“Sculptural landfill,” he said, and for a second it didn’t sound like he said anything strange until the people around him made noises that they hadn’t heard him say that before. Neither had I, and I quickly realised that he had said something original and maybe a little profound. “Didn’t you coin that just now?” I spoke. “I suppose those words did come out of my mouth,” he said. It’s incredible the profound things that are said at a bar which go undocumented in human history. If people listened to the things people say with a pint in their hands and the smell of cigarettes on the air (poisoning us, mind you), then we would be a much more culturally enriched society. It’s a shame that the words of drunks falls only on the ears of drunks. I think we should try sitting at a bar, idly reading a novel by a famous author, just letting your eyes see the words without fully trying to comprehend the words and listening you the babbling around you. Pubs are the melting pots of minds, it is no wonder that in Ulysses the pub chapter with the Cyclops is written half in a style recounting of legends, while the other half is written in the mundane pub chatter that we typically associate with such establishments. The man who said sculptural landfall offered some examples of such artefacts, like art deco lamps with faulty wiring and there was something else. I don’t remember the full details. I just think sculptural landfall sounds like an architect’s idea of an archaeologist’s term. Either way, it is evocative and instantly brought the idea of beautiful refuse into our minds, with the brilliant juxtaposition of high art and that of waste. For that moment, this random man (at least to me; I think he was well-known by his crowd) in a pub in Dunedin had become a poet in the vein of Robby Burns, thus echoing the mythology of the sculpture of Burns, who sits in the Octagon watching tourist busses come and go and seagulls shit on his head. It’s funny how the words of someone can sound like poetry. Sculptural landfill.