One woman's garbage ...

Lara Durback, Greg Turner, Garbage Research 1: Hoarders and those resembling hoarders (Dusie/No No Press, 2011), unpriced — This little collage of found materials, original commentary, illustrations and sketches is part of Durback’s ethics of making, a commitment to recycling everything. To that extent, then, the subject of hoarding holds a mirror up to the found stuff that comprises this chapbook. The house of mirrors is a system of ecology here; feedback and loop are pertinent practices. And yet a large part of the commentary concerns the television program Hoarders, a show that focuses on those who withhold themselves and their “stuff” from circulation. Durback thus investigates the emotional toll — guilt and shame as effects of what we might be tempted to deem adolescent recalcitrance vis-à-vis obsolescence (a psychoanalytic perspective might see in hoarding arrested development at the anal stage….). However, as one of the primary vehicles of manufactured desires, television’s specular commodification of keeping, holding onto, reminds us once again, as does this chapbook, that obsolescence is the bread and butter of capital expansion and development. Referring to the size of a bin of her “things” given to her by her mother, Durback notes that “two of me could fit in there. It is a double coffin and time capsule.” The specular relationship between the coffin and time capsule points to the fetish, of course, but outside any psychoanalytic context, hoarding has (also) political, economic and social functions. Durback opens by noting that “hoarders” have special designations, as one sector of the marginalized, in Egypt and China. Durback notes that children are particularly adept at hoarding, a skill of survival: “Children do it. They have to.” The recent interest in trash as both a practice and ethos of poetics in our time suggests that Durback’s and Turner’s interests here are themselves the effects of a larger movement, if not quite the symptoms of a zeitgeist, among certain poets and artists (see, for example, issue 37 of The Volta).