Sunday Salon: Mongo - Adventures in Trash

Click for information about The Sunday Salon.

Currently reading: Ted Botha, Mongo: Adventures in Trash

Pages read: 22
Time spent reading: 26 minutes

Comments: I discovered this book on Bookins, which is a great place for finding books you might not otherwise run into. And I even used the book's first line on TwitterLit back in September.  I started it on Friday, during Melissa's gymnastics class,* and just read chapter three. (*At the gymnastics class, this woman's there with her daughter, who looks to be 11 or 12. It's a waiting area; there's not too much to do. The girl starts thumbing through a copy of Star magazine. The mother says, rather harshly, "I don't want you looking at that." The girls puts it down. "Why?" I'm wondering. Is this some kind of punishment? Or is this mother insane about censorship? About ten minutes later, the girls finally says, "Why can't I look at it?" "Indeed, why?!" I cry out internally. And the mother answers...I'm on the edge of my uncomfortable seat...something completely unintelligible. I wait a moment, thinking my brain will eventually be able to translate the grunting sounds, but it can't. The girl understands, though, and doesn't pick up the magazine. But she does look at its cover longingly.)

So, as it's subtitle suggests, Ted Botha's book is about trash, specifically, about people who rummage through the trash to find things of interest, and specifically people who do this in New York City. "Mongo" is a slang word that refers to something retrieved from the trash--I'd never heard it before either. In his first chapter Botha writes about "pack rats." He's not talking about people who will, once or twice in their lifetimes, pick up something from the trash and take it home to fix up. He's concerned with the lifers, people who do this obsessively. The pack rats go out "pailing", as we might have called it in my youth, looking for items they might be able to fix up and sell or, indeed, just looking for stuff because they're obsessed with the process. They bring it home and fill up their garages and attics and living rooms with junk that, often, they never get around to selling.

Chapter two is more interesting. Botha writes about "canners," people who specialize in retrieving cans from the garbage and recycling them for profit. In the hierarchy of "collectors"--people who go through the garbage--canners are apparently on the low end of things. But it's interesting to me that there is a hierarchy, and that there is specialization, and also that there are apparently unspoken rules among canners. Botha addresses these things, but I'd like it if he did more of that. So far he seems more interested in considering the sorts of things people can find in the trash than in unpacking the subcultures of trash digging.

In chapter three Botha profiles a fellow named Dave who specializes in digging through piles of dirt, specifically dirt that has been dug up from really old landfills. He also goes through sediment that has been removed from sewers. Some of them haven't been cleaned in a hundred years, apparently, so he's been able to find some really old stuff by both means, and occasionally Dave will find something that's worth a few thousand dollars. He once uncovered a 4000-pound canon but didn't have the means to lift it and transport it.

Tags: The Sunday Salon