Kingsley Widmer
IN PRAISE OF WASTE:
Some Reflections on
Contemporary Culture
Waste now has a peculiar, perhaps a distinguishing, fasci–
nation for us. Ours may be not only a wasting culture, multiply
characterized by a remarkable wastefulness which carries us beyond the
portentous sense of Waste Land into something both more trivial and
desperate, more aesthetic and institutional, but· waste may have become
the thing itself-The Waste Culture.
"My question to myself," said a wealthy woman whom I had
sardonically questioned about her financial support of several cultural
projects, "is not 'Am I wasting my money?' but 'Which is the best, the
most amusing and curious, way of wasting?' . . .. " The publishing
industry has developed a similar sense of humor. Apparently we have
new genres, such as The Quick-Look Book, The Throw-Away Book,
The Endlessly Replaceable Book, The Very Bad Book Which Must Be
Treated Seriously for the Moment, among others.
In
the rising market
of non-book books-volumes less written than accreted, or excreted, on
near-random principles, such as guides
to
almost everything unim–
portant and plagiarized collections of selections of graffiti, debris and
manias-are somewhat bookish devices for easy wasting. I admit a
pang (probably a misplaced symptom of a more general malaise) at the
first sight of a piece of mine reprinted in a collection with p"erforated
pages. I suppose I had had the covert image of the indignant reader
wasting my wisdom by hurling the book, like Luther's inkpot, not just
peeling out the pages. A similar discomfort came with the boxed
anthology of unfastened sheets which could be readil y rearranged,
curiously disarranged, or discarded. My friendly book-buyer wouldn't
take that freebie-"How do I know it's
all
there?" -so I dumped it in
the wastebasket, a gesture to say that it was at least
there.
Perhaps there, too, belong such antique pieties as bookishness and
the passion for qualitative distinctions. To understand contemporary
book publishing one should not wastefully apply the categories of
