His own fondness is for "the mute, meager, practically valueless object.... What I like is the potency of the impotent thing, the renewed and adorable life I find in the dead and despised object".
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".
King believes that the impulse to collect comes "partly from a wound we feel deep inside this richest, most materialistic of all societies". But he also considers other possibilities—"It finds order in things, virtue in preservation, knowledge in obscurity, and above all it discovers and even creates value". His own fondness is for "the mute, meager, practically valueless object.
Choose a valueless object with a simple surface area such as a toy doll or a ball.
He has spent his life telling you, and girls and women like you, that your lives are valueless except as sexual objects.
It consists of a confusing, dusty, heteroclite accretion of objects — many of them valueless, or ephemeral and kept beyond their time — behind which he seems to immure himself in order to feel at ease and resident.
It wears you down, seeing tweet after tweet telling you that women are objects, that we're valueless, that we don't even deserve the care and respect that people give murderous, inanimate objects.
Surely the aim is to make it valueless, not priceless.
The cars being essentially valueless, much of the early focus by these sentimental collectors was the salvaging and rehabilitation of the objects.
