Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice On Toast, And Other Marvels Of Jurassic Technology (1996) - Plot & Excerpts
So, you’re waiting at a bus stop in Culver City when you notice an odd little shop (just, you know, stuck in among the zinnias?) and mosey on in. You could be forgiven if you thought for a moment that you might have dropped into a story from the White Hart or one of Joseph Jorkens’ club yarns. But the tales told here are not tall, at least not the ones told by the author. He tells of this very odd place, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, which holds a dazzling array of oddities, many of which illustrate real science.The book is divided into two sections, Inhaling the Spore and Cerebral Growth. The first was a 1994 article printed in Harper’s. It begins with a story about a strange parasite, a fungus that infects the Cameroonian stink ant—one of the only ants capable of emitting a vocal sound people can hear, (Learning things like this is one of the reasons we read books like this… and no, the ant doesn’t say “He-elllp me-e-e-e.”),—working its way into the ant’s brain and driving the poor creature to climb up some vegetation and then clamp its jaws so tightly onto a leaf that it becomes locked in place. The fungus proceeds to take over the remaining brain and then sends a stalk up from the ant’s head. The fungal stalk grows until, having reached full maturity, it bursts and spews a cloud of spores to stalk the next generation of ants. It is no stretch to infer that Wechsler was himself so infected the first day he wandered into owner/curator David Wilson’s treasure trove. While no fungal spikes appear to have emerged from the author’s cranium, he was indeed infected with a growing curiousity about the materials he had seen. Wechsler tracks down the veracity of some of these. It almost does not matter whether any are reality-based. Some are, of course. Some not so much. In Part 2, Cerebral Growth, the author looks at the beginnings of museums, the so-called “wonder cabinets” of the 15th and 16th and 17th centuries, eclectic collections of samples from nature and art that sometimes filled entire rooms. Francis Bacon urged collectors to prepare:“a goodly, huge cabinet, wherein whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art or engine has made rare in stuff, form or motion; whatsoever singularity, chance and the shuffle of things hath produced; whatsoever Nature has wrought in things that want life and may be kept; shall be sorted and included.”These Wunderkammern of yore constituted the birthplace of museums, which now tend to be public rather than private, and split between nature and art. The overall sense of wonder that infused these collections is what made them special, and what makes us special in our appreciation of the stimulating, new and surprising. The MJT is a throwback, including not only scientific exhibitions, but displays of intricate scenes carved into plum pits and microminiature sculptures on “motes of dust, specks of lint, and wisps of hair.” And of course, an actual human horn. (Thus the cute section title) The sort of material that, eliciting from us our natural sense of wonder, makes us stand, stare (or sit, read) and say “cool.” Almost constituting a third section, an extensive, 40-page list of notes is also filled with interesting tidbits. To come across an unsuspected gem like this is truly a joy. Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder was a Pulitzer finalist in 1996. That it did not win is understandable, given its very modest length. But that it was nominated is, well, wonderful.The museum is very much a going concern. You can visit at http://www.mjt.org/. The museum’s soul, David Hildebrand Wilson, received a MacArthur genius grant in 2001.PS - One of my favorite quotes from the book:P 145“Many ancient peoples believed that strength and fertility were concentrated in horns,” [Martin] Montestier [in the book Human Oddities] points out, “hence the numerous cults worshiping bulls and rams…Jupiter, the supreme Roman god, was depicted with horns, as was Isis, the Egyptian goddess of fertility [definitely not cherry Isis]. When Alexander the Great declared himself the son of Jupiter [or, actually, of Zeus], he ordered that all coins bearing his likeness should henceforth show him with horns. Moses was sometimes depicted with horns as was Christ Himself. Many rulers had horns affixed to their helmets as a symbol of power.”UPDATE7/31/11 - I came across a small bit of the taste of the times (late 17th, early 18th centuries) in The Clockwork Universe. Gottfried Leibniz, the other creator of calculus, and overall unbelievable genius (p 237) drew up detailed plans for a “museum of everything that could be imagined,” roughly a cross between a science exhibition and a Ripley’s Believe it or Not museum. It would feature clowns and fireworks, races between mechanical horses, rope dancers, fire eaters, musical instruments that played themselves, gambling halls (to bring in money), inventions, an anatomical theater, transfusions, telescopes, demonstrations of how the human voice could shatter a drinking glass or how light reflected from a mirror could ignite a fire.
This is a mind-bomb of a book. It starts out very small (160 pages, including generous footnotes), but somewhere in the reading, it pops open inside your head, like a popcorn kernel, with a loud "PTHUNK!" And suddenly, large swaths of your brain-space are being employed to process the implications of this strange, little-known museum out in west Los Angeles.The Museum of Jurassic Technology, if you're not familiar, is curated and owned by Mr. David Wilson. It's operated at a net loss for years, its owners always just on this side of bankruptcy. It is unassuming from the outside -- most first-time visitors probably stopped in just because they were waiting for a bus at the corner -- but once inside, you're brought into a world completely removed from our own. Mr. Wilson has an exhibit that features African stink ants that have been made crazed by a tree spore which causes them to climb up vines and blades of grass and die while the spore creates a horn-like appendage from their forehead, aimed at dropping more spores on more ants. There's also a sculpture of Pope John Paul II made out of a wad of hair, so small that it can fit into the eye of a needle. There's also a peach pit with a Medieval fresco carved into it, a horn that was supposedly grown from a woman's head, and an exhibit called "Tell the Bees" that was so complicated in its evolutionary implications, I don't think I can do it justice here. The author, Lawrence Weschler, assumes most of this stuff is fake, and starts to research some of the more outlandish claims. Shockingly, he finds out that more of it than not is real. The boundaries between fabricated elements and pieces of truly forgotten science and art (microminiatures, it seems, were quite popular forms of art in the 16th century) gets very fuzzy indeed as we learn more about the mysterious Mr. Wilson, a former experimental filmmaker who had a religious conversion in his teens that brought him to this endeavor. If his literature features some fake addresses of "affiliate" publications, what are we to make of the fact that people really did grow horns in the olden days (it was a type of cyst that today could be handled with minimal cost or effort that in its day was strangely common, even in the upper classes) or that these types of "curiosity museums" were de rigueur among high society, that a man of letters was all but required to have a room for his guests that housed rare animals, great art, strange inventions, and religious artifacts meant only to reignite his guests' sense of wonder? The deeper Weschler digs, the stranger it all gets, and the harder it is to discern fake from truth, superstition from verifiable science.And that's the point. As we delve into the increasingly convoluted footnotes, we find that the line separating scientific analysis from religious faith and alchemical crackpottery is often hair-thin. The first forms of scientific rigor came out of religious desires to understand God's creation better, and the only thing that separated them from medieval alchemy was improved results. As Weschler notes (from a speech by John Maynard Keynes, of all people), Newton wasn't just the first scientist; he was the last alchemist. His early work, largely forgotten or intentionally ignored, is full of lead-into-gold schemes are other black magic of the time. He was carried along by the Renaissance's notion of scientific rigor and is remembered mostly because he was very good at it. By the time you're this far into the maze, you begin to forget that this was supposed to be a breezy little book about strange roadside museums and has now grown to encompass the very cornerstones of scientific thought and their mutual dependence on the pre-Enlightenment insistence on open-eyed Wonder, a gawking at the complexity of nature and all its variants and an insistence that all forward progress in human thought was fueled by simply gazing on the visage of spore-maddened ants, human horns, and microscopically brilliant works of human art. This book will take you as deep as you want to go, and open up portions of history that seem, on the surface, to be built of nothing but boils and witchcraft and short lifespans. Despite its short length, it's a book that you almost can't absorb in one read -- you'll want to look more into these cabinets of curiosities, maybe visit the museum itself (it's still open 20 years after this book was written), and then re-enter the book from the start, hoping to keep the threads of inquiry from criss-crossing into an impossible knot. Very, very highly recommended.
What do You think about Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice On Toast, And Other Marvels Of Jurassic Technology (1996)?
Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder is a fascinating book that incorporates specific writing styles to make the reader feel as if the book were fiction. Reading this book really does feel like diving into another story, another world.The nonfiction is built on multiple anecdotes stacked on top of each other that gives a narrative feel, but these stories are all connected by subject matter, or chronological order. In this manner, the reader won't ever experience random blurbs of information being thrown at them. Everything makes sense where it is; the story flows.The book begins by sparking interest using one particular specimen, and then branching off to a related larger specimen, to humans and their research regarding unique species, and finally to museums to host these research. Even among museums, it branches from the specific Mr. Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology to include all museums. By starting off small and specific before expanding to the main idea, the reader is able to follow the narrator's thoughts. The reader knows exactly what the narrator knows at that point of time. This way, one is not watching the story unfold, but is, instead, a piece of the story unfolding.To keep the reader's interest high, the author varies his writing structure. He throws in short sentences to make a point, long sentences the drag you in a story, straight facts for complex things, plays around when the topic begins to dwindle, interjections of thought, dialogue as a form of action, and source clippings. Weschler maximizes the use of long sentences by adding inserts of thought and other punctuation so the sentences brings you on a journey and does not feel long or out of breath. Short sentences pack a punch-- Wow" factor-- that can really leave you thinking.The book also ends brilliantly by pulling all the loose ends together efficiently, and does not leave the reader hanging. After branching out wide to be inclusive of all museums, we come back down to the very first one mentioned, and all the way back to the very species that began the nonfiction. The reader will not feel like they have been left hanging since it is a very satisfactory feeling. Weschler's ending also invites others to join the research of the museums, which reinforces the feeling that the reader is constantly engaged in this process.The book wasn't written just to get facts published, or something interesting published, but to tell the world a story that also happens to be factual. Should anyone ask me about this book, I would highly recommend it, for anyone can take something out of this book. May it be for knowledge or just for time of peace and quiet with a good book, I encourage everyone to dive into Weschler's world, which just also happens to be our own.
—Tinac
The Museum of Jurassic Technology...how can it not on your lifetime Must-Do list? I've never been to Los Angeles; I'm an East Coast/New England kid at heart. But I'd make the pilgrimage to L.A. just to visit the Museum.Wechsler's essays here are a delight--- sly and clever thoughts about science, the odd by-ways of natural history, and the nature of museums and obsession. A book that'll hold your attention all through a weekend afternoon, a book that'll send you off on your own explorations. Take a look--- you'll be thrilled.
—DoctorM
After going to the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, what I really wanted was a knowledgeable friend--someone whose eyes I could catch, who would reflect back to me my own "what the fuck?" expression over a display of two small mice on a piece of toast with a caption that stated that eating mice on toast was a cure for bed-wetting; someone who then could go on to explain what the truth was behind the mice-eating bed-wetting cure, the horn cut off an old woman, the wheel of bells created by Athanasius Kircher, and so on.Weschler's book on the Museum of Jurassic Technology more-or-less fits perfectly as that friend, with the downside that I didn't have it with me while I was at the museum. (They sell it at the gift shop, but it's almost too dim in there to read, so.) The first third of the book (pp4-69) goes through Weschler's own experience of the Museum: he sees some displays, is utterly confused, befriends the curators and owners (the Wilsons), does some research into the history of the museum and the reality of its displays. The two keywords here, I would say, are ironylessness and confusion. Weschler was as confused by this museum as I was, and when he tries to investigate the reality, he runs into David Wilson's ironylessness over everything in the museum--the real, the fake, and the in-between. [E]ach time [I visited the museum] David would be there manning the desk, so that after a while I got to know him pretty well--which is to say, it felt like I got past the first layer of ironylessness to, well, maybe a second layer of ironylessness. I don't know. (41)I love that "I don't know" at the end, which is pretty much where the museum lives. As Weschler notes, in some ways, the museum is both parody and homage to museums and museum-ness; a throwback and celebration to the moment right before the confusion of data turns into the neatness of theory and fact. In one episode, Wilson tells a Cornell biologist (Tom Eisner) about the Museum's display about a mysterious bat that some native South Americans only knew as a mysterious devilish force; and which was finally discovered in a lead wall set up as a trap. It's a crazy story that honestly raises the hair on the back of my neck. (Try for yourself here. Eisner's responseThat's exactly what it's like when you're out there in the field and you're first encountering some of those marvelously strange natural adaptations. At first all you've got is a few disconnected pieces of raw observation, the sheerest glimpses, but you let your mind go, fantasizing the possible connections, projecting the most fanciful life cycles.Which brings us to the second third of the book (pp71-109), where Weschler puts the Museum of Jurassic Technology into the context of the Age of Wonder and the wunderkammern (cabinets of curiosities), where Europeans tried to collect/organize all the wonders of nature and man. This part gets a little theoretical; but it's a very nice introduction to this area of history. (I'd also suggest Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen if you're interested in this topic and how it relates to new media, since many cabinets played with new technologies of seeing.) Weschler gives this context not just to look at some interesting, under-understood moment, but to think about how these cabinets were built out of phenomena without understanding or according to different rules of understanding. (I love the display that was organized by defect: double apples, siamese twins, two-headed cats--all things doubled.) In its way, Wilson's museum (Weschler's subtitle calls it a "cabinet of curiosities") fits here, especially considering how many of its displays are on the edges and frontiers: Russian rocket theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and the dogs of the Russian space program both had displays when I went.Weschler ends this section with a visit to Wilson's workshop, where he was putting together a big exhibit on symbolic cognition and folklore cures--including the toasted-mice bed-wetting cure. And here, where Wilson is creating the exhibits, we're returned to that weird feeling we had at the beginning: of not knowing how much of this is a put-on job, how much parody, how much homage, how much actual museum.The last third (pp111-168) are all notes and tangents and sources for Weschler, which in its form felt very much like an infection of the museum itself. I mean, some of these notes were useful, some interesting, some distracting. Which might be why Weschler put them in.Still, this book is not the museum, and while it's a useful companion, I find myself wishing I could go back to the museum rather than reread the book about it.
—Benjamin
