I think your two observations that
a) statistics aren't applicable here and
b) a postmodern map might try to represent through inscrutability
are the reason the gyre appealed to you in the first place, when you kept saying how some people thought the gyre was the size of Texas--no!--of France!! etc etc., and how mind-blowing the disparity between and enthusiasm embedded into those claims is. I think that's why the gyre became such a good focal point for these questions, because it eludes our efforts to map it in traditional ways. Again, though, I think it's really important (and this is something I'm trying to apply to my own thinking as well) not to see the gyre as an un-problematic, living definition of these post-modern issues of (non)place and non-mappability.

I think that both potential points of comparison are interesting, but why do you need them? I guess it just seems like a lot of work to take on at this point. The landfill is pretty awesome though---the way a certain type of non-place is being made even more invisible, literally being buried under the earth to make way for a new surface, one that we will be quite able to say is 3x Central Park or whatever.

Isle of Flowers made me think about two things:
1. The desire, when talking about global economy and trash as its symptom, to extract and re-commodify some small representative object---a tomato, some bath toys (that's so crazy!!! little sailors in one big bathtub--how perverse), or I'm also thinking of that Dave Eggers essay in which he traces a t-shirt that some kid in a third-world country wears back to its origin (people talk about that a lot---startling photographs of refugees wearing Celtics t's). This attempt tries, I think, to make garbage speak by re-integrating and re-mapping it into the global economy. How can garbage speak of the global economy without returning to it?

2. The end of Isle of Flowers, when the women and children collect the plant matter, seemed to me to capture an interesting place in the chain of things...when an object has been pressed and squeezed and all the exchange value has been wrested from it, use value still remains in a perverse way. I'm not exactly sure what I mean here, but it seemed like trash as this underbelly and these people as a kind of underbelly so destitute they had fallen so at the bottom of the chain almost seem exempt from it---a loaded comparison, definitely, but both the garbage and the people represented this kind of map-less, obligation-less, exchange-less parallel system of values, places, and networks.

I'm working on writing today, I'll send it to everyone later tonight or tomorrow, hopefully.