Kate Durbin’s new book, Hoarders just arrived!
It all started right here on this blog! I am delighted to post the cover of Possessed: A Cultural History of Hoarding and a link to the Preface and Introduction.
This is going to be a fun year!
ifiwereahoarder reblogged
My comedy debut! Soon I’ll do a set about hoarding.
This is was the scene on the second floor of my dad’s house in Waltham last time I was there. Tambourines, samovar, digital cameras.
Hoarding and Procrastination (I)
I write today after long neglect. I started If I Were a Hoarder in January 2010, during what I hoped would be my final year in graduate school (it wasn’t). I imagined the blog would help me to save money and space: it would be an antidote to “retail therapy,” some modified form of art therapy. The idea was that instead of buying curious objects--the apparently unique and modestly priced knickknacks that shine forth irresistibly from the cluttered shelves and brimming racks of thrift stores--I would stifle the temptation with well-selected words interrogating the fascination of such things. The therapeutic aim of the blog seemed particularly important, since it just so happened that the office of my psychotherapist was located above a gourmet grocery store, and across the street from one of my favorite consignment shops.
That was eight years ago; and sometimes it seems like a lot has happened since then: I finally finished the Ph.D. and managed to land my dream job at a large private university in New York. But it often seems like not so much has happened since then with my writing: just a couple articles and a dissertation. I’ve found myself stuck with the book -- the same book about hoarding I’ve been working on for years, the same book I’ve promised to send to an editor by September. It should have been done years ago, but now I’ve finally run the clock down, almost to the end of the game, when «Le more della legge [avranno] avuto chiusura», when «Il tempo [sarà] stato consumato».
I’ve all but shed my pseudonym; my identity is not a secret to anyone who cares. Nonetheless, the anonymity provided by "Zoltana Domotor” and, more to the point, the fact that the only person who reads this blog is my mother, feels like comforting cover under which to attempt to casually explore some of the sticky ideas that have been slowing me down as I work on the book.
I first imagined this blog to have an apotropaic function: it would shield me from the threat of hoarding by transforming seductive objects into words. But it turns out that words are no less likely than things to accumulate without end or intention.
Each of us has known such creatures, whom Walter Benjamin defines as "crepuscular” and incomplete, similar to the gandharvas of the Indian sages, who are half celestial genie, half demon. “None has a firm place in the world, or firm, inalienable outlines. There is not one that is not either rising or falling, none that is not trading its qualities with its enemy or neighbor; none that has not completed its period of time and yet is unripe, none that is not deeply exhausted and yet is only at the beginning of a long existence.” More intelligent and gifted than our other friends, always intent on notions and projects for which they seem to have all the necessary virtues, they still do not succeed in finishing anything and are generally idle [senz’opera]. They embody the type of eternal student or swindler who ages badly and who must be left behind in the end, even if it is against our wishes. And yet something about them, an inconclusive gesture, an unforeseen grace, a certain mathematical boldness in judgment and taste, a certain air of nimbleness in their limbs or words —all these features indicate that they belong to a complementary world and allude to a lost citizenship or an inviolable elsewhere. In this sense, they give us help, even though we can’t quite tell what sort of help it is. It could consist precisely in the fact that they cannot be helped, or in their stubborn insistence that “there is nothing to be done for us." For that very reason, we know, in the end, that we have somehow betrayed them.
Giorgio Agamben, Profanations
I feel that it is precisely the garbage, that very dirt where important papers and scraps are mixed and unsorted, that comprises the genuine and only real fabric of my life, no matter how ridiculous and absurd this may seem from the outside.
Ilya Kabakov, The Man Who Never Thew Anything Away, 1977
