, the local newspaper. Specifically the Burton Mail. Published six days a week and running to more than 40 pages, the Burton Mail has many column inches to fill. And Burton upon Trent, a dull, moribund, intellectually and aesthetically benighted provincial town, provides precious little of significance with which to fill them.
The outcome, exacerbated by the economic decline of the print media and its attendant brain drain, is a dismal and frequently incompetent document of life in Britain in the early 21st century. Trifling stories (the long-running saga of a rising bollard, notably) are reported with the gravity and full-spectrum intensity of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Literal non-events (local pubs fail to win an award, say) warrant half a page, a photograph, and vox pops from members of the public. And so on.
As an edifice of staggering banality, increasing in extent daily like a viral culture gone rogue, it is grimly compelling, perversely sublime in its magnitude. But (like all media outlets, obviously, and in spite of its mewling claims to the contrary) the Burton Mail is not a neutral record of events. Until recently edited by a man who perfected his craft in the hallowed halls of The Sun, it's an incubator and vector of wretched English affliction, a vessel of timidly commonsensical Tory cant. Whether endorsing the bombing of the population of Middle Eastern country, blaming the world's woes on benefit scroungers, or lamenting the preventable death of a local OAP due to the defunding of a vital support service, the Burton Mail can be relied upon to espouse a position of incurious, cowardly equivocating, passive voiced, conservative (and Conservative) orthodoxy whilst never once daring to imagine that these might stories might, on some level, be related, that there may be some sort of underlying pattern, that chains of cause and effect may exist.
To consume this content daily is dulling, numbing. It is to feel one’s humanity being chipped away, little by little. It is an anamnesis diagnosing a societal wasting disease. It is to see delineated the precise dimensions of a collective coffin. The banality is insidious, injurious, a pallid tendril burrowing into one's brain. It is morbidly fascinating, with the emphasis on morbid.
But Flaubert’s dictum ought to be taken further too: anything becomes strange if one looks at it for long enough. The distinctive, truncated grammar of headlines (all nouns and verbs, no prepositions and conjunctions) starts to resemble gnomic fragments of found poetry. The vacuously aspirational and exhortative style of advertising copy turns into self-aware auto-satire; They Live without the need of the magic sunglasses. Lonely hearts ads become Borgesian catalogues of emotional futility. Crosswords and sodokus morph into monochrome Mondrians.
And the stories come to exhibit a surrealist hue too, seeming to hint at fantastical or eldritch subtexts. A short snippet from the fire brigade ledger might be a precis (or a cover-up...) of a Lovecraftian tale. Activities at a local public house hint at the possibility of festering, Ballardian undercurrents of sex and violence just around the corner. The world becomes mediated, viewed through a distorting lens, reflected in a glass darkly.
These pieces, then, are an on-going attempt to process and corral these responses. To commemorate these artefacts, to critique them, to satirise them, to recontextualise them, to impose a form of order on chaos, and to fashion something (hopefully) interesting and pleasing out of their morass. They are a search for some sort of satori amongst squalor, and if, in their slightly tatty (vain-) glory, they amount to little, literally or figuratively evaporating upon contact with air, or gradually fading to nothing, then perhaps that is an apposite end for the raw materials from which they are crafted too.
The outcome, exacerbated by the economic decline of the print media and its attendant brain drain, is a dismal and frequently incompetent document of life in Britain in the early 21st century. Trifling stories (the long-running saga of a rising bollard, notably) are reported with the gravity and full-spectrum intensity of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Literal non-events (local pubs fail to win an award, say) warrant half a page, a photograph, and vox pops from members of the public. And so on.
As an edifice of staggering banality, increasing in extent daily like a viral culture gone rogue, it is grimly compelling, perversely sublime in its magnitude. But (like all media outlets, obviously, and in spite of its mewling claims to the contrary) the Burton Mail is not a neutral record of events. Until recently edited by a man who perfected his craft in the hallowed halls of The Sun, it's an incubator and vector of wretched English affliction, a vessel of timidly commonsensical Tory cant. Whether endorsing the bombing of the population of Middle Eastern country, blaming the world's woes on benefit scroungers, or lamenting the preventable death of a local OAP due to the defunding of a vital support service, the Burton Mail can be relied upon to espouse a position of incurious, cowardly equivocating, passive voiced, conservative (and Conservative) orthodoxy whilst never once daring to imagine that these might stories might, on some level, be related, that there may be some sort of underlying pattern, that chains of cause and effect may exist.
To consume this content daily is dulling, numbing. It is to feel one’s humanity being chipped away, little by little. It is an anamnesis diagnosing a societal wasting disease. It is to see delineated the precise dimensions of a collective coffin. The banality is insidious, injurious, a pallid tendril burrowing into one's brain. It is morbidly fascinating, with the emphasis on morbid.
But Flaubert’s dictum ought to be taken further too: anything becomes strange if one looks at it for long enough. The distinctive, truncated grammar of headlines (all nouns and verbs, no prepositions and conjunctions) starts to resemble gnomic fragments of found poetry. The vacuously aspirational and exhortative style of advertising copy turns into self-aware auto-satire; They Live without the need of the magic sunglasses. Lonely hearts ads become Borgesian catalogues of emotional futility. Crosswords and sodokus morph into monochrome Mondrians.
And the stories come to exhibit a surrealist hue too, seeming to hint at fantastical or eldritch subtexts. A short snippet from the fire brigade ledger might be a precis (or a cover-up...) of a Lovecraftian tale. Activities at a local public house hint at the possibility of festering, Ballardian undercurrents of sex and violence just around the corner. The world becomes mediated, viewed through a distorting lens, reflected in a glass darkly.
These pieces, then, are an on-going attempt to process and corral these responses. To commemorate these artefacts, to critique them, to satirise them, to recontextualise them, to impose a form of order on chaos, and to fashion something (hopefully) interesting and pleasing out of their morass. They are a search for some sort of satori amongst squalor, and if, in their slightly tatty (vain-) glory, they amount to little, literally or figuratively evaporating upon contact with air, or gradually fading to nothing, then perhaps that is an apposite end for the raw materials from which they are crafted too.
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