The Simplicity of Objects or, How I learned to Love Kipple
by Tom Jacobs
They were the serious toys of the men who lived in the dead world of sunshine and rain he had left, the world that had condemned him guilty.
~ Richard Wright, “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1942)
Sometimes when I step from one room in my apartment into another room, I have the distinct sense that there is somehow more stuff than there was before. It’s as if a bunch of stuff has just magically appeared while I was gone for a few moments. Here is another book. There is another trinket or fossil or object of some small interest to me. Where did it all come from? I must have bought it. I suppose I did. Why? Hard to say. Loneliness? Personal fascination? What am I going to do with it? Not at all sure.
I will try to get around to reading the book but most of it is, in a purely technical sense, useless. It’s just stuff that I buy because I like to look at it and hold and feel the weight of it or because it gives me some small pleasure to be able to say I “own” it.
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Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers of yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.
~ Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Back in the day when Don DeLillo was somewhat reclusive and not very public, I saw somewhere that he was going to give a talk about his new book, “Falling Man.” From the time I read “White Noise” in college, I realized this was a guy who got it. Or maybe it was just that I sensed that he was talking directly to me and that we shared a private sort of fraternity. I assume everyone has had this experience when an artist or a poet or a novelist seems to be speaking directly to you and without mediation. Even if they themselves weren’t aware of it, they are speaking directly and, slightly more dangerously for, you.
So I got to his speaking engagement about two hours early. In case you think ill of me, there was a dude who had gotten there even earlier than me, which I thought was crazy (who shows up two and a half hours early just to hear a dumb talk?). So we stood there, awkwardly together and alone. I don’t know why I didn’t engage him in conversation. I vaguely remember getting a strange vibe from him, though, and thinking, “how can DeLillo be speaking directly to both him and me both?” Then I noticed he had a paper bag full of first editions and realized that this guy was not someone who had read a passage of DeLillo’s and who had stared off the page with his mind boggling in recognition and admiration. This guy was a collector. Maybe that is why we didn’t speak to each other, although I am a kind of collector too.