Friday, March 01, 2002
Junk Mail and Me
I am daily astonished by the quantity of paper that tumbles through our mail-slot. Every piece of mail insists on my attention, whether a cursory glance to sort the camouflaged sales-pitch from the real bills, or the moment needed to tear up another credit card solicitation and file it in the recycling. It’s odd to reflect that some marketer has calculated that the value of my moment’s attention is greater than the cost of printing and sending me each flyer. Then there are the catalogues. Most arrive unbidden, as a result of the selling-on of mailing lists. No matter how modest my shopping habits, one impulse buy from an unfamiliar catalogue, and my purchasing predilections are promiscuously spread across the databases of the nation’s direct marketers.
On the one hand, it’s reassuring that someone cares enough to remember all the things about me that I forget - shoe size, belt length, recent magazine subscriptions. On the other hand, it is disconcerting to be reduced to an intersection of customer profiles. In those databases, I am what I buy, what I have bought. And what I will buy can be predicted fairly accurately on the basis of my past consumption. I see myself, like Marley’s ghost, dragging behind me a chain of all my past purchases - an autobiography spelled out in chunky cotton knits, Dutch bulbs and cedar coat-hangers.
Still, catalogues fascinate me. After work, I often slump on the sofa with a catalogue. Clothing catalogues are my soap operas, where familiar characters stand in frozen tableaux against a set of distant pines or a seascape, sometimes a modernist office. Invariably, in December, a blond twenty-something threads a popcorn and cranberry garland for the tree, accessorising with a plump, blond toddler and matching blond Labrador puppy. A single purchase promises admission to this immaculate world of wrinkle-free ease.
Each catalogue has a characteristic moral tone. One Vermont-based catalogue welcomes us to a world of small c conservatism and thrift. Everything from throat candies to long underwear is commended as “old-fashioned,” “reliable,” “practical,” or as “a long-time customer favourite.” Another catalogue coopts the rhetoric of feminism to sell Soccer Moms kicky little outfits and darling accessories with an unctuous, “You know you deserve it.”
Then there is the wonderful gadget catalogue that sells everything from self-coiling garden hoses to nose-hair trimmers in the name of what is sensible. Yet beneath the calm descriptions of ergonomic avocado slicers and spill-proof coffee-mugs lurks a restrained hysteria. You might have eliminated clutter with this rolling organiser end-table, and have cleansed your problem tiling with roll-on grout rejuvenator, but still, terror might leap from the pantry - the vacuum-cleaner might clog and explode - and all because you failed to purchase the electronic cat-hair filter.
Other catalogues offer great, rolling, Walt Whitmanesque lists. A seed merchant lists forty different heritage varieties of lettuce from Amish Deer Tongue to Yugoslavian Red Butterhead. A spice-merchant offers eight distinct kinds of peppercorns - from Sarawak White to Whole Tellicherry Indian Black.
A nursery that sells only iris describes each species in a peculiar vocabulary of hafts and horns, beards and bitones. Thus, an iris is: “Reminiscent of warm Italian sunlight on sparkling ice, the domed standards and style arms are pale yellow and the semi-flaring falls are creamy yellow with deep lemon shoulders...a delightfully ruffled confection....” This is the poetry of enthusiasm.
And therein lies the genius of catalogues. Of course lifestyle consumption is the opiate of the western middle classes. And catalogues are indeed cogs in the inexorable machinery of capitalism. Yet catalogues also celebrate the human ability to discern and care about fine-grained differences. I cannot tell Ceylon cinnamon from Vietnamese cassiachunks, and I do not care so much for lettuce or iris, but I am glad to live in a world where someone can and does. And who knows, one day these skills of discernment may transfer to a more consequential sphere, when we learn to attend to and understand the fine-grained differences among people.