Museum portals (below)

A new department of jpt, designed to introduce our readers to the array of strange, weird and inexplicable places open to the public and filled with stuff so strange you’d never imagine it in a zillion years!  While we cannot touch on every kooky kabinet or mystical museum in the world, we will describe the crème de la crème of zany sites for contemplation and curiosity.  For more information, consult some of our sources:  Sandra Gurvis, America’s Strangest Museums (Citadel Press, 1998), Rachael Kaplan, Little-Known Museums in and around London (Abrams, 1997) and a Web site chock-full of exoticism, exuberance and weird museums:  http://www.infoplease.com/spot/weirdmuseums4.html.

These places are remote descendants of the gentleman amateur collector’s “Cabinet of Curiosities” or “Wonder Room.”  To see a contemporary version, check out the Museum of Gardening in London, on the south side of the Thames across from the Houses of Parliament, next to Lambeth Palace.  It is housed in the deconsecrated 900+-year-old Church of St. Mary’s-at-Lambeth, a solemn and wholly appropriate site.  It contains the treasures of the fabulous Tradescant brothers, who in the early 17^th century traveled the known world in search of plants and animal treasures.  It also sketches the history of gardening in Britain, the most garden-ridden culture in the world, and displays wonderful drawings and paintings of plants.  The Tradescant tomb in the churchyard, sculpted all over with exotic flora and fauna, is worth the trip alone.  The bones of Captain Bligh of HMS Bounty lie next to it.  The collection pays tribute to great British gardeners from Lancelot “Capability” Brown to Gertrude Jekyll.

NO. I  LES MACHINES DE L’ILENO. II  MUSEUM OF BAD ART

NO. III  NATIONAL FRESH WATER FISHING HALL OF FAME

NO. IV:  THE MOUNT HOREB MUSTARD MUSEUM

NO. V:  THE MUSEUM OF QUESTIONABLE MEDICAL DEVICES

NO. VI:  SIR JOHN SOANE’S MUSEUMNO. VII:  THE DENNIS SEVERS HOUSE

NO. VIII:  THE DAN QUAYLE MUSEUM

NO. IX  THE BURLINGAME MUSEUM OF PEZ MEMORABILIA

NO. X  THE MUSEUM OF JURASSIC TECHNOLOGY

APPENDIX NO. 1: Letter to The Observers at Mount Wilson from T.P. Stanley, July 27 1948

APPENDIX NO. 2:  More sites to see

Museums of the Mind:  In addition to the real, verifiable nut-job collections we have noted, there is also a broad category of imaginary (or imagined) museums and wunder-kabinetti, often the inspiration of science fiction and fantasy writers.  The blind but visually inspired Argentinian author Georg Luis Borges wrote many of his best tales about museums, libraries and collections as analogs for reality.  The pioneer sf scribbler A.E. Van Vogt wrote a Voyage of the Space Beagle to chronicle the collecting of rare and bizarre interplanetary specimens. (The genius Kurt Vonnegut made his time- and space-jaunting hero Billy Pilgrim a specimen in such a zoo in his greatest novel, the immortal Slaughterhouse-Five.)  More recently the gifted personal essayist Anne Fadiman has written of the childhood collecting and displaying she and her brother Kim followed in creating The Serendipity Museum of Nature, which in her essay collection At Large and at Small (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) she compared to the projects of Mr. Venus in Dickens’ great tale of rampant collection-mania, Our Mutual Friend:  “It [the Fadiman Serendipity Museum] bore a . . . resemblance [more] to Mr. Venus’s shop, or to a seventeenth century Wunderkammer crammed from top to bottom with miscellaneous natural curiosities, than it did to any museum we had actually seen.”  We hereby elect Mr. Venus as patron saint of all such goofy sites, remembering his precise description by Mr. Dickens:  “Mr. Venus, Preserver of Animals and Birds, Articulator of human bones . . .” For other indispensable literary insights into the mania for collecting and observing collections, see John Fowles’ The Collector, Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man and Charles Grandison Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao.

APPENDIX NO. 1:  The Department of There Is No Gravity, the Earth Sux:  Excerpted from the Museum of Jurassic Technology publication “No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again” (1993)—Letters to Mount Wilson Observatory, 1915-1935

Letter to The Observers at Mount Wilson from T.P. Stanley, July 27 1948

Gravitation is not a Mystery as taught by lying scientists but contemptible lying

Not a scientist nor an Educator nor an Astronomer seeks the truth about gravitation but always seeking some lying excuse for teaching senseless gravitation as the great force of the Universe

Only lying Astronomers will teach the Law of Gravitation and explain that particles of matter are too small to show their attraction for each other.

Only cheating Astronomers will teach that “All bodies attract each other by gravitation” when not an astronomer can find one body attracting another body by gravitation.

When astronomers were discovered lying in teaching that large heavy bodies were falling faster than small light bodies of same density according to the law of gravitation the lying scientists made a new lying law of gravitation that “All bodies fall in  the same time under gravity alone which is in complete contradiction of Newtons lying law of gravitation.   Yet Astronomers are willing teachers of both lying laws of gravitation in which truth and sense can not be found.

When  astronomers were discovered lying in teaching that falling bodies were caused by gravitation in the falling bodies and in the earth the lying scientists taught that all the attracting of gravitation were located in the center of the earth to show why no attraction of gravitation  can be found although taught in lying textbooks to be everywhere in all bodies.

Lying astronomers teach that gravitation makes bodies fall in a straight line from their centers of gravity which is very stupid lying for all bodies are falling in a curve toward the center of the earth because all falling bodies are revolving with the earth which is not turning under any falling body.

Lying astronomers teach that gravitation makes a 150 pound man on the earth weigh only 25 pounds on the moon while on Jupiter the man would be crushed with his enormous weight showing the lying foolishness of astronomers in teaching that gravitation produces weight.

So there!  Eds.

APPENDIX NO. 2:  More sites to see

To follow up on jpt’s selection of strange museums, see MSN’s on-line essay, “An old-world sense of wonder,” by Pam Grossman (http://cityguides.msn.com, 9/10/08)

Included in her city-by-city roundup of places (many are shops or stores as well as wonder-cabinets) are:  New York City—Obscura Antiques and Oddities, De Vera and Evolution; Boston—Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; Columbus, O.—Collier West; Dallas, TX.—Grange Hall; LA—Museum of Jurassic Technology; San Mateo, CAL.—Zymoglyphic Museum; San Francisco, CAL.—Paxton Gate; Seattle, WA.—Steve’s Weird House.  Ms. Grossman’s brief commentaries on these places are both helpful and intriguing.