A Dust Up With Fidel: Interview

Why did you choose the act of dusting as the subject of your essay?

When I woke up on a recent morning with a hangover, I was genuinely surprised by the intensity of my urge to clean, to order my life and impose control in some way. This, to me, was representative of the larger instinct to make a place, and to maintain and protect it against the inevitable entropy that dissolves everything eventually. I think the amount of time we spend merely maintaining our lives–rebuilding the sand castle, essentially–is pretty remarkable, as is the automatic, almost robotic quality of this maintenance. There is a lot of life being lived as we brush our teeth, wash the dishes, or dust the shelves, but we rarely see anything special in these tasks.

I chose dusting in particular because I couldn’t think of any task that was more mundane. It’s something we do as quickly as we can, with our minds occupied by other things, so we’re unlikely to absorb much of the experience. And yet when I dusted the shelf where I keep all my random odds and ends, it forced me to interact with aspects of my life that I had long neglected, to bring awareness to these things and begin to contemplate connections between them. The act of dusting served the same purpose, for me, that Tuan attributes to good literature, which “…draws attention to aspects of experience that we may otherwise fail to notice” (162).

In the essay, you describe memories associated with a series of random objects on your shelf. What did you hope to accomplish by doing this?

At first, I thought this idea was original, but reading back through Tuan’s Space and Place, I realized that I must have been subconsciously inspired by a passage from Wright Morris that Tuan excerpts, where Morris looks at the objects on his bureau–a cigar box, pills, poppies–and feels, despite the mundane nature of these things, that there is an independent presence there (144).

<I was interested in a concept that Ian Frazier explores in his 1995 essay In the Stacks, about spending a Saturday afternoon in the stacks of Columbia’s Butler Library. He begins by describing the scene in and around the library, but becomes engrossed in the graffiti that people have carved onto the library study tables. There is political and religious commentary, there are boasts about one particular campus fraternity or another, and there are cries for help, both academic and existential. For example, one student writes “TOMORROW THERE IS A PHYSICS EXAM (11/15/83) HELP!” and another writes “I cut myself last night with a razor because I need help” (87). Most of the individual bits of graffiti are unrelated to one another, but as a group they begin to tell an interesting story about Columbia as a whole. Until Frazier comes along, no one has bothered to place the pieces of the story next to each other to see what they look like, to see what message they might convey. He does this, and in examining a series of neglected objects from my own life, I tried to do the same in this essay.

Why did you choose to photograph the objects that you write about the way you did?

I had never done non-digital photography before, so I thought this would be an interesting time to explore that realm, and a roommate of mine had recently purchased a camera called the Diana F+. It’s a pretty cheap plastic camera with its origins in 1970’s China; rumor has it that it cost a dollar there when it first came out. You can adjust the shutter speed and aperture, but other than that, it’s not really possible to manipulate and customize the image anywhere near as much as can be done with a digital camera. As a result, there’s a high degree of randomness and chance associated with how the images will come out. Since the objects I was photographing were themselves somewhat random, and since much of the essay consists of my interpreting them and drawing connections between them, I thought the photos should themselves be subject to a range of interpretations, and the photographic technique I used lent itself to that.

What difficulties did you encounter in the process of doing this project?

The biggest challenge, of course, was in trying to write about the mundane in an interesting way. I think of Frazier as the gold standard for this, the way he can write about something as seemingly uninteresting as glitter and yet somehow make it compelling. I don’t think I necessarily succeeded in making the mundane compelling, but the process deepened my appreciation of how difficult that is to do.

Also, just being inexperienced with photography was a challenge, both in terms of the quality of the images and my ignorance at the shop where I got them developed. I didn't know anything about the film I was using, and I even shot an entire roll with the lens cap on!