the tools of collecting

I’m going to shift my response to the tools of collection, largely because when I examined my own processes, I found that there was little that I made the effort to collect in any exhaustive or detail-oriented way. There have been periods where I kept an eye out for matchbooks, novelty magnets, floaty pens, and books of poetry, but by and large those interests have passed, or the collecting urgency, the archival desire, has mellowed out considerably. There is plenty that I sort through however, and even more that I neglect; I moved a few months ago and still have unpacked boxes piled up in my closet, and my email inbox, at this point in the semester, has gotten particularly bad, despite my best efforts to create ever more descriptive and narrow folders and subcategorizations.

But I’m interested in the area of tools of collection, what one needs in order to survey or maintain or even “use” a collection, be it some kind of music player, an eBay account, or a refined skill in a specialized area. I am a compulsive notetaker and carry with me a notebook everywhere I go –it’s necessarily blank, without lines, and small. And while it’s fairly heterogeneous as far as the kinds of things that go in there – lecture notes, shopping lists, messy film notes written in the dark, odd words or phrases I hear, particularly medical ones, messages written in big letters to be shown to my roommate while she’s talking on the phone—it’s not personal in the way that my actual journaling or writing is, which takes place only on my computer, nested away in a labyrinthine system of deliberately misnamed folders. But I like to think of my notebook as an alternate journal, something more “public,” though not with the intention of being seen; a kind of net that’s cast to collect all the words and ideas that I come across in the everyday. A bit more formally, i.e. on my laptop, I keep a list of all films that I ever watch, organized by year, and listing information such as who I saw the film with, and what venue I saw it in (this would suggest I am a huge cinephagus; I am not. I just have a poor memory). But these lists and little books, ordered chronologically, accessible only by me (as entry is limited by my handwriting legibility, even for me), become their own kind of archive, some physical substrate of ephemeral experience, a material memory. I rarely go back to my notes, but there’s something comforting in having them there, even if I can’t find what it is I’m looking for, or if my graphological inscrutability –my personal “code”– has locked me out entirely.

For me, one of the paradigmatic collector figures is, of course, Harry Smith, who was known for his wildly diverse inhabitations of different fields and material things, from string figures, recordings of Kiowa ceremonies, paper airplanes, and Ukrainian Easter eggs, to his own paintings, films, esoteric mysticism and his seminal Anthology of American Folk Music, which formed an archival backbone for the folk revival movement on its own terms. But one of the most interesting things about Smith, in my mind, was the depth at which he’d dive into an area, and then once he felt complete, the speed at which he’d abandon everything. There’s a new book out from the Getty that attempts to bring together Smith’s various collecting and collection-making impulses, but I wonder, if in the context of collecting tools, Smith’s own disposition, his own two hands and his inimitable mind, were the only throughline that could connect such an eccentric assortment. Certainly the collector is always present behind a collection (or maybe not always, but there is an implied direction that guides its changing parameters), but I know of no more extreme case than Smith, who used a variety of tools, and amassed many, very rich archives, but himself was the only connecting point that could link them.