Garbage thinking and trash talk

A surprisingly interesting piece in the Times today mulls the meaning of garbage. Snippet:

There is also much to understand about the odd place garbage now holds in middle-class life. At least in part the impulse to redeem garbage and its handlers is found not only in these windows. Spurred by environmental concerns, attitudes have been shifting.

Instead of wanting to excommunicate our trash, we often treat it as if it were not refuse at all. We classify our waste, create different containers for it and carefully label it, the way we would collections of cherished objects. We are even instructed to rinse some garbage.

Coincidentally I just learned that the next installment of Adult Ed, a really cool-sounding series of events in Brooklyn that almost makes me wish I still lived up yonder, is also trash-related. “Trash and The City” features guest lecturers Benjamin Miller (author of Fat of the Land), Robin Nagle (anthropologist in residence at NYC Dept of Sanitation), Michael Mandiberg (Eyebeam research fellow), and Gertrude Berg (artist “who takes care of her own trash.”)

April 8 at Union Hall in Park Slope. Details here.