About boredom

The unstructured reality of Sylvia Smith

I don’t know how Sylvia Smith might have reacted had she known she had become the subject of an obituary in the Daily Telegraph. True, she was a published author with three books to her name; but those books were distinguished – if that’s the word – by the flatness of the prose and the banality of the content, most of it being short anecdotes of her apparently entirely humdrum life. It’s the combination of style and content that makes her works remarkable, I guess. There’s nothing wrong about detailing the minutiae of everyday life if you do it in an interesting way (see The Mezzanine,  Nicholson Baker’s debut novel, which teases interest from a superficially mundane lunch hour, rather as artful editing and stage management moulds the stars of structured reality TV into supposedly compelling viewing) or applying a flat style to interesting goings-on (I’m currently reading Jonas Jonasson’s The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared, in which the extraordinary back story of the titular character is thrown into hilarious relief by the artfully artless prose).

There may be a feminist subtext in the acclaim bestowed upon Smith’s work; I’m reminded of Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, in which the heroine’s domestic drudgery is portrayed in real time; yeah, you may be bored as a viewer, but think what it must be like to live this way, day in, day out. On the other hand, towards the end of the film, Dielman indulges in a little discreet prostitution, has an unexpected orgasm and kills her client. If that sort of thing had happened to Sylvia Smith, would it have made her books better or worse?

And on similar lines, here’s a piece of radio that left me and plenty of others, including the show’s presenter Paddy O’Connell, more than a little choked up on Sunday. It’s by Emilie Blachere, who wrote a love letter to her partner, war photographer Remi Ochlik, after he died in Syria last year. At times she seems to be reading the text out phonetically, almost as if she’s not quite sure what it means; but by the end, as she recites the lyrics of one of the happiest songs ever written, her halting, heavily accented voice feels perfectly suited to the almost unbearable sadness of the whole story.

Not yet retro

 

If you’re not on Facebook you may not have encountered the above image or its many, many variations: essentially someone picks a job or a location and finds six pictures that illustrate six different perspectives on it. I think I first saw it on about Tuesday or Wednesday, and it was already getting tired by Thursday evening. If there’s a single phrase that seems to characterise modern society, it’s “easily bored”. Remember Benton/Fenton the out-of-control labrador? Within days of his arrival on YouTube the very mention of his name was enough to provoke guffaws from the audience of Radio4 comedy shows; a week later, he was utterly forgotten. If you go for a more-leisurely-than-normal poo, it seems, you’ll find you’ve missed seven flavours of the Zeitgeist by the time you’re finished. Actually, do they still have Zeitgeists?

But it doesn’t move me

Musician John Roderick, in Seattle Weekly, is bored with bored music hacks and their boring boredom:

But the median level of music writing has declined, much of it hovering consistently at the level of bratty piss-taking. The number of reviews I’ve read in the last year that contain the word “meh” just boggles my mind, as though we’re expected to consider the writers’ own boredom more fascinating than the music they’re charged with critiquing.

Roderick unwittingly disparages the music that he’s ostensibly defending; very often it really is less interesting than the response, and it takes an almighty effort to write anything more helpful than “Here is another record by Coldplay and it sounds like a Coldplay record and Coldplay fans will like it” or variations thereon. “Go on,” says the real critic, “impress me.” And all too often there is no reply. Only when music (or any other product) is magnificent, or ghastly, or teetering somewhere between the two, is it worthwhile making any comment. A critic is not obliged not to be bored, any more than an artist is obliged not to be boring.

Moreover, what’s wrong with boredom as an attitude, as a stance, as a provocative statement of intent? Ennui, disaffection, meh-ness has been a key component of youth culture and popular music for decades: the Situationists saw it as an inevitable response to the banality of modern life, and it reached its zenith in the glory days of punk. I think it was Schopenhauer – although it may have been Rat Scabies – who said “Life swings like a pendulum backwards and forwards between pain and boredom.” And a reviewer musing on his or her own pain is, perversely, even more tedious than one who goes on about boredom.

PS: On vaguely parallel lines, listen to this interesting Radio 4 documentary about on French punk, available till next Thursday.

A candy-colored clown

I think I stopped dreaming for a while, or maybe I was dreaming dreams that left no trace on the waking memory. Now I dream again, but the dreams are quite un-dreamlike, entirely feasible if sometimes a little implausible. In other words, rather boring. I recently found myself attempting to deliver a large mattress to a flat in Plymouth. It’s not something I’ve ever done, and I’ll be surprised if I ever do it, but it’s hardly the sort of thing that can only occur in the fevered imagination.

And on those rare occasions when my dreams do break free from the bondage of banal reality, they’re still pretty much empty of excitement. For example, last night, I dreamed I was on some kind of commercial time travel flight, where everybody was dressed in 1970s sci-fi chic (think Buck Rogers in the 25th Century). Potential for some kind of reality-defying adventure, one might think? Nah. Rather than meeting Tutankhamun, I occupied myself by filling in the landing card, but I made a mistake, and had to ask the stewardess for a new one.

So, tell me. How dull are your dreams?