“Cereal boxes were my first literature. I spent virtually every morning of my childhood reading the box while ruminating on the cereal, long before I ever perused a morning newspaper.” — William Davies King, “Collections of Nothing”

“麦片盒是我的第一份阅读材料。早在我读晨报前，童年的每一个清晨，我都会边阅读盒子边咀嚼麦片粥。”——William Davies King，“虚无的收藏品”。

William Davies King spent a good chunk of his adult life becoming one of the top scholars of Eugene O’Neill in the country. He has endeavored for considerably longer as a premier collector of stuff hardly anyone wants.

William Davies King花费了他成年后的大部分时光成为了Eugene O' Neill 的顶尖学者之一。他已经为几乎没有人想要的东西做了卓越的收藏家而努力了。

Thursday, June 20, from 9 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. at UC Santa Barbara’s Modern Dance Studio in the campus’s Humanities and Social Sciences Building. It is there that the Distinguished Professor of Theater and Dance will create a “Tree of LifeTM” with more than 2,100 cereal boxes he has collected for nearly 40 years.

6月20日晚上7点30分，在加州大学圣塔芭芭拉分校（UC Santa Barbara）校园人文社会科学大楼的现代舞工作室里，这位著名的戏剧和舞蹈教授将收集了将近40年的2100多个谷类食品盒创造一棵“生命之树”。

 “I imagine that when I lay this out as a mandala,” King said, “there will be a kind of revisiting of the scope of a whole life — at least my life.”

King说，“我想当我把这布置成一个曼陀拉的时候，会有一种对生命的重新审视--至少是对我的生活。”

For many people, being a collector is to be obsessed with a single subject: hubcaps, Soviet propaganda posters, stamps, mousetraps, Victorian underwear; the list is endless. King, however, is … different. “I collect nothing — with a passion,” as he wrote in the perfectly titled “Collections of Nothing” (University of Chicago Press). His nothings are tuna can labels (at least 55 varieties), envelope linings, bits of metal, tea bag tags — and those boxes of Life, Cheerios, Count Chocula and everything else.

对许多人来说，收藏家就是痴迷于某个单一的主题：胡同帽，苏联宣传海报，邮票，捕鼠器，维多利亚内衣；名单是无穷尽的。然而，King是…不一样的。“我带着一种激情，收集虚无，”他在“虚无的收藏品”中写道(芝加哥大学出版社)。他的虚无包括收藏品金枪鱼罐头标签(至少55种)、信封纸、金属碎片、茶袋标签-还有那些Life, Cheerios, Count Chocula的盒子等等。

“I grew up in a house where the idea of keeping something like this is just, ugh,” said King, who grew up in Canton, Ohio. “My whole culture, my whole family and society said, ‘No, you just dispose of trash and move on to the new product. All you want is the new.’ And somehow I developed this nostalgia, this sense that returning to the past is something that is satisfying or soothing to me.”

在俄亥俄州的州长大的King说，“我长大的环境认为保留这样的东西是正常的。而我的文化，家庭和社会都说，‘不，你只是处理垃圾，然后买新产品。你想要的只是新的。’不知怎么的，我养成了这种怀旧的感觉，即回到过去对我来说满足或抚慰。”

His collection of cereal boxes — all but one or two the shells of breakfasts past and carefully sorted — reflects his appreciation of marketing and packaging to draw people to a product. He notes that Quaker Oats, the maker of Life, has zero connection to the Religious Society of Friends. The company, he said, “just thought it would sell. Purely commercial opportunity. Honesty, purity, all of those things. They said, ‘That’s good for selling cereal.’ ”

他收集的麦片—仅有一两个是精心挑选的—反映出他对市场营销和吸引人的产品包装的欣赏。他指出，桂格燕麦（Quaker Oats），Life的制造商，与Religious Society of Friends几乎没有任何联系。他说，“这家公司只是单纯卖产品。纯商机。诚实，纯洁，所有这些。他们说，‘这对卖麦片很有好处。’”

For King, his collection is also art. He practices bibliolage, the creation of whole book collages using bits from the collection. The tension between art and commerce is inescapable — and maybe the point.

对King来说，他的收藏也是艺术。他的著作由他的收藏拼接粘贴而成。艺术与商业之间不可避免的紧张，也许正是这一点。

“It is a celebration of material culture wrapped around a contempt for material culture. It is a burgeoning collection full of emptiness. It is a collection of nothing. That is my title, and I am its lord, its consumer and author and subject and victim.” — “Collections of Nothing”

“这是对物质文化的庆祝，也是对物质文化的蔑视。这是一个充满空虚的新兴集合。它是虚无的。这就是我的头衔，我是它的主人，是它的顾客，作者，主体和受害者。”—“虚无的收藏品”。