Batgrl (Book Data Kept Elsewhere) > Recent Status Updates

If you haven't heard of Frederik Ruysch (earlier skeletal related quote), then I'll bet you've heard of his daughter Rachel - or at least seen her work. Click that link and check out her floral paintings. In the US at least they're reproduced everywhere, in multiple media, on and offline.

"I will not go so far as to say that I was poorly dressed, for that would be bragging. The best I can say is that I could not be arrested for indecent exposure." - Zora Neale Hurston

"On the left, behind a handsome vase made of the inflated tunica albuginea of the testis, poses an elegant little skeleton with a feather on its skull and a stone coughted up from the lungs hanging from its hand." - tableaux/table arrangement by Frederik Ruysch

"The point is that for a good century and a half after the discovery of the Americas, Europe's mind was blown. That was the animating spirit behind, and the enduring significance of, the profusion of Wunderkammern."

"[Jean de] Lery makes the same point about even earlier authors, noting how while he is still hesitant to believe everything he reads, nevertheless, ever since visiting America, "I have revised the opinion I formerly had of Pliny and others when they describe foreign lands, because I have seen things as fantastic and prodigious as any of those - once thought incredible - that they mention." " - written in 1578

Centaur skeleton exhibit: here and here. Designed by sculptor/zoologist Bill Willers, University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh.

Eisner [biologist]: "...there is an African ant called Pachycondyla analis. Foetens is smelly, but analis - well let's just say that's even more smelly. And I believe that that ant does stridulate - it's not a cry exactly, but it does produce a faint chirping sound." - I would believe the spore infection bit, but apparently the ant noise part is true?! My head is now spinning.

Eidophusikon - and a modern recreations. (More here.)

"There was a Musaeum Tradescantianum and a John Tradescant...who during the 1600s built up a famously eclectic cabinet known as 'The Ark' in Lambeth on the South Bank, in London" - some of the contents of which eventually ended up at Oxford's Ashmolean.

Wilson: "Nothing supports this venture - it is woven from thin air. We apply for grants, and we've gotten a few, but most grants-dispensing agencies frankly don't know what to make of us. We don't fit into the traditional categories."

Randomly, in Denver there's a castle built by the uncle of Baron Manfred von Richthofen, also known as WWI's Red Baron. Wilson grew up living near the castle.

"The Jurassic infects its visitor with doubts - little curlicues of misgiving - that proceed to infest all his other dealings with the Culturally Sacrosanct."

Marcia Tucker, the director of New York's New Museum: "It's like a museum, a critique of museums, and a celebration of museums - all rolled into one. ...I consider the Museum of Jurassic Technology to be one of the great artistic treasures of the Western World."

Charles Gunther, it turns out, was a real person, a candy maker and collector of odd natural history items. Like a snakeskin supposedly from the one in the Garden of Eden. (There should be a book on him somewhere, you'd think.)

Wilson, on the museum's banner: "Well, you may have noticed the line on top of the letters: that signifies negation or cancellation. So that the 'A, E, N' means non-Aristotelian, non-Euclidean, non-Newtonian. Sort of one of our mottoes."

Wilson: "It was an incredible coincidence - in fact, everything associated with the story is like a tissue of improbable coincidences... And those kinds of coincidences are also a special interest of ours here at the museum."

SO much easier to read this with wikipedia open in another screen. Names of real people are salted into the tales of people who don't exist. For instance, Hermann Ebbinghaus was real (I actually read of him in a college cog. psych. class); Geoffrey Sonnabend not so much. This is why so much of the museum content seems almost, nearly true - in places.

The likelihood of anything in the museum described in the first 25 pages being true/reality is very low. But it's that tiny bit of doubt, the thought that some part of it might be true because it sounds vaguely possible, that makes you wonder...

"Each of the monographs is described, on its copyright page, as having been "Published in the United States by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Information..." "

(Not that I'm sure that that ant trivia is true, seeing what the book is about, after all. Because I'd think, with as many bug documentaries as I've seen, someone would have had to film a vocalizing ant.)

The stink ant of the Cameroonian rain forests: "one of the very few capable of emitting a cry audible to the human ear."

Annoyingly couldn't find a passage to quote from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl that wasn't spoilery - and the story is really worth reading. I added a Gutenberg link to the review section and plan to read the whole thing eventually.

Annie French Hector: "Journalist, novelist. ....married in 1858, had four children. Published 41 novels after the death of her husband in 1875." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Fr...

Another example of little known author, and short bio: "Emma Robinson (1814-1890): Novelist. Born in London, daughter of a bookseller. Remained single. Went mad. First novel, Richelieu in Love (1844)." - and not in wikipedia. Book is here:http://archive.org/details/richelieui...

There are a lot of women authors with really little biographical information in this period. Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroness...

Thanks to notes like this in the Biographical Appendix - under Laetitia Elizabeth Landon, last sentence: "Died under mysterious circumstances." - Am having to look up every other entry because I must know more than that! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laetitia...

"There is a female voice that has rarely spoken for itself in the English novel - the voice of the shopgirl and the charwoman, the housewife and the barmaid. One possible effect of the [1970s era] women's movement might be the broadening of the class base from which women novelists have come."

"[Doris] Lessing herself will have to face the limits of her own fiction very soon, if civilization survives the 1970s, which she has predicted it will not." - surprise non-apocalypse!