The Literature of Waste

[Jochen Stremmel]

Abstract: In a world in which material prosperity and life itself are
inevitably linked to pollution and the production of waste, how can we
humans—ourselves sources of waste in terms of all that we
discard—understand and cope with waste? A special exhibit at the Wellcome
Collection (2011), titled “Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life,”
presented six urban locations designed to test the dictum the
anthropologist Mary Douglas made famous: “Dirt is essentially disorder …
matter out of place.”2 An eclectic exhibit, items ranged from
seventeenth-century paintings of Delft—famous for its cleanliness—to slabs
made of human excrement from India; from videos of dust mites to a jewel
and pearl-encrusted broom; from vials of Victorian cholera-ridden diarrhea
to anti-Semitic posters accusing Jews of being carriers of typhus during
the Second World War. The exhibit included a “Scratch and Sniff” card
redolent with odors from an eighteenth-century tannery and medieval sewage
sludge from the BBC2 Filthy Cities series. One could put one’s own dust
into an envelope to be transformed into a brick as part of the “Laid to
Rest” time capsule project. The Dirt Exhibit at the Wellcome was a crash
course in waste (rubble, rubbish, trash, garbage, litter, filth, and
excrement). The repercussions from and interpretations and ethics of waste
were the focus of this study.

Obviously the author has written an interdisciplinary monograph before:
Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics
(2008). Sounds interesting.
Also the book from which she gleans her motto: "Waste may be described as
simultaneously a most harrowing problem and a most closely guarded secret
of our times."

Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2004)

Btw:

THE GRANDEUR THAT WAS ROME

     — Wait a moment, professor MacHugh said, raising two quiet claws. We
mustn’t be led away by words, by sounds of words. We think of Rome,
imperial, imperious, imperative.
       He extended elocutionary arms from frayed stained shirtcuffs,
pausing :
       — What was their civilisation? Vast, I allow : but vile. Cloacae :
sewers.
The Jews in the wilderness and on the mountaintop said : *It is meet to be*
*here. Let us build an altar to Jehovah.* The Roman, like the Englishman who
follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on which he set his
foot
(on our shore he never set it) only his cloacal obsession. He gazed about
him
in his toga and he said : *Is it meet to be here. Let us construct a
watercloset.*




Am Sa., 2. Feb. 2019 um 17:42 Uhr schrieb Nicole Bennett <
nlbennett at gmail.com>:

> I have this book and, as an English lit. academic interested in discard
> studies, use it often in my research. Unfortunately, the author overlooks
> the centrality of waste in books like *The Crying of Lot 49* and *Gravity's
> Rainbow* (she works mostly on medieval literature). There is some
> interesting stuff on more recent authors (Beckett, Calvino, Eliot
> [obviously]), but I also found the style of the book to be a bit haphazard
> for my tastes. It's more of an observation of the different ways the
> concept of waste functions across a vast range of literature. Definitely a
> great reference, though, for those who can afford it. Academic books are so
> stubbornly and frustratingly pricey.
>
> On Sat, Feb 2, 2019 at 8:41 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > ---------- Forwarded message ---------
> > From: Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> > Date: Sat, Feb 2, 2019 at 9:34 AM
> > Subject:
> > To: Me at G <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> https://www.amazon.com/gp/search?index=books&linkCode=qs&keywords=9781137394446
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> >
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>