107. Cabinets of Curiosities & The Museum of Jurassic Technology

KIM: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I'm Kim Askew, here with my co-host Amy Helmes.

AMY: Hey, uh, Kim I've decided that going to the library is a lot like going to Target.

KIM: How so?

AMY: Well, like being at Target, I wind up coming home with way more items than I had gone there for. It's becoming a problem because I already have way too many books lying around my house.

KIM: Yes. And as we know from our previous episode on libraries, you do not like having books around the house, which is unusual, but that's another whole story. So tell me about your latest unanticipated library haul.

AMY: Okay. So I happen to walk past one of those little carousels with the random paperbacks, you know, they're barely even organized. But one title catches my eye. It's called Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder. It was written by a guy named Lawrence Wesler Weschler. Not sure how to say his last name, but I see that it has a medallion on the front, naming it a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critic Circle Award. So that's promising, right. And the minute I read the subtitle, I know this book is going home with me.

KIM: Oh my gosh, tell me the subtitle. What is it?

AMY: " Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology."

KIM: Hold the phone: Jurassic Technology. You just said the magic words.

AMY: I know. I almost called you from the library. Um, anyone who doesn't live in Los Angeles and frankly, even many people who do live in LA have never heard of one of our favorite places, the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Kim, I think that I introduced it to you when you moved here, but I'm not sure.

KIM: I'm not sure either. I don't remember. That's how long we've been friends though, but it's probably true. Anyway, the Museum of Jurassic Technology is a very small and unassuming museum in Culver City, California. It's not much more than an obscure little storefront on a busy street. Thousands of people probably drive by it every single day and don't even notice it.

AMY: And I always am telling people they need to visit the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Well, to clarify, I tell the people I think will get it, because not everyone does. I actually used to take dates before I was married, because it's like a litmus test.

KIM: Oh, my God, I did the same thing, but only once because I met an online date there in the tea room at the top, they have like a samovar and a tea room. I met a guy there. He was not interested in the museum, but he was interested in talking about himself for like two hours. And I'm like, I'm never bringing another date here again, unless I know he is the one. By the way, I took Eric when we first started dating, and he loved it.

AMY: Okay. Yeah. Good. And I get that, because it's just like don't taint my experience of the museum. Yeah. Okay. So for as many times as I've tried to explain this place to people, I often come up short because in a lot of respects, it defies explanation. This book by Weschler says the same thing. He kind of struggles to figure out for himself what it is, but also to describe it in the book. But it's one of the reasons I wanted to read his take on it. I wanted some sort of explanation for the absolute randomness and weirdness of this place. 

KIM: I'm sure you've done the thing where you go down the wormhole on the internet, trying to find out more, but there's also almost this feeling like you don't want to know too much. Like you just want to take it as it is. And I never, before I take anyone, I never tell them too much about it.

AMY: Cryptic is the word.

KIM: It makes just enough sense to be tantalizing. It's like you are just catching something and getting something, but around the edges it's very nebulous, which is one of the things that makes it so amazing.

AMY: First of all, when you walk in, it's almost pitch black. There is a soundtrack playing that is spooky, like, "Oooooh," kind of like that. So one of the first things you can do though, is they have a little introductory video. You watch the video, you finish it and you're no farther along than where you started. It's like stepping into a Twin Peaks episode or something. I keep thinking of like David Lynch.

KIM: It's "Carnival"-esque. So if you ever watched the HBO series "Carnival," it's very dark like, this is all part of the vibe of the Museum of Jurassic Technology. So anyway, Amy, did this book you found give you any new enlightenment about the museum? Tell me, I'm curious. Maybe part of me doesn't even wanna know, but tell me.

AMY: I know. Well, I think it's gonna be everything that you probably already surmised. So the museum owner, his name is David Wilson, he actually won a MacArthur Grant for this museum. So the book's author, Laurence Weschler, he calls the museum "uncertain and settling," and that description is spot on. It's sort of like that Kaiser Soze thing from The Usual Suspects, where you're like, "Is this real or is it all a put on? Is it just elaborate performance art?" Like you said, Kim, you sort of understand it. There's enough basis in truth where things look official and real. There's official, um, plaques that go by each exhibit that make it seem like, yes, this seems real.

KIM: Especially to a non-scientist, like, "Huh, yeah. Okay. That could be true."

AMY: Yeah. You're kind of doubting what you're reading on the little plaques, like, "Noooo," but words are thrown out like, um, "early Mesopotamia" that you're like, "Okay." So the author goes on to explain sort of the history of the modern museum. And I think this is what the little video at the beginning of the museum does too. Museums, when they started, they were very different from what museums are today, what we know of museums. They were more like personal collections. Rich people had, you know, collections of oftentimes weird stuff: oddities. Curiosities. There's actually a German term called wunderkammern, which means basically "wonder cabinet." And this dates back to the 15th and 16th centuries, where people would sort of have a hodgepodge of natural history, art, features of human ingenuity. So they were very, um, excited about anything that humans invented that was interesting or weird. So the Museum of Jurassic Technology is really kind of a nod to these precursors to the modern day museum. Does that make sense?

KIM: Yep. Absolutely. It's um, cabinet of curiosities.

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. But it's a little bit more elevated. It's not Ripley's Believe it or Not.

KIM: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. 

AMY: It feels much more intellectual ,academic. So for example, let's go back to the subtitle of this book that I read. There's an exhibit on these pronged ants that live in the Amazonian rainforest or African I'm not sure.... we think. I mean, we're told, based on the exhibit I, I don't quite remember what happens with the ants, but it's something like they wind up turning into like another creature. Something that scientifically doesn't seem possible. There is a whole exhibition called "Listen to the Bees." It's probably my favorite one there. You know what I'm talking about, right? So it's basically a whole room with old remedies that people in the 1700s and earlier would've had for, like, medical problems. So one of the remedies would be like, you eat mice on toast. Like in one of the little displays, there's a piece of toast with three furry mice, dead, and then you read like , people thought this cured impotence, people would've had those home remedies. Um, there was another thing that I loved in it, the micro art.

KIM: That's what I was gonna say. That always stays with me. yeah, well, Um, you're looking through a microscope and you're seeing all this art on the head of a pin. Is that what it is? 

AMY: On the head of a pin or in the eye of a needle.

KIM: Yeah. You're seeing all this incredible art.

AMY: Microscopic miniatures. Yeah. But you're also sort of like, why is this here? 

KIM: Yeah. how does this fit into the, the, this "Mesopotamia" or whatever? 

AMY: There's one thing that you look through these binoculars into this dark box and there's a taxidermied fox head in the box that's lit up, but then projected onto it is of video an old lady in a rocking chair . And there's not really any explanation.

KIM: Yeah,

AMY: You kind of shake your head as you're walking away, like I, I I'm stunned. 

KIM: I feel like some of our listeners are like booking their ticket to LA right now.

AMY: It's so cool. And like I said, the guy won a MacArthur Grant for this. Okay, so I'm just gonna read a little section from Weschler's book because this passage more than anything is what finally explained to me what he thinks the owner, David Wilson, is trying to do.

So he writes: 

Those earliest museums, the ur-collections back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were sometimes called Wunderkammern, wonder-cabinets, and it occurs to me that the Museum of Jurassic Technology truly is their worthy heir in as much as wonder, broadly conceived, is its unifying theme. (“Part of the assigned task,” David once told me, “is to reintegrate people to wonder.”) But it’s a special kind of wonder, and it’s metastable. The victory to the Museum of Jurassic Technology continually finds himself shimmering between wondering AT (the marvels of nature) and wondering WHETHER (any of this could possibly be true.) And it’s that very shimmer, the capacity for such delicious confusion, Wilson sometimes seems to suggest, that may constitute the most blessedly wonderful thing about being human.

 So basically it is a museum about wonder. Wondering if it's true, wondering like a state of awe at what you're seeing, because you know, the stuff is really weird that you're looking at. 

KIM: Just that idea of the possibilities of the things that are unknown to us, because we know that there are potentially some mysteries in life that we don't understand. And when you're in this museum, you feel that possibility.  

AMY: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So yeah, this book also mentions the Ashmolean museum at Oxford University. That kind of started out as one of these cabinet of curiosities. And I've never been there, but I have been to another museum in Oxford called the Pitt Rivers museum.

KIM: Yes, that is so cool.

AMY: You've been there? Okay. I had read about it in a book and the thing that I really wanted to see there was a fly, like a house fly that was dressed up like a ballerina. So it had a little tutu on it and stuff, and I'm like, No matter what I do in England, I'm going to find that house fly that looks like a ballerina, right? So, I was traveling with my friend, Meg, and we get to the museum and there is so much stuff. Several floors, floor to ceiling, like specimens. 

KIM: Are you able to find this little fly? 

AMY: Well, yeah, there's no way I was gonna be able to find this. So we went up to a guard and we were like, "Can you help us? We're looking for this fly that looks like a ballerina." And he's like, "Oh yes, yes, yes, follow me, follow me." And so he's walking very swiftly down all these aisles and so we passed this one section where's all these jars of formaldehyde, and the guy points to his right and goes, "Baby in a bottle." Like he just wanted to point out that we saw the baby in a bottle.

KIM: Oh, my God.

AMY: And then we keep walking and yeah, he showed, he took us and showed us where the little fly was in a tutu with fairy wings, yeah. I'm very, when I travel, I like to find unusual museums.

KIM: Yeah. You are really good at that. I remember the, the, um, yeah, the funeral carriage museum that you went to. Where was it? Barcelona.

AMY: Yeah, that was in Barcelona. I've also been to the Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago, which is really fun. They have all kinds of like rusty, old, torture-y looking surgery tools, you know? And then like also things that have been pulled out of the human body. Gallstones that look like a four leaf clover or whatever. Yeah. I've been to the world's only pencil sharpener museum in Ohio. like this random guy just spent his whole life collecting little novelty pencil sharpeners. Yeah. Oh, I have my Freakatorium story too. Should I tell that? Okay, so when I was in New York City, like, I don't know, probably 20 years ago now, I had seen an ad in like the weekly indie paper for this place called the Freakatorium. Like, ding, ding, ding, what? What's the Freakatorium? I have to go to it. So we tried to figure it out. It was closed while I was gonna be there, so I was like, "Oh, well." I was there for New Year's Eve, so we're leaving the New Year's party with a group of about nine friends. Across the street, it's all dark, but I see the sign Freakatorium and I'm like, "Oh my God, there it is. There's the Freakatorium" 

 I, um, run across the street. I just wanted to try to look in the window and see what it was all about. Right. So there's nine of us. We're all kind of looking in the window. It's darkened storefront, all of a sudden way in the back inside the store, a light goes on.

KIM: Ooh.

AMY: I see a silhouette figure coming towards the front of the shop. It's 2:00 AM on New Year's Eve. The door cracks open, and these little eyes peep out. It's a guy. He's like, "Yeah?" And I was like, "Oh my gosh, I'm visiting from out of town. I really wanted to come to the Freakatorium, but it was closed. Is there any way you could let us in and just see it really quick?" And he says, "All right, gimme five minutes. I need to go turn on the lights and wake up the two-headed turtle. It's gonna cost everybody 10 bucks a head, but I'll throw in a sword-swallowing demonstration for free".

KIM: Oh 

AMY: So he closes the door and we are all standing on the sidewalk losing our minds. And sure enough, he brings us in. They had all kinds of weird stuff. Like just weird, weird stuff. Um, allegedly Sammy Davis Jr's glass eye was there on display. Frick and Frack, the live two-headed turtle was in the little terrarium. And then, yeah, the guy did a sword swallowing exhibition.

KIM: I have a couple of museums, just off the top of my head. But, um, I mentioned in a previous episode, just as an aside, the Prostitutes Museum in Virginia City. I think it might be called the Red Light District Museum or the Prostitute"s Museum, but it's basically got all sorts of like paraphernalia for birth control and other stuff, and it's super interesting and weird and it's in a basement also, so that's kind of creepy, but really interesting. Um,

AMY: That's reminding me also in Tuscany. I went to the Museum of Torture.

KIM: Oh, that's amazing

that yeah. Yeah. 

AMY: So now that you know that Kim and I are intrigued by these sorts of museums, I want to start a list of more weird museums that we have to check out. I know you guys know them, so please email us or message us on Instagram or whatever, and tell us where we need to go to find more places like this. Let us know, and if we get enough responses, we'll try to compile them into a definitive list for an upcoming newsletter. So you can all have them. And in our show notes, we'll try to include the ones we talked about today.

KIM: For sure.

AMY: And if you happen to find yourself in Los Angeles, carve out a few hours to pop your head into the Museum of Jurassic Technology. 

KIM: Advanced reservations are now required, but you will not regret it. We guarantee it.

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. Be sure to join us back here next week when we'll be covering another last lady of literature.

KIM: Our music was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.