Two fascinating articles on waste and recycling: I would print them out and send to family and friends, but that would be an unnecessary waste of paper and thus invoke the gods of irony. If you can stand to read long articles on a computer screen (and chances are you probably do spend hours as it is staring at one), please do so in this case.
One is a full investigation by Andrew O’Hagan for the London Review Of Books. He hangs out with those who collect the bins, the managers of landfills and furnaces, and a curious pair of gentlemen who shun money, live together in a van and exist purely on the food thrown out by supermarkets (though as one letter the following issue asks, what about their fuel, insurance, road tax? What happens if they crash into someone?).
Mr O’Hagan points out how it’s easy to forget that recycling is older than modern consumerism. Many have memories of used bottles taken back to the shop and exchanged for pennies, and the term ‘dustcart’ in the first place refers to the dust recycled in Victorian brick manufacture:
The 19th century was the age of salvage, and Victorian Britain was a recycling nation by necessity: wood was redeployed and bone was ground down; ash was spread on the land, and the only things buried were bodies and vegetable matter.
He also touches on the more poetical and philosophical side of current waste concerns: waste as a record of life, and thus death. The landfill as monument:
At the near edge it seemed there were Tesco bags as far as the horizon; I looked down and saw a bottle of children’s bubble mixture, a squashed box of Typhoo tea, a tin of Dulux paint, a Capri Sun fruit drink carton: the recent detritus of an average life, and in the distance there were more plastic bags trapped in the branches of a copse of trees and blowing in and out like struggling lungs.
Mr O’Hagan’s wonderful essay is here in full:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n10/print/ohag01_.html
By way of contrast, his fellow LRB contributor Mary Beard emails me the link to her “all very well, but…” piece in the Times, addressing the selfishness of liberals who use recycling purely as a way of salving their 4×4 conciences. Recycling as a kind of liberal confession booth:
The problem is that the amount of high-minded effort that goes into recycling at home (all that careful sorting of the plastic bottles from the glass ones, the removal of the plastic cover from the newspaper supplement you never read, and so on) tends to make you feel that you have already done your bit for the planet. ‘I recycle so I’m OK.’
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2007/06/does_recycling_.html
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Last week I announced I’m retiring from DJ-ing for a bit (with the exception of the Latitude Festival – though they seem to be dithering). And since then, I’ve had more offers of paid DJ work than ever before. Typical. It’s a career move based on The Cutty Sark via Joni Mitchell. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.
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A reader emails on the ‘the world behind every mirror’ theme in the last Doctor Who and the Sandman story I was reading at the time:
The concept is also there in a Borges story (which inspired China Mieville’s novella ‘The Tain’, where the very peed off people from behind the mirror gain their freedom and revenge).
Sounds great; must read that. For a Get Out Of Genre Free card, it’s always best to mention Borges. And I understand Mr Miéville is one of the few sci-fi authors allowed to be on BBC Radio 3 arts programmes without the world coming to an end.
On genre:
The odd thing is how certain authors get rescued – Ballard, for instance, is now regarded as a literary writer, ever since his books became set in a recognisable present (whether his writing has changed, or reality has become more Ballardian, is another case entirely). More accurately, ever since his publishers started marketing him that way.
I would say the same about Ian McEwan, whose earlier books like The Cement Garden were dark and strange and ‘cultish’. Today, he’s part of the UK arts mainstream.
Tory leader David Cameron has done a Doctor Who and turned himself from a lofty superhuman (from Planet Eton, an eternal plane of the powerful and godlike looking down on the real world) into an ersatz normal human of sorts – a living zeitgeist index of what he regards normal people do. To this end, he has had his photo taken reading the latest McEwan novel. On the train.
