Collections of Nothing - Hardcover

King, William Davies

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226437000 ISBN 13: 9780226437002

Verlag: UNIV OF CHICAGO PR, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Nearly everyone collects something, even those who don’t think of themselves as collectors. William Davies King, on the other hand, has devoted decades to collecting nothing—and a lot of it. With Collections of Nothing, he takes a hard look at this habitual hoarding to see what truths it can reveal about the impulse to accumulate.

Part memoir, part reflection on the mania of acquisition, Collections of Nothing begins with the stamp collection that King was given as a boy. In the following years, rather than rarity or pedigree, he found himself searching out the lowly and the lost, the cast-off and the undesired: objects that, merely by gathering and retaining them, he could imbue with meaning, even value. As he relates the story of his burgeoning collections, King also offers a fascinating meditation on the human urge to collect. This wry, funny, even touching appreciation and dissection of the collector’s art as seen through the life of a most unusual specimen will appeal to anyone who has ever felt the unappeasable power of that acquisitive fever.

"What makes this book, bred of a midlife crisis, extraordinary is the way King weaves his autobiography into the account of his collection, deftly demonstrating that the two stories are essentially one. . . . His hard-won self-awareness gives his disclosures an intensity that will likely resonate with all readers, even those whose collections of nothing contain nothing at all."—New Yorker

"King's extraordinary book is a memoir served up on the backs of all things he collects. . . . His story starts out sounding odd and singular—who is this guy?—but by the end, you recognize yourself in a lot of what he does."—Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

William Davies King has explored numerous odd corners of theater history in books and articles, including Henry Irving’s “Waterloo”, which won the Joe A. Calloway Prize. He is professor in the Department of Theater and Dance at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Collections of Nothing

By William Davies King

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2008 University of Chicago Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-43700-2

Chapter One

Nothing Lost

On a hot summer day in 1998, I pulled up at the house I still owned with the woman who was soon to become my ex-wife to find that she had delivered every item connected with me to the garage. My surprise was not that she had divvied up our goods, though I would rather have done the work myself, but the spectacle of what an immense and unattractive volume of me there was, much of it retained only because I collect, as a collector collects, compulsively. And then some.

There I was, forty-three, wearing shorts and an old T-shirt already heavy with sweat, in the dusty glare of desert suburbia, Ryder truck still hissing and ticking at my back as the great panel door swung open with a shriek. The door shuddered, and I shuddered too. There were the usual black plastic bags of shoes and canted piles of shirts on hangers, portable radios and razors and power tools, but also the singular multiplicity of diverse collections of nothing, a junkstore dumpster's highlights, stuff of no clear value to anyone but someone like me.

I am a collector, something a lot of people can understand. My being a collector of nothing will require explanation. I am on the small side. A neighbor told my parents I was the only child he'd ever seen who could walk upright under a table. Eventually I grew to a normal height, but I sometimes think of myself as an overgrown runt. My weight has always hovered just above normal, which is typical, I think, among people who grew up fighting for a larger portion. I have two younger brothers who could easily be cheated, though I chose not to, and an older sister who always wanted it all and could not be cheated because she was disadvantaged, disabled, disastrous, and later insane. Because of her, I tend to measure my fair and healthy share, then sneak a bit more. My eating disorder is in my collecting. I eat nothing, in excess.

I've read accounts of people who one day give away everything, purging themselves of material association. They report feeling liberated, disburdened, and alive for the first time. The moment of my divorce might have been a good moment for me to cleanse myself that way. I did not like what I saw under the bare bulb in that shadowy garage. There, mixed in with my necessaries, shone forth what had doomed me to a life of collecting-that super-superfluity of sub-substance. During twenty years of living with my wife, decades of relentless acquisition, I had found ways of weaving my collections into the lattice of our life. Now, brought out from concealment, arranged in heaps, not carelessly but also not artfully, these things looked like signs of hoarding, which is a diagnosis, not a hobby.

So I transported the cumbersummation of me into the Ryder and into my new, unmarried life, in the hope that I might locate myself somewhere in the midst of it.

* * *

Middle-class life is itself a collection: a spouse, a house, a brace of children, a suitable car, a respectable career, cuddly pets, photos of grinning relatives, toys for all ages and hours, coffee and coffeepots, coffee cups and spoons, coffee tables and coffee table books about coffee and about coffee tables. I had the set, and then I had another set-boxes and binders and closets full of stuff no one needs:

Fifty-three Cheez-It boxes, empty Thirty-four old dictionaries Three dozen rusted skeleton keys, found as a cluster in the woods A mound of used airmail envelopes, most culled from mailroom trash A pipe tobacco tin chock-full of smooth pebbles My neighbor's library card from the 1960s, before he became a felon Family snapshots of people unknown to me Plastic cauliflower bags (many), all mimicking the sphericity of a cauliflower head Business cards of business card printers, though I had no business card Cigar ribbons, though I did not smoke ...

"And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge" (Milton, Paradise Regained), enough odd stuff that, if you looked at each item for just two seconds, you'd be bored for a long time, if not eternity.

* * *

I left behind just one collection, naturally sculpted beach boulders with which I had decorated the lawn and gardens. I had gathered them on countless long drives between Claremont, on the outskirts of Los Angeles County, where I lived with my college professor wife and two daughters, and my job as a university professor in Santa Barbara. For a decade, I spent weekends at the house and the midweek at work, one hundred and thirty miles away. I would often stop at a beach on the drive home, hoping the night air might stave off drowsiness. It was there that I fell in love with these Brancusi boulders. They looked like naked bodies in the moonlight, wrapped warm and tight to each other. Soon I was rolling the larger rocks up a board into the trunk of my car. I imagine I collected a thousand or so, five or six at a time. The next day I would place them in the yard or gardens, like a curator of antiquities home from Rome.

Ironically, this was the most beautiful of my collections and the only one constantly on display. To set these boulders off, I practiced a sort of topiary mowing, sculpting patches of alligator grass with my Murray 20 mower to accent the sea-worn contours. In the spring, lush green would arabesque salty gray. By late summer, the grass would turn sharp and sallow amid the seemingly liquid rocks, and huge wolf spiders would finish the brutal composition with no-nonsense webs. Finally, I would mow everything, hose down the stones, and start a new configuration for the next year. Many people commented on them, and perhaps they still do, though the lawn now has the conventionally trimmed look of bimonthly mow-and-blow yardmen. The stones remain, never moving, monumental. So I have left some of my heaviness behind, the heaviest of all that I was, and it looks good. When I glance inside the house now, it does not seem the same house, nor does my ex-wife seem the same person. The house looks better.

* * *

Here are all the varieties of tuna fish for which I have labels:

Albertson's Solid White Tuna Budgens Skipjack Tuna Chunks Bumble Bee Chunk Light Tuna-Touch of Lemon Bumble Bee Solid White Albacore in Water (blue label) Bumble Bee Solid White Albacore in Water (green label) Chicken of the Sea Chunk Light Tuna in Spring Water Bumble Bee Solid White Tuna in Vegetable Oil Bumble Bee Prime Fillet Solid White Albacore in Water Cento Solid Pack Light Tuna Chicken of the Sea Albacore in Water Chicken of the Sea Chunk Light Tuna Chicken of the Sea Lite Chunk Light Tuna in Spring Water Crown Prince Natural Chunk Light No Salt Added Tongol Tuna Dolores Chunk Light Yellowfin Tuna Geisha Albacore Solid White Tuna in Water Geisha Light Tuna in Water Genova Tonno Solid Light Tuna in Olive Oil Genova Tonno Solid Light Tuna in Olive Oil Seasoned with Salt King of the Sea Fancy Solid Tuna in Spring Water Kirkland Signature Solid White Albacore Lady Lee Albacore Solid White Tuna in Water Polar All Natural Tuna Chunk Light in Water Polar All Natural Tuna Solid White Albacore in Water Ralph's Private Selection Albacore Solid White Tuna Packed in Water...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF CHICAGO PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226437000
• ISBN 13: 9780226437002
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 163
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Klondyke B.V.; info@klondyke.nl; ; Vlaardingenstraat 51; Almere; 1324LB; Niederlande