"...the beauty of ugliness got hold of me again and again..."

Interesting interview here in the latest Context with Gerhard Meier from 1993, talking about his novel Isle of the Dead:

For a time it was pretty much my invariable route in Olten, and out of love for the things I came across, the banalities, I gladly laid out this route precisely in the novel...I especially emphasized the industrial quarter. I was drawn over and over to these out of the way places — or to put it differently, the beauty of ugliness got hold of me again and again in life...

I noticed in William Carlos Williams how gloriously the unbeautiful, the unaesthetic, the ordinary, the small, can shine forth when it is placed against the right background. I’m a little in love with these discordant phenomena. I have never been interested in aestheticism understood as the merely beautiful, the select, the dressed up. For me the aesthetic is anchored much more deeply, connected with the completely immaterial and with the movingly small, the eccentric, the vulnerable, the susceptible, the inconspicuous...

I never render such banalities cynically or arrogantly, they simply form the line of melody in a great piece of music, in the score of this character. I am — that’s why I recited Williams’s poem "Pastoral" — a lover of the banal, the small. It is so moving when it’s done right, when it is really banal, but it needs a background in front of which it can shine.

Meier talks a bit too much in aphorism for my taste, with plenty of "Art is..." pronouncements, but I admire his appreciation for the ugly, inconspicuous and banal. I feel much the same way - while like most people I'm awed by soaring mountains and classic architecture, I also see the beauty in ordinary marshes and abandoned steel mills. The everyday interests me just as much as the extraordinary.