RUBBISH

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Comment by Zara Dinnen on April 20, 2011 at 9:38

Doctorow's recent novel Homer and Langley is about two brothers who hoard newspapers and other "historical" items; who experience the whole twentieth-century through their flat. Think that might fit somewhere with this discussion.

Comment by Lisa Mullen on April 19, 2011 at 9:17

some undead toys...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwNgvARjrq8&feature=related

Comment by Tony Venezia on April 19, 2011 at 9:12

Link for The Cramps, Garbageman

(thanks to Roger Sabin for suggesting this)

Comment by Tony Venezia on April 18, 2011 at 14:10

Night of the Living Objects? There's a certain kind of pathologised behaviour here that you've rightly pointed out. From my own experience, when I was a nursing student in the late nineties I did a placement for EMI (elderly mental illness) at a South London hospital during which I had contact with a surprising number of patients who were hoarders - you're right, a lot of them end up sadly evicted for basically not managing their affairs and falling through the cracks. They were predominantly aging white males in social housing who never threw away any newspapers, and often stored other things (bottles of urine were a popular one).

It strikes me that there's a thin line between this type of behaviour, and more accepted kinds of collection (antiques, comics, books etc.) which can potentially result in more or less the same thing - eviction by the sheer overflow of material objects.

Comment by Lisa Mullen on April 16, 2011 at 10:58

I was thinking about the relationship between rubbish and collecting and googled myself into the world of compulsive hoarding as a form of OCD. Not described in medical literature until the 1990s it seems.

I was interested to discover that this website aimed at sufferers has created its own vocabulary to describe collected rubbish and human negotiations with it ('goat paths') ( http://www.compulsive-hoarding.org/Vocabulary.html ) and also has identified something called 'word hoarding' where people can't throw away any written matter. http://www.compulsive-hoarding.org/Word-hoarding.html

Romantic ruins, and modernist city-ruins seem to be categories of emptied space, suggestively porous, and now I'm wondering about this opposite type of ruined space, clotted/ closed, which finally evicts the human maker. Filled ruins like Rachel Whiteread's House? Apparently compulsive hoarders usually end up homeless.

Comment by William Viney on April 14, 2011 at 22:42

Anyone interested in abandoned or derelict buildings might like to take a look at some of James Griffioen's images.

Comment by Ernesto Priego on April 13, 2011 at 10:38

Re: Bahrani's film, reminded me of the video the character takes in American Beauty, and William Carlos Williams's poem to the paper bag... (it is William Carlos Williams's isn't it?)

Comment by Ernesto Priego on April 13, 2011 at 10:20

Have you seen the Dirt exhibition at the Wellcome? (Gallery here).

Comment by Tony Venezia on April 13, 2011 at 10:15

Plastic Bag: a film by Ramin Bahrani

This short film by American director Ramin Bahrani (Goodbye Solo) traces the epic, existential journey of a plastic bag (voiced by Werner Herzog) searching for its lost maker, the woman who took it home from the store and eventually discarded it. Along the way, it encounters strange creatures, experiences love in the sky, grieves the loss of its beloved maker, and tries to grasp its purpose in the world.

In the end, the wayward plastic bag wafts its way to the ocean, into the tides, and out into the Pacific Ocean trash vortex — a promised nirvana where it will settle among its own kind and gradually let the memories of its maker slip away.

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