In a piece called Three Rooms – published in the Journal of Social Archaeology June 2004 issue and as a traumwerk/wiki, I tracked the case of David Rodinsky. He walked out of his one room apartment in Whitechapel, London one morning in 1969, and never returned; the door was unlocked over a decade later to reveal the strangest of cabbalistic remains … or the everyday detritus of a simple life.

Philip (D of philosophistry.com) and Christine Morton have found another case in San Jose.

He left his apartment suddenly over a year ago and nothing has been heard of him since.

He seems to have been a Vietnam veteran turned truckdriver. All his stuff is here. He has paid no bills since he went, left no contact address. The apartment is about to be cleared.

Philip and I talked today of the dust accumulating on the mundanity of his life, his absence, but uncanny presence in everyday and quite unexceptional items, the awkwardness and guilt in confronting these remains …

I am reading Brenda Fowler’s Ice Man at the moment – another take on that lonely bronze age corpse found in the Alps … and I think of that scene in Silence of the Lambs when Clarice Starling is directed to a garage store by Hannibal Lecter, to find the gruesome remains of a serial killer’s early life …

I am to visit the apartment on Wednesday …

and it will feature in our new photoblog – archaeography.com

See also some recent comments on the 1947 Graflex [Link]