For the love of newsprint: Capturing the straightforward pleasure of reading the paper

AUG. 13 – In the course of The Heat of the Day (Elizabeth Bowen) there may be an extended and tender ode to the newspaper. It’s a passion shared by Connie, “a collector of newspapers of just about any age, either to have a look at again or wrap things up in,” and Louie, who, “once [she] had taken to newspapers … found peace.” The 2 women hoard the papers, savour their smells and textures, have the benefit of the brittle sounds of pages being turned and folded, empathize with their thinning bulk in war-rationed Britain and long to feed them, feel covetous on the sight of fried fish being wrapped in one in every of the dear broadsheets and, having used a page to light a hearth, “peer forward into the acrid smoke to read the last of the print till a flame [eats] it …”

“What’s needed is appetite. And if there may be appetite, a story will unearth itself.” In a filmed interview Rainer Werner Fassbinder says he could make a movie from reading an article within the newspaper.

“ … my impressions on certain mornings once I read the newspaper.” – Aldo Rossi

“And I need to read all of the papers which I put into my closet week after week and never read.” – Jane Bowles

SEPT. 5 – Indignant at J. for throwing out papers, then find them within the trash on the sidewalk. Awesome fantastic thing about park beside Notre Dame. Pleasure of maps, determining where I even have been and where I’ll go.

OCT. 20 – On the train: reading N.Y. Herald Tribune from Oct. 15: story about conflict over non-extradition to Italy by France of Marina Petrella, 54, former Red Brigade. Carla Bruni visits her within the hospital and assures her she will likely be allowed to stay in France. Petrella is severely depressed and says she desires to die. Pianist is playing Bach.

A.C. reads 3-4 newspapers a day: “I read what interests me.” I learned from her to read what interests me. Arrive: eat, read newspaper. Talk on the phone to A: one hour. 1PM: eat, read newspaper. Still haven’t finished paper from Thursday. Consider sleep. Ache in my teeth too real to be phantom.

I wrote and picked up these notes in a period just before and after moving to Paris for 10 months in 2008. Just like the characters in Bowen’s novel, I’ve all the time loved newsprint, especially if it has a rather satiny coating that seals the ink out of your fingers.

One other memory from that yr: Parisians lining up on the newsstand for the Thursday edition of Le Monde, which incorporates the books complement, and the way it might normally sell out by noon. It was my favourite subway reading, though it might take me an extended time to read it in French, hence the pile.

There was a time when high-school kids in Recent York were taught to fold and unfold The Recent York Times in quarter sections, in order to not disturb other passengers on the subway. This can be a long-vanished sight, as are the stacks of papers tied up with twine that may drop within the night on the sidewalks, and fill the front portions of newsstands. Vendors now reserve mere inches of shelving for newsprint.

For years I had the Times delivered to my door, and sometimes when it was late I’d wait for the sound of the slap within the hallway. On Sundays it might be a thud. I treated the majority exactly as did Simone de Beauvoir, by her 1947-54 account in America Day by Day: “I learned to place aside the sports section; the business section; the section on marriages and deaths.”

In prepandemic days, before I left my apartment in the town and needed to discontinue delivery, I’d easily spend an hour reading, sometimes two, and I’d consider the megastar, whose name I now not recall, who said: “Reading the NYT is like sinking right into a warm bath.” Conversely, Noam Chomsky, who, on discovering that he ground his teeth, found out that it was not happening in his sleep, but within the morning as he read The Recent York Times. Now I read the headlines on my phone, and sometimes I forget to do even that. It’s negligent, but in addition a form of self-preservation. My partner and I are still subscribers though; we keep deferring a latest starting date, and each once and some time a lone copy will break through the embargo and appear at our door. It makes me a bit sad to see my jilted paper, and to recollect how intimate we once were.

To return to a literary theme: I’m near ending Christa Wolf’s One Day A Yr, by which she chronicled the identical day, Sept. 27, day-after-day for 50 years, starting in 1960. She would begin and end most days by reading the papers, making note of the key headlines and stories. The book is greater than 600 pages long, but it surely appears like probably the most sped-up life from any memoir I’ve ever read.

Moyra Davey was born in Toronto and lives in Recent York. She is a author, photographer and film and video artist whose works are held within the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Tate Modern. Recent publications by Davey include The Shabbiness of Beauty (2021, Mack Books) and Index Cards (2020, Recent Directions) Her film Horse Opera (2022) was featured earlier this yr at MoMA and on the Toronto International Film Festival.

A note on the image

Papers, 2009/2022 The above image is a photograph of a piece by Davey from a unbroken series of works where she folds and tapes photographic prints into letter-sized aerograms, which she then posts to friends and collaborators. Her unfolded and postmarked photos have been exhibited in galleries and museums all over the world.