A Fascination with Found Paper Objects

Supermarket finds are invariably shopping lists. The usual stuff: excessively packaged foods noted by brand name, snacks, breakfast cereals that are mostly air, laundry products. On the street, you never know what you'll come up with. I once picked up a folded sheet of notebook paper to find one line of writing: "girl you no I love you so." (Darn those homonyms!)

Found objects first appeared in works of art associated with the surrealist and dada movements of the early 20th century, when World War I scrambled an ordered, rational world. Artists have since then made mosaics from bits of junked glass, and sculptures from aluminum cans and auto parts. Detroit's Heidelberg Project decorates entire abandoned houses with discarded objects of all kinds.

Harry Partch was an avant-garde composer who lived the tramp's live during the Great Depression of the 1930s. He made instruments from things he found in trash dumps, and wrote music for them. John Cage added the concept of indeterminancy; a universe operating completely at random. He once placed star charts atop sheets of blank music. The notes went wherever the stars happened to fall.

Indeterminacy applied to grocery shopping would mean that dinner could be made from only items that were on the lists I found.

Found documents didn't have their day until technology made it possible for them to be scanned and posted on the Internet.

Found Magazine is both an on-line and print publication whose readers are encouraged to scan and submit their finds. One is posted each day at www.foundmagazine.com. So stop and think before you leave that note under someone's windshield wiper. It could end up there.

Anything is eligible: memos, cash register receipts, handwritten notes that fell out of library books, notes written in an angry scrawl and left where the victim would find them, and more formal messages composed on Word, two paragraphs, indented.

Each submission is a window on someone else's life.

Published collections of celebrities' letters, their diaries, and personal papers, have always intrigued the average person. They give outsiders a chance to see a well-known public figure with their guard down. The more infamous, the greater the interest. Thus the fascination with Kurt Cobain's journals, and the Mitchell Report whose proof that certain major league baseball players used steroids included copies of their cancelled checks.

Blogs and personal web sites, and social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, have made it possible for anyone to be a celebrity in their own small corner of the Internet. They've given any printed document potential star status.

It's also human nature to be nosy. Who hasn't wondered about the secret lives of strangers and wished that, somehow, they could get a peek inside?

On the Found site, search "beach note" and read the entry for December 3, 2007. In the credit line will be a name you'll recognize.

"Girl you no I love you so" might also turn up there someday.