MGN-AFRICA»» pin:2A123D88 From stationery fiends to hand dryer enthusiasts who are you calling boring?: Stationery may not be everyones cup of tea, but to James Ward it is endlessly fascinating staplers especially. He explains why, and meets five people with similarly obscure passions, from sneezes to tills to hand dryers I didnt notice the moment when boring got so cool. I was too busy clearing my shelves of CDs to make space for my stationery collection. While style magazines began raving about normcore and the virtues of plain grey clothes, and when staying in became the new going out, I was documenting my collection of notebooks, staplers and ringbinders. I had replaced my love of music with my love of pens. I knew there were others out there: Twitter had led me to like-minded souls, leading to the formation of Stationery Club, a sort of stationery equivalent of a book club (although I began to doubt how serious some of the members were: Id ask how many staplers people owned, and the answers would be in single figures). But this year, the humdrum became super-popular. To my surprise, tickets for my annual Boring Conference (Im on year four) sold out in minutes. How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs every day? asks the French writer Georges Perec in his 1973 essay on the infra-ordinary (his word for everything thats the opposite of extraordinary). Perec challenges us to question the habitual. But thats just it, were habituated to it. We dont question it, it doesnt question us, it doesnt seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither question nor answers, as if it werent the bearer of any information. Continue reading... bit.ly/1kcSHfb pin:2A123D88
Posted on: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 08:04:24 +0000
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