I got a very special book for christmas, one that really mattered, a very special book that chronicles a period I remember. Published posthumously, Gordon Burn had written many pieces, primarily on that stale phrase that bands together to deindividualise, The Young British Artists. The essays read chronologically from punk to global importance. The line seems so clear, hindsight blinds us, nostalgia deafens. Yet read sequentially you recall how tatty, how small it all began now history has made it all seem so big.
Gordon Burn did the same for the Yorkshire Ripper 'Someones husband, someones son'.I lived through that too yet even to those of us who walked those streets as children where the bodies were found, the Ripper tag gave it a mystique that was neither deserved nor real. Gordon went to live and talk to those at the heart of the mess and drew out just how ordinary, how obvious how senseless it all was. As the phrase goes the banality of evil. Through the combination of living through that period in Leeds and Gordons book I learned so much. I finally understood Hitler, Auschwitz. Ordinary, even boring people who did strange things that taken out of historical and cultural context make no sense at all. Yet in that bubble of time were just like the pavement, the lino, the tool shed.
The sum of the two books make me see anything can happen if you want it to, it just depends what you want to be your legacy.
God bless you Gordon and rest in peace
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