November 08, 2009
UTNE READER

Talkin' Trash

Cartoonist Lynda Barry tells Found magazine editor Davy Rothbart about her love of scrounging

July/August 2002 Issue
By Davy Rothbart, Found magazine 
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DAVY:

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Do you remember when you first became interested in found stuff and why?LYNDA:I was always pretty much of a scrounge. Part of it might have been bugs. I really really liked bugs and when you are looking around at ants on the ground or potato bugs or caterpillars you sort of will run into trash and some of the trash will be interesting. At least in my neighborhood this was true. I remember finding brown paper bags with glue wads inside. The glue sniffer’s corner. And a whole block of houses was empty up the street. We all went inside, dug through things. Opened drawers. Bums were there. People set corners on fire. Peed on things. Made out. Places like that totally magnetized me. I loved finding things there that would give me a weird chill. A hairbrush. A pile of letters. And there was a dump, an unofficial dump, actually it was a mile-long stretch along a ravine down the hill where people threw things out, and I used to go poking around there, looking for tossed-off weirdness. This is when I was really little, like around 8. I would walk down there by myself, digging around in the piles of garbage. Finding suspenders and stoves and photos of people. There was a store called Pay’n’Save near my house and I used to look around their garbage area, trying to find broken things they threw out. It relieved a certain kind of itch I didn’t know any other way to scratch.What are some of your favorite and most memorable things you’ve found?The first thing that always comes to mind is a tiny bowling bag purse that would have fit in my hand when I was about 7. It was perfect with a little zipper and it had five bucks in it. I found it in the woods, in this totally unexpected area that kids were using to race bikes around piles of dirt. I loved that bowling bag! It was green and white and made me feel huge. I found a series of notes in a notebook a man and a woman had been writing each other over a year. She worked nights. He worked days. It ends with her writing lies! lies! lies all over the last pages. In a certain way my favorite or most memorable thing is hard to identify because it’s been a life of picking up trash. As I look around the room right now I can see that only the computer and stereo and other tech stuff are new. Mostly it’s found or church rummage sale, which is a paid-for kind of trash. About my favorite kind.
One of the things I used to love to do is take something really eye-catching that I didn’t want anymore and put it outside somewhere on display and see how long until it was "found." I used to love to take my penny jar and make tall stacks of pennies in funny places in alleys, the kind of places kids might look but adults would not. I loved walking and checking on the pennies. Seeing which of the stacks had been located.
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