Children of Fleet Street
The Newpaper, ed. Eleanor Brown, artwork by Eva Weinmayr, Art after Parties 2007
Now that all the broadsheets are available in tabloid form and I am a little out of practice with the process of sharply opening the first page, folding it back on its central crease, then depending on the placing of the article I am reading, folding in half and then folding in half again, to render the paper behemoth into a more manageable size, it took me a few minutes grappling with The Newpaper before I could start reading.
A parodic critique of a beloved and now, in our electronic age, somewhat beleaguered media form, The Newpaper is strikingly simple, some of the pages are almost entirely bare, whilst others have a more traditional (though still not conventional) set up. Immediately apparent are the missing adverts, replaced with nothing, so one is confronted by the melancholia of the empty page, (or is that no news is good news?) and the crammed efficiency of the more usual broadsheet space with its advertising, life style articles etc is revealed in its sinister complexity.
It contains exactly what you would expect – articles, essays, interviews, share prices, international news and of course, a crossword puzzle – though this being a subversion of the form and function of the paper, the crossword is half done already and is actually a clipping from an older paper so really, its inherent obsolescence is explicit, and stands as a fitting metaphor for the newspaper format and indeed the ‘news’ itself.
This is the broadsheet that Brion Gysin would have produced, given half a chance, a thoughtful and intelligent prod at our media-saturated and largely credulous society, constructed with cut-up snippets and taglines.
After all that folding and refolding I realise I rather miss the process and ritual of reading the broadsheets, even if I take half the contents with a pinch of salt, and I don’t really believe that internet news delivery will ever really extinguish our fondness for newsprint. Get a subscription to The Newpaper, it’ll restore your faith in faithlessness and of course, once you’ve finished reading it, it would make a marvellous Millwall Brick, and you can’t do that with a web page.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Heidi James‘ novella The Mesmerist’s Daughter (published by Apis Books) will be launched in July 2007, likewise her novel Carbon (published by Wrecking Ball Press). She has a column in Dazed and Confused, is a regular contributor to Another Level and Arts Editor for 3:AM. Her essays and short stories are published in a variety of anthologies and magazines. She is the proprietor of Social Disease and is a recipient of the Sophie Warne fellowship.
First published in 3:AM Magazine: Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007.
