August 22, 2024 : Issue #74

WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse

WELCOME

This time, a pair of convergences around Ukraine’s surge into Russia; from the archive, a late summer’s night’s yarn about Mr. Wilson in Belgrade; and an array of pendulums.

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CONVERGENCES IN THE NEWS

The surprise Ukrainian offensive into Russia’s Kursk oblast, irrespective of its strategic wisdom or eventual outcome (may it perhaps hasten the chances of a negotiated peace), has occasioned many uncanny convergences, one of which struck me almost at the start when the New York Times led with a strangely pastoral late summer image, which put me anyway in mind of an earlier version of the same sort of vision (though I was surprised how when placing them side by side, the two almost melded into a single continuous diptych):

Left: John Constable Flatford Mill (1816) at the Tate, London.
Right: A Ukrainian armored vehicle in the Sumy region, near the border with Russia, on Sunday, August 11, 2024. (Credit: Roman Pilipey / Agence France-Presse / Getty Images)

Meanwhile, I myself suddenly realized a few days in how just as the Zaporizhian surround early on in the war had tapped into its own deep historical resonances (as limned in our Issue 15), so that name “Kursk” was clanging its own urgent bell (regarding which, see here), one which in turn gets referenced in this joke currently making the rounds in Moscow (via our most-esteemed comrade Michael Benson):

Putin, after two weeks of the Kursk catastrophe, summons Stalin’s ghost :

Stalin: “What’s happening, Vlad? What’s up?”
Putin: “The Nazis are in Kursk! The army is retreating! What should I do?”
Stalin: “Hmm, okay. Listen carefully. Do exactly want we did in 1943. Send your best Ukrainian troops to the front, and ask the US for arms shipments.”

(How does one say Ba-Dum-Tss in Russian?)

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The Main Event

From the Archives

Cleaning out some files the other day, Ren came upon the clipping of an old piece of his, dating back to 2001, that he’d almost forgotten. Rereading it—all true, he assures us—he felt it had the makings of a fine shaggy late summer’s night’s yarn, or at least, he hoped, one that might offer a bit of a change of pace. So, if you are of a mood to, gather ’round and listen in:

Mr. Wilson in Belgrade

Los Angeles Times, February 4, 2001
(subsequently included in Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative, 2012)  
                                                                                  
It can get downright weird. You’re going to have to bear with me on this one: there are all sorts of false starts, seeming feints and side-tributaries in the telling of this story, but, trust me, by the end it all sort of comes together.

So, like I say, I was home, minding my own business, rifling through my latest email, this was about two years ago, when—not so very unusually—I spotted yet another missive from Serbia. Ever since having covered the aftermath of the Balkan wars for The New Yorker, I’d been subjected to a steady if intermittent stream of hate mail bearing the telltale “.yu” coda in the sender’s e-return-address. “You obviously must not be able to get enough of the taste of the blood of Serbian infants with your morning cereal.” You know: that sort of thing. Anyway, here was yet another one, emanating from some e-place like “rabbit@enet.yu” or some such. And for a few days I didn’t even bother to open it: who needs such images rattling around in his head?

Anyway, eventually I did open it, and—surprise!—this wasn’t that kind of message at all. On the contrary, it was from a fellow named Rasa Sukulovic, who introduced himself as an experienced literary translator (English into Serbian), veteran for example of texts by Salman Rushdie, and what he was inquiring about was whether or not I’d allow him to translate my book on the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, into Serbian and then see to its publication in Belgrade.

Now, as it happens, that book has received a bunch of translations: a work of magic-realist nonfiction, as it were, it’s far and away my most translated book, showing up in Italy, Germany, France, and even Japan, usually finding a home in the catalogs of the respective publishers of Borges and Garcia Marquez and Umberto Eco. Japan, of course, was strange (and even stranger the busloads of Japanese tourists who now began pulling up at the doors of the Museum in Culver City)--but Serbia? What on earth were people in Serbia going to make of my odd little text? Still, I figured what the hell, and by reply missive, I extended my somewhat dubious permission—don’t even bother worrying about the royalties.

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So anyway, hold all that in the back of your mind for a moment, as I pick up the narrative somewhere seemingly altogether different—and in fact, a couple years before that.

I happened to be visiting David Wilson’s little museum one day. It occurs to me that I ought to say something here about the Museum of Jurassic Technology, for the benefit of those who haven’t ever read the book, or maybe even for some of those who have, because the place really does exist. Several of the book’s reviewers, at the time of its publication in 1995, indicated that they’d thought I was making the whole place up and had even gone so far as to call Information in L.A. to confirm its reality (though why they imagined that, had I been making the place up from scratch, I wouldn’t have had the wit to place a listing for my fictional creation with Directory Assistance in L.A., I’ll never know). (Which reminds me about the single coolest review the book ever got, which wasn’t even published in any journal, but instead took the form of this guy who went to visit the Museum one day about six months after the book’s publication: He spent about two hours puttering around the Jurassic’s labyrinthine backhalls before re-emerging at the front desk where he hesitantly asked the fellow seated there, “Excuse me, but are you either David Wilson or Lawrence Weschler?” Informed by the sitter in question that he was indeed David Wilson, the visitor leaned in confidentially before triumphantly demanding, sotto voce, “Come on, tell me the truth, does that guy Weschler really exist?”)

Where was I? Oh, yeah, the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, halfway between downtown L.A. and Venice Beach, a place that really does exist (go ahead: call Information; you’ll see), a deceptively diminutive little storefront operation that specializes in the breathtakingly lovely and loving display of some of the most astoundingly incredible material you’ll ever encounter—incredible because, as it happens, some of it may not be entirely true. Or not. You can’t be sure. There’s this sense of slippage: horned humans, pronged ants, mice on toast, microminiature painted sculptures of Snow White and all seven of her dwarfs strung out along the shaft of a needle, the medicinal uses of urine

—an entire hall given over to an exhibition on the career of Geoffrey Sonnabend, an American neuropsychiatrist who, during the 1930s, in despair over the collapse of his researches into memory pathways in carp, suffered a complete nervous breakdown and was shipped off by his mother to a spa near Iguazu Falls, in the Mesopotamian region of Latin America, which is where, one night, he happened to attend a recital of German lieder by Madelena Delani, the famed Romanian chanteuse, most famous perhaps for the fact that she suffered from Korsakov’s syndrome, a condition which had ravaged all her long and short-term memory with the exception of the memory of music itself, a condition which imparted a “uniquely plaintive air” (New York Times) to her haunted and haunting singing;

after which he (Sonnabend) spent a shatteringly insomniac night across which he came up with an entirely new theory of memory, a theory it would take him the whole next decade to elaborate into the three-volume masterwork in which he argued that memory itself is essentially an illusion which we all throw in front of ourselves to disguise from ourselves the fact that we’ve in fact forgotten everything, a theory which has in the meantime proved particularly intriguing owing to the fact that no sooner had it finally been put to paper than its author himself seemed to fall into complete oblivion, that is until his recent resurrection there in the halls of the Jurassic itself.

You know, that sort of thing.

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So, anyway, Wilson and I were sitting there one day whiling away the time at the front desk when the mailman delivered a mysterious little package covered over with myriad colorful stamps from Italy. Inside, without any cover letter, was a beautifully produced little hardcover book, just published by Rizzoli, Un Cosi bel Posto, by one Fabrizio Rondolino,

a narrative which apparently (neither of us could actually read Italian) purported to relate the true life love story of Geoffrey Sonnabend and Madelena Delani. Though as mystified as I was, Wilson hardly seemed the least bit upset by this sudden appropriation of his creation. On the contrary, he seemed entirely pleased by this confirmation of the palpable reality of these individuals whose existence heretofore had seemed entirely confined to the halls of his emporium.

Later that evening, I myself was dumbfounded to recall an incident that had taken place about nine months earlier, around the time of my own book’s publication. Shortly before that date, I’d been approached by the radio producer David Isay to see whether Wilson and I would be willing to collaborate with him on a half-hour audio version of my little narrative—completely re-reported for radio, to be broadcast on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” We’d all agreed, and there had ensued several days worth of surreptitious taping at the museum, eventually yielding over forty hours of overheard conversations among and with visitors to the Jurassic, which, following another several month’s editing, had eventually yielded the finished documentary.

And what I suddenly remembered that evening was how the documentary had included a passage where I intoned on how people came from all over the world to visit the Museum’s many exhibits, as, for example, in this instance {at 16:58}—and here the sound of a doorbell bubbled up from behind my narration, followed by that of a young man with a foreign accent launching into a series of queries—“this fellow here who’d come all the way from Rome, Italy, to pursue his researches on the career of Geoffrey Sonnabend, an American neuropsychiatrist who, back in the thirties”....and so forth. Listeners were then invited to listen in as the fellow indicated to Wilson how much trouble he’d been having tracking down Sonnabend’s three volumes (“Yeah,” Wilson said, “those books are quite hard to find”), whereupon he asked Wilson whether he himself happened to have the books there at the Museum, and Wilson sighed that no, as it happened, he didn’t (“They’re really really hard to find,” he assured the young man), at which point the young man shrugged audibly and proceeded on into the museum’s backhalls.

A few days later, when I got back to New York, I called up Isay, went over, and we foraged around for the original tape of that overheard conversation, and indeed, fiddling with the dials, sharpening the sound, we were able to make out the fellow’s self-introduction: “Hello, my name is Fabrizio Rondolino and I’ve come here from Rome, Italy, and I’m especially interested in....” and so forth. Incredibly, of all the days we could have chosen to tape there at the museum, we’d managed to pick the one on which occurred the sole ever meeting between David Wilson and Fabrizio Rondolino—and the amazing thing, listening once more to the whole conversation, was how neither of them had broken irony the entire time. They’d both gone on as if theirs were the most common-sensical sort of conversation to be having.

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But that’s not the story I wanted to tell you. Because the thing is—and now I have to come back to my Belgrade Rabbit friend (and as I say, this was a few years later)—Rasa now did indeed begin translating my Mr. Wilson book, he was sending me updates every few days until about three weeks into the process when he sent me a fairly breathless piece of email: “You’ll never believe what just happened,” he wrote. “I didn’t ever mention this to you before but my girlfriend is also a translator, in her case of Italian into Serbian, and she happened to be reading the part of your book I’ve translated up to this point and she almost had a heart attack, because, you see, she came upon the stuff about Geoffrey Sonnabend, and as it happens, she’s been commissioned by the same publisher here in Belgrade to translate a book by an Italian writer which claims to be a narrative about the love story of Sonnabend and Delani.”

Now, this was in the fall of 1998, and in the weeks thereafter the Belgrade publishers got in touch with all of us and we began planning to converge on Belgrade — Wilson, Rondolino, and me—for a great reunion on the occasion of the simultaneous Serbian publication of both books that upcoming March. And we would have gone, too, except that just then, in response to Milosevic’s escalating rampages in Kosovo, NATO started its air blitz, and the whole thing had to be called off (the event, not the books’s publication—I’ve got my copy right here: Kabinet cuda gospodina Vilsona by Lorens Vesler).

And here’s the really weird part. It turns out that Rondolino.... (Actually, I should mention that in the meantime I was able to get a report on the book from some friends who read Italian, and they say it’s actually quite marvelous, recounting as it does the story of a pair of lovers who seduce each other one evening and the next morning the woman has completely forgotten that they ever met and they have to seduce each other all over again that night, and so on and so forth, night after night thereafter—kind of a cross between Valentine’s Day and Groundhog Day, I suppose.) Anyway, it turns out that Rondolino’s day job, from which he’d only just resigned, had been as the press spokesman for the Italian prime minister, in which capacity he’d been having to justify the stationing of NATO planes at Italian bases, from whence they’d been heading off to rain bombs down on Belgrade.

As I say: weird, weird, wondrous world. Go figure. 

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POSTSCRIPT: And while you’re at it, figure this. That piece was published in the Book Review of the Los Angeles Times on February 4, 2001. Almost exactly three years later, I happened to be visiting the MJT and plastered across the billboard directly across the street was an ad heralding the Valentine’s Day 2004 release of the latest Adam Sandler-Drew Barrymore vehicle, a film entitled 50 First Dates.

The pair were portrayed on a beach blanket by the sea, Sandler gamely plucking a ukelele, gazing puppy-wistfully on a wide-eyed completely bewildered Barrymore. “Imagine,” the ad’s legend invited us, “Imagine having to win over the girl of your dreams every friggin’ day.”

Frig, indeed: who could possibly imagine that?

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INDEX SPLENDORUM

A dynamic abstract visualization of the foregoing

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ANIMAL MITCHELL
Cartoons by David Stanford, from the Animal Mitchell archive

animalmitchellpublications@gmail.com

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