Profane Waste

Front Cover
Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2006 - Art - 65 pages
Jewels buried in a grave, cigarettes smoked in $100 bills, champagne poured into a bathtub--these perverse, irrational acts are also somehow thrilling. Profane Waste explores the workings of an unacknowledged taboo: the taboo against willful dissipation. Dana Hoey, an acclaimed photographer appearing here in her first book, presents a series of 30 haunting images that are at once ultra-real and uncanny. Bestselling biographer and social critic Gretchen Rubin uses lucid analysis and explosive examples--the actions of Rauschenberg, Jesus, Ivan Boesky, Thoreau and Goebbels, among others--to demonstrate the power of the title concept. Together, Hoey's photographs and Rubin's provocative arguments create a shock of recognition: they lay bare intentions that stand outside the conventional goals of acquisition and accumulation.

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Contents

THE TABOO AGAINST WASTE
3
ORDINARY WASTE AND PROFANE WASTE
15
WASTE THAT IS NOT PROFANE WASTE
23
SPECIES OF PROFANE WASTE HEEDLESS WASTE
39
SPECIES OF PROFANE WASTE DEFIANT WASTE
47
SPECIES OF PROFANE WASTE DENYING WASTES
59
CONCLUSION
63
Copyright

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About the author (2006)

Gretchen Craft Rubin was editor in chief of the Yale Law Journal. She clerked on the Supreme Court under Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and served as counsel to FCC Chairman Reed Hundt. An adjunct professor at Yale, she currently lives in Manhattan.

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