Collections of Nothing
source: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/reviews/brieflynoted/2008/07/07/080707crbn_brieflynoted4
-
-
- khsing
- added this
King, a professor at Santa Barbara, has spent decades collecting things that nobody else would want: food packages and labels (he has about eighteen thousand), illustrations snipped from old dictionaries (seven thousand), linings of “security” envelopes (eight hundred patterns), “the mute, meager, practically valueless object, like a sea-washed spigot, its mouth stoppered by a stone.” 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.
-
- tags:
- Books, Autobiography, The New Yorker, Collecting, 4 more
