DreamCon 2009

So I had this dream. I've had it before, where I'm sitting in workshops at a conference and walking around. There's always a workshop or a panel I forgot about, and wish I'd gone to, like the panel where everyone is learning to change the colors of crystalline rocks in jars. Or the one where they are learning to install beehives in pieces of furniture (taught by the same guy, interestingly, an intense young man who seems to hold it against anyone who didn't come to his workshop, and in fact puts a chair full of bees in my car to show me what I missed).

There's a panel on Do Spiders Understand Geometry? and one on Static Electricity As Art Form.

Some of the groups, such as the one of mechanical wind-instrument geeks, had their own rooms with terrine-style displays of items of interest such as working valves from tuba-like items, odd keys from unusual bassoons, and interesting bits of other, lesser known instruments - things which I had no idea could be so complex and magical. One group, Ants for Architecture, had a whole display on using ants to build your house. A little like the bee-furniture, I suppose; I'm not certain why there are so many insects in this particular convention.

Some other popular panels and activities:

- Writing Live Code: codemakers as zookeepers, or how to keep your functions from escaping into the next code-object
- Designing Electronics Through Intuitive Fields: how to use the emotion of electronic fields to guide your circuit-building
- Direct Optical Music: redesigning your optical drive to play the tonal qualities of, say, a piece of metallic lace or a piece of tin foil
- Ethernet Fishtank: teaching your fish to swim the network

There were so many more; what I liked about this particular con was how much the different compartments of our worlds intersect to create something never before seen. I do wish I could go to some of these panels when I was conscious, though.

What panel or workshop would you like to see at DreamCon? Any suggestions?

Blogs as Wunderkammern

I'm writing an actual academic paper which I will be presenting in February to the College Art Association's national meeting, about Blogs as Wunderkammern. I will be discuss the ways in which blogs emulate the same kind of exploration/bringing back oddities/presentation as the old Wunderkammern. The similarities go right through, including the re-emergence of systems of personal taxonomies defining the order of the collection, and the blossoming culture of exploration and idea-making.

With, of course, a modern twist. One of the things I find fascinating about this idea is the way that the vision of a Wunderkammer has become such a conceptual one; people seem to feel that it applies to all kinds of things. And, of course, blogging being a virtual medium, it follows that it should be a conceptual home-base of sorts.

I'm in the thick of trying to construct this paper, written of course in serious ArtSpeak, and it's really hard to wrap my head around the blog at the same time, though I keep taking rushes at a post on calculation through history. You'd think I could do it, given that the paper only has to be some 2,200 words long; but it's surprisingly difficult (especially given the way I seem to need to be dragged kicking and screaming to the keyboard). But no, my brain is curiously slow this month. However, I'll put the abstract below, and you can see what you think. Don't mind the language!

Though I think I've got a good handle on the paper, I'd welcome your thoughts on the topic. How is a blog like a Wunderkammer?


Abstract for Blogging as Wunderkammer:
Finding Authentic-ness in Virtual Collections and Personal Taxonomies


The contemporary perception of Wunderkammern has little to do with the ostentatious acquisition which drove the rich collectors who assembled them during the era of exploration and idea-making of the 16th and 17th centuries. At its most specific and physical, our contemporary vision is based on the aged and fragile remnants of the old Wunderkammern, which appear to us intimate, tactile and many-layered, with apparently whimsical taxonomies which depended on the personal world-view of the collector - very different from the sublime and overawing superstructure of the museums which they later became. In a broader sense, though, this image of the original Wunderkammer has become a metaphor for authenticness and a sense of wonder: something which lasts through history, full of mysterious meaning, presented in the intimacy of one’s home. And as a metaphor, it is appropriate that it be found in a metaphorical medium.

Blogging, more than any cultural technology, allows for an approach to wonder in an intimate and often apparently whimsical environment: bloggers present a collection of images, ideas, and objects in a style and order specific to his or her own vision: a personal taxonomy. The software encourages the collection to be accessed according to flexible parameters, allowing movement through different kinds of “rooms”, depending on the viewer’s interests.

Additionally, the blogging format invites blog collections to intermingle transparently: people can “add” to their catalog of items through blogrolls, blog memes, and, especially, polite appropriation: as blogs work with one another, greater Wunderkammern are created. A slow collapse in the authority of centralized taxonomies and top-down culture-making has left an opening for the re-emergence of personal taxonomies in a different era of exploration and the connection of ideas. Steampunk and Clockpunk are lively examples of subcultures that ignore the mass-market paradigm; participants are often as satisfied with virtual images of “real” things as they are with actually owning them, which appears to be less important than the idea of its perceived authenticness - unlike the original Wunderkammern, for which ownership was paramount, and authenticity secondary. The viewer is no longer simply an onlooker to another person’s riches, but a participant, invited not just to move through intimate collection-spaces in the same way people were invited to wander through the Wunderkammern of old, but to take from it and build their own.

The Death and Resurrection of a Cabinet

This is what French Wikipedia says about Joseph Bonnier de la Mosson:

"Joseph Bonnier (1702-1744) was a French aristocrat of the 18th century. Fortune enabled him to make career in the army, becoming a colonel of the Dragons-Dauphin Regiment and Maréchal-des-logis (staff sergeant) of the Royal Household. He left Paris with the death of his father to take on the responsibilities of Treasurer of Languedoc.

Appointed baron of Mosson, he build a famous folly, the Domaine Bonnier de la Mosson, close to Montpellier. A great science and art lover, he became famous for his collection which was housed in his Parisian home. With his death, his fortune was wasted and his house ransacked."

Such a brief description for such a larger-than-life man.

In 1726, Joseph Bonnier's careful and frugal father died, leaving his twenty-four-year-old son with a fortune worth ten billion francs and a governmental position which paid, possibly unofficially, one hundred thousand écu, or five or six hundred thousand livres (an ecu, just before the Revolution, being equivalent to about $25 in 2006). Being young, insanely rich, and a handsome officer, Bonnier had no problems with spending his money. He loved pomp and splendor, and was known to frequent the theatres, both in the audience and backstage, and showed particular interest in beautiful actresses. He was intelligent and talented, and was able to indulge all his desires for beauty and knowledge without being accountable to anyone - at least, for awhile.

When he took the opera singer known as La Petitpas for his mistress, building her a fanciful palace in the garden of the Hotel de Lude (his luxurious house in Paris), he was


In the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. is a painting by Jean-Marc Nattier of Bonnier, showing a man happy in his obsession:

"Bonnier was the perfect eighteenth-century amateur, whose wealth allowed him the leisure to study nature's curiosities. His large collection, open to the public, held cabinets devoted to anatomy, chemistry, pharmacy, and mechanical engineering. Nattier's portrait shows a man of lively intelligence, informally dressed and in a relaxed pose, surrounded by the objects that held his interest: books about natural history (perhaps a publication he sponsored), jars of biological specimens, and mechanical models." (link)

Wunderkammern vs. Cabinets of Curiosity

I happened across an interesting article in Cabinet Magazine by Celeste Olalquiaga about, among other things, the difference between Wunderkammern, which were early expressions of wonder and awe at the world and what it could produce, and curiosity cabinets, which came later and were really about early scientific efforts to master and control nature by creating strict taxonomies - by, essentially, demarcating the natural world in a "divide and conquer" flurry of examination, collection, and cataloguing.

Ms. Olalquiaga makes an interesting point about the change from collection-as-expression-of-wonder to collection-as-analytical-vehicle. She claims that with the paradigm shift from the theologically-driven 1500s to the analytically-driven 1700s, Wunderkammern underwent a demotion from the grand and exquisite collections of kings to the literal cabinets of the bourgeoise. The Wunderkammern of royalty was literally disassembled, separated into collections of man-made things, which were housed in Kunstkammern (art galleries), and natural things, which were put in curiosity cabinets and designated with the new, "scientific" categorizations.

"Unlike the Wunderkammern, where the elements of what we now call natural history were mainly objects of puzzlement and awe...the curiosity cabinets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries mark the onset of a desire to grasp and control the mystery which made of nature such an enthralling realm. Once Wunderkammern began to lose their allure in the face of, among other things, a colonial expansion that made their treasures far more familiar and available than befits a bona fide object of wonder, the curiosity cabinet became the privileged form of exhibiting such goods."

To those of us in the modern world, this era's idea of "scientific" seems quaint, even ignorant, based as it was on similarities that were at times nearly arbitrary - but nonetheless, it was the seeds of science today, with its emphasis on why and how, its need to separate things into groups, segments, divisions.

Bonnier de la Mosson's Second Cabinet of Natural History, of which Ms. Olalquiaga speaks at length, as it stands today. Courtesy Bibliotèque centrale du Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Paris.

This change in our view of nature was revolutionary, as people began to discover that they could actually figure things out by observation and deduction. That, and the colonization of the globe, meant that from an ever-present environment that was unpredictable and dangerous, nature began to be understandable and even tameable. The old adage that "education defeats fear" means that what was once the arena of God, unknowable and all-powerful, now becomes knowable, conquerable: each window of understanding becomes a view into the possibilities of what can be learned, what can be known. And therefore, being known, it ceases to hold power over us.

I've been having a number of conversations with my friend Gwyan over at Salt in the Code about The Sublime recently. The sublime is a concept that was first imagined in the first century AD by Longinus (but not really rediscovered until the sixteenth century), for whom the sublime was about greatness, loftiness, and elevation, inspiring awe and veneration.


However, in the early 18th century, three Englishmen - Anthony Ashley Cooper (third earl of Shaftesbury), John Dennis, and Joseph Addison - made separate journeys across the Alps to visit Italy, and were struck by the experience. They wrote about the mountains, and the conflicting emotions the landscape raised, in terms of the sublime - but with a new twist: the sense of loftiness, yes, and veneration, but also a sense of terror at the way the mountains made them feel small and insignificant. The landscape could be so vast and twisted, so gnawed by the elements, that it evoked both asthetic fascination and a sort of horror. There is power, and even beauty, within the sublime, but beauty, in the discussions of asthetics of the day, was a calm emotion, whereas the sublime brought on a sense of agitation and awe.

"John Dennis was the first to publish his comments in a journal letter published as Miscellanies in 1693, giving an account of crossing the Alps where, contrary to his prior feelings for the beauty of nature as a "delight that is consistent with reason", the experience of the journey was at once a pleasure to the eye as music is to the ear, but "mingled with Horrours, and sometimes almost with despair." [wiki]

Kant wrote a whole treatise on the subject, called Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime:

"There are two kinds of finer feeling: the feeling of the sublime and the feeling of the beautiful. Kant gives examples of these pleasant feelings. Some of his examples of feelings of the beautiful are the sight of flower beds, grazing flocks, and daylight. Feelings of the sublime are the result of seeing mountain peaks, raging storms, and night." [wiki]

"...the word naturally expressed high admiration, and usually implied a strong emotional effect, which, in the latter years of the century, frequently turned on terror" Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime

Previous to this, mountains had been seen as blemishes, even warts, defacing the beauty of the earth, and there had been great theological controversy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries about whether mountains and other natural formations came as a result of the earth being a ruin of man's fall from grace. One man, Thomas Burnet, even claimed in 1681 that the earth before the Deluge had been smooth and perfect.

This coincides almost exactly with the same time period that Ms. Olalquiaga describes, where Wunderkammern transformed into Cabinets of Curiosity. As the wonders in people's hands and shelves began to diminish in wonder-power, the urge to turn to larger, grander themes began to appear, and the writings of people like John Dennis became a subject of fascination: the more explored the world became, the more people sought to find that sense of wonder through travel and grandiose art, until The Picturesque, a product of the Romantic movement's mashup of Beauty and the Sublime, made its way into the limelight.


At which point it might be said that the search for wonder was brought, so to speak, into our own backyards. Twisted trees, dark grottos, and strange pseudo-ruins became all the rage, for example, in English landscape design by the end of the eighteenth century, and English people began to travel, not to Europe for the Grand Tour, but at home around the British Isles, looking for wild landscapes and broken remnants. Instead of awe, the search was on to capture Wild Nature and contain it:

"The irregular, anti-classical, ruins and even ruined people - the ragged poor (viewed from a safe distance of course) - became sought after themes. Picturesque-hunters began crowding the Lake District to make sketches..As Malcolm Andrews remarks, there is 'something of the big-game hunter in these tourists, boasting of their encounters with savage landscapes, "capturing" wild scenes, and "fixing" them as pictorial trophies in order to sell them or hang them up in frames on their drawing room walls.'" [wiki]

Thus, as the grandeur of the mountains was reduced and carried into the drawing-rooms of the middle class, so the effects of the Wunderkammern were being divided up and handed out into those same kinds of drawing-rooms, as objects of curiosity and conversation, symbols of our coming ascendency over Nature and the World: little windows into our eventual conquest of things both wondrous and frightening.

Call for Wunderkammern: an UnContest

My kitchen Cabinet: a taxonomy of food?

I'm looking into people who have their own Wunderkammern, or Cabinets of Wonder, with the view of featuring a select few on the blog. Send me pictures (up to four of them) and an explanation of how you started it and why you did it.

I am particularly interested in hearing what you think about what it takes to create a Wunderkammer. What is the most important feature in making one? The taxonomy? The size? The labels? Or is it the exquisiteness of what is displayed? Or perhaps it is simply that it matters to the person making it? How is a Wunderkammer different from a museum display? Tell me about it.

Email me at the address under the "About Me" header, below. I will answer everyone, and if I am particularly taken with yours I may email you asking more questions.

Looking forward to seeing the results!

The Unknown Museum

Years ago, my college friends and I used to take trips up to Mill Valley to visit the Unknown Museum, an amazing collection of stuff arranged in a house which looked, from the outside, like a typical Mill Valley home...except there was a bunch of stuff in the yard. Stuff like stacked TVs, bowling balls, and baby dolls transformed the outdoor space, so that walking by, you had a peep of something amazing.

Going inside on one of the few days it was open was overwhelming to the eye: an aquarium full of Mr. Potato Heads, stacks and stacks of old lunch boxes, rooms and rooms of toys, dolls, plastic bits; mannequins and glitter-balls and every kind of thing from fake food to electronic parts. Nothing seemed to be single. It all came in multiples, sometimes in the hundreds: this Museum was a Wunderkammer of post-consumer detritus. Things were not only displayed in tanks, towers, and piles but in fascinating tableaus where mannequins sat down with TV dinner trays full of vacuum tubes, or a bride-mannequin crawled across a landscape of tiny bridal figures who seem to be tying her down, Gulliver-style.

The Unknown Museum, as it was called, lived in an old radiator shop in Mill Valley from 1974 to 1985; its founder, Mickey McGowan, believes in having lots of stuff. "I always thought that if your mom threw it away, the Unknown Museum was the place to come. Once I tried to create a sort of Zen space there, a room that was spare and austere, but when I'd go in there I'd go nuts wondering what I should put in. Gor me the perfect Zen space is jammed with all kinds of stuff. Zen is all one, isn't it? Well this is all one, the purity of allness." (thanks to Image Magazine for the quote).

After twelve years, the Museum lost its lease, and Mr. McGowan moved the whole museum to the residential neighborhood that I remembered visiting, a place he felt was perfect for the Museum, having a sort of Beaver Cleaver/Ozzie Nelson flavor to it. The different rooms of the house became theme rooms: a boy's room "crammed with chemistry sets, sports equipment, war toys and insect collections; the girl's room had stacks of Nancy Drew mysteries, worn ballet shoes, jump ropes, wedding dress dolls and Katy Keene comics..."

Trapped on the way to the wedding, while everyone watches in anticipation: the landscape around the Bride is made of heaps of rice

Yet the art of the place was not simply in its sheer collecting madness, but in the way that McGowan placed everything. Nothing was overlooked. He used volumes of stuff as a kind of space-painting, creating awesome displays that overwhelmed with their numbers - but he also paid attention to theme and worked asthetically to arrange things so that they had humor and looked...well, artistic. It's rare for someone with Mr. McGowan's bent to really put so much thought and artistry into their collection of stuff, really treat it as a Wunderkammer - in how it is arranged, how it is displayed. The whole art of crafting a proper Cabinet is to be found, not only in the asthetic presentation of things, but in the personal quality of the taxonomy. So often people who love collecting tend to file their stuff away in boxes, or stack them up like Scrooge McDuck all around their room or in some kind of storage, following some external taxonomy of value or meaning; but to put it all together, to present it in a personal, whimsical, commentative style, so that people can gasp and wonder at the sheer awe of it, is really something.

And to do so with objects that most of us do not admire or feel have value is especially impressive. I would not, if you told me of this place, think that it sounded very inspiring; but the care and order of it, the gimcrack-ish depths of our own associations with what some would call junk, makes us pause, makes us wonder.

Which is the point, isn't it? Plus, making it funny is always a bonus.

The Mill Valley house was a great place, with a wonderful garden, but eventually Mr. McGowan had to move again. He put most of his stuff in storage and moved into a railway car (still decorated, of course) in Mill Valley for awhile. When I talked to him recently, he was living in a house at an undisclosed location in Marin, which he said was done up much the same as before but which he no longer opened to the public. It's a shame, because it was truly a service for people, saying to us: "Here is your unwanted, your discarded: it is your past, your childhood - and see how it can be made wonderous?"

Which is something everyone in modern consumer society needs to hear. And see.

Wunderkammer Alert, again

Covered Uranium Glass Sugar Bowl, England, about 1840–1860. This glass was actually made with uranium, and has a deep yellow glow to it not found in any other kind of glass.

Thanks to Morbid Anatomy for their mention quite recently of the Corning Museum of Glass' Curiosities of Glassmaking show, a purely glass wunderkammer: a real, proper exhibition of curiosities. On looking at the Exhibition Checklist, which sadly does not contain any pictures (sigh), I was blown away by the descriptions, and am nearly ready to buy plane tickets to see the wonderous thing.

Euplectellum Aspergillum, or glass sponge, is also known as Venus' Flower Basket. The skeleton of the sponge is a lattice of silica; a scientific study of its substructure and refractive properties found that the sponge’s silica spicules transmit light in a similar way to the optical fibers used in telecommunications.

Among other things, there are glass fire grenades, a pyrex iron c. 1946, meteoric glass, glass sponges, a Klein bottle, Prince Rupert's Drops, strange glass medical equipment, a collection of glass eyes, and glass eye beads, which are supposed to divert the evil eye (more about these later), not to mention various odd, old scientific glass acoutrements and glass used for reliquaries.

If you are anywhere near upstate New York, I encourage you to go look at what seems like one of the most interesting exhibitions this year.

Curiosities of Glassmaking, an exhibit in the West Bridge Gallery of the Corning Museum of Glass, is up until October 21st, 2007.

Wunderkammer Alert

Brief news flash:

A friend of mine just came back from Washington, DC and tells me there is a really interesting exhibit at the Smithsonian's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, titled "Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th Centuries," on until September 16th. The show is about Portugal and exploration, and the effect it had on the culture of the times.

To look at Henricus Martellus's 1490 map of the world is to behold a strange, unsettling planet. Europe seems vaguely familiar, but beyond the Mediterranean everything dissolves wildly into myth. Africa is a squarish blob, connected to Asia by a long strip of land. A huge island called Taprobana dominates the Indian Ocean, and there's no hint of the Americas or the Pacific Ocean; the map simply stops at China. Half the world is a confused jumble, and the other half is not yet even imagined.

But jump ahead a half-century to Pero Fernandes's map of 1545 -- and the planet is utterly transformed. A huge wave of exploration has brought the world into focus for the first time: Africa has taken on its distinctive shape, India is no longer an insignificant bump, the Pacific is there in all its vastness, and the Americas have appeared. Guesswork has given way to knowledge: A new world, with all its complexities and possibilities, has suddenly come into being.

.."It's hard for us to imagine how transformatory this period was," says Julian Raby, the director of the Smithsonian's Sackler and Freer galleries. "It's the first moment of globalization -- information about the variety of the world, in terms of its peoples and cultures, was just pouring in. And part of what we want to get across is that sense of wonder at the complexities and textures of the world."

-- from the Brooke's review in the Washington Post

Here's a secret, though: If you go down to the lowest basement level of the gallery, near the back somewhere, there is a room full of pieces from a Wunderkammer. My friend says it's not set up or organized like one, but there are some really marvelous pieces: a rhinoceros horn wrapped in gold, a bezoar the size of your fist (also decorated with gold), and a number of other really interesting, wonder-ful things.

And of course the show has maps. Lots of cool maps.


"When Ferdinand Magellan set out on the expedition that would circumnavigate the globe (1519-1521), he was looking for a route to the Spice Islands, or the Moluccas, now part of Indonesia. Magellan was killed en route, but his navigator Antonio Pigafetta survived. This map, which includes a clove tree, is a from a 1525 French copy of Pigafetta’s journal."

-- From Smithsonian Magazine online.

Musee Mechanique

One of the little-known wonders of San Francisco, the Musee Mechanique spent many years hidden underneath the Cliff House, next to the Camera Obscura. It seemed to be open at odd hours, and so visits were sort of rare and exciting. It is the privately-owned collection of Edward Galland Zelinsky, who began collecting at the age of eleven, and went on collecting to this day. He is the proud owner of a rare steam-powered motorcycle (see below), built in about 1912 by a man named Gillingwater (on display in the Museum).

He says "I seldom sell, but I love to trade."

The thing I particularly like about the objects in the Museum is that they have this amazing patina of age and wear, and yet you can still see quite clearly how they must have appeared when they were new. Some of the things appear kind of cheesy on the outside, but in reality are quite strikingly innovative in their mechanisms. A number of really complex automata are there, going incognito under a layer of funky papier-mache and dusty wear-and-tear. Among other things, you can find the Bimbo Box, a band of clockwork monkeys playing to a recording of Herb Alpert's "Tijuana Taxi"; the "Naughty Marietta" Cail-O-Scope, which is a sort of stereoscopic hand-cranked movie device; an English pub-going Drinking Man automata (with real liquid); and a boggling collection of other automata, working models, peepshows and carnival figures. Wonderful stuff!


The carnival atmosphere is unique; many of the items are actually originally from carnivals, and have that indefinable air of creepy, tawdry awe. I admit I have not been to their new location at Pier 45, but hope that it preserves some of the oddness and funkiness of the original location.


If you're ever in San Francisco, make sure and go have a look!

For more/other steam-powered motorcycles and bicycles, see these:
- A 1936 Motorcycle featured in Popular Science
- A beautiful restoration gallery of the Hubbard Steamcycle, built in the early 1970's
- Various steam bicycles through time.

Why Scrooge McDuck is better than Bill Gates

Rant alert: some ranting may appear in the content below.

Okay, that title may seem off-topic. After all, as the book How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic points out, Disney comics are all about imperialism, and we know that Wunderkammern are not. Right?

Well, not necessarily. Looking at the Age of Exploration, and how it ushered in both science (in its modern form), and imperialism of the worst sort (read: Conquistadors, Dutch East India Company, British Empire, and our good old American "military advisors"), it is clear that there is a flip side to the kind of wonderous mentality I have talked about in previous posts. After all, some of the most interesting things found in Wunderkammern were things co-opted, wrested or wheedled from people in other parts of the world.

However, as a longtime reader of Donald Duck and his elder (and weirder) relative Scrooge, I beg to qualify.

When I was a kid my father collected comic books. Not a lot of them, but he had a few, some of them really interesting. He let me read his Donald Duck comics, mostly written by Carl Barks, which was probably a mistake, as they were no longer pristine after I had read them twenty times. I will say, though, that they certainly made an impression on me.

Many of the best stories are about Uncle Scrooge's quest for owning the most valuable things in the world. So in that sense, they are indeed imperialist, and assume a sort of outdated sense of the white duck's right to take things from other, differently-colored, less "developed" people around the world.

However, there is something very important to be said for Scrooge: when he wants something, he goes there himself to get it, even though he is an old duck with a fabulous fortune at his command. His adventures are what make him worth reading about.

Now, I need to take a moment here to talk about pulp fiction. The (non-sexual) pulp fiction, by definition, was full of wild adventures, explorations, discoveries, and tales of strange occurrences. There is an interesting reverse correlation between the exploration of the (un)known world and the rise of pulp fiction: the more we knew about our world, the more wild the stories in the magazines, as if people's imagination craved more the less there was to wonder about. (the Hollow Earth book, in a previous post, has a nice section on pulp fiction, by the way). In general, pulp fiction was for adults; but some of the best comics of the day followed the pulp format, including, in a slightly classier and more humorous way, the Donald and Scrooge comics.


As in pulp fiction, Scrooge's amazing geographic discoveries are mostly not-real or thinly disguised (though he does visit the Yukon to find his lost stash). But, like a true pulp hero, he goes into it willing to lay his own safety on the line for greed. And, unlike the standard pulps, which lack a sense of humor, we know all about his personality: he is a cantankerous, greedy boogerhead who chisels his own nephews and often screws up. He is, within the comic format, pretty realistic - and we like him because he's so annoying, greedy, etc, and therefore real.

Bill Gates, on the other hand, is anything but a pulp hero, annoying or not. He is a total cipher. We wonder, in fact, if he could possibly be not-real, like Scrooge's locales. He's probably as rich as Scrooge; you know that old adage that if Bill dropped a $500 bill it would not be worth his time to go back and pick it up (of course, if he were Scrooge, he would go back for a dropped dime)? He doesn't seem to be as greedy as Scrooge, but who's to say? Maybe his wife knows. Ultimately, he seems nice enough. And, well, terribly bland.

Which brings us to this: Bill Gates, while smart and pretty savvy, was also lucky. He came along at the right time. He worked pretty hard. But he's a new breed of wealthy, nothing like the old dubloon-wielding explorers who went out in search of their fortunes: he happened on his wealth. I get the sense he doesn't really know what to do with it. Look at pictures of him: have you ever seen anyone so boring?

But Scrooge - Scrooge is hands-on. Like Indiana Jones and his pulp treasure-hunting ilk, he is larger than life. He actually bathes in cold cash (don't you kind of wish Bill Gates did that?). He loves his money, not for what it will buy or what it means in the larger context; he just loves it for itself. He is a collector, obsessed with his collection. He almost can't help himself; his office is a Wunderkammer devoted to wealth. He is incredibly superstitious, and has numerous lucky talismans that he guards jealously. He is a believer in wonders.

I have a weird vision of Bill Gates, in his inevitable unimaginative checked shirt, trying to rescue the Lost Crown of Gengis Khan from the Abominable Snowman. Do you think he would escape? Or convince the Snowman that he had caused a miracle? Would he throw down bundles of rubber and bounce from one to the other to escape Mombie the Zombie? No, he probably wouldn't believe that Mombie was a zombie. But then, if Bill Gates were Scrooge McDuck, Mombie would be wearing a tie, and be a tax-collector.

Bill Gates is the personification of How to Make Being Rich the Most Boring Thing In the World. Face it: people think that being rich is fun (imagine yourself bathing in that money!). And, if you're creative, you'll be thinking that "fun" would be a lot like Scrooge McDuck's adventures, except maybe with some interesting ways to give money to crazy artists or something. But the truth is, as a modern rich person, you would need to hire an army of accountants to find things to do with your money. Hell, you probably never even see your money in cold, hard cash (remember Harry Potter's bank vault?). I'll bet Bill Gates hasn't seen more than $2000 of his money all in one place before. His kind of money is invisible to the naked eye. It's conceptual. It's being groomed and moved around and taken care of by experts, so that it will keep growing - exactly like modern science: compartmentalized, optimized, and managed. All Bill Gates has to do is sit around and give talks and start foundations which largely run themselves, and maybe decide if his advisors have good advice.

Perhaps I am influenced by my upbringing, drinking Horatio Alger with my mother's milk, believing, like Nathaniel West's Lemuel Pitkin, in my divine right to be rich (60% of Americans believe deeply that they will be extremely rich someday). We can be anything we want, if we just work hard enough! Get dirty, put your nose to the grindstone. Got to get in there and roll up our sleeves, put some elbow grease in; then we'll make it big. I'm going to be President when I grow up!

But... it's hard to admire a stuffed shirt. Think about it in terms of storytelling: which is more exciting, a movie about a bank heist, where people walk off with a suitcase full of money, or a movie about boardroom politics? Why is Pirates of the Caribbean, and pirates in general, so popular right now (hint: treasure caves, cool clothes, physical danger)? Why isn't it cool to comb your hair and sit in an office moving money around? Yawn.

Have you ever seen a picture of Bill Gates with his sleeves rolled up and a shovel in his hand? Have you ever seen him get dirty? I can't even imagine it. Scrooge McDuck, on the other hand, gets dirty, and wet, and hit on the head, and schemed against, and lost, and all manner of explorer-type predicaments. And: he swims in his money. In fact, his money vault is nearly 100 feet deep. He still has every coin he ever earned - and he can recognize each of them, tell a story about it. Which to me is the ultimate goal: my ideal home is one in which every little thing, every dish and every object on the shelf, has a story behind it.

Now maybe because Scrooge get all the episodes of his life published for everyone to read, we know of all his trials and tribulations. Bill Gates is invisible, hiding behind security gates (sic) and darkened car windows (although, would you notice him if you saw him on the street?), so it is assumed he is as boring as he looks. I don't know anything about his life, do you? For all I know, he goes out into his garden and digs when he's mad at his wife, or keeps chickens that he loves and who poo on him when he picks them up. Or perhaps he secretly goes to central America and builds houses for poor people with his own hands, for sport; or spends his free time looking for leprechauns.

But I seriously doubt it.

The British Museum's new King's Library

Thanks to akacurator for telling me about Wonder Cabinet, a community of Wunderkammer-lovers. On a tip from romeodistress, at said community, I looked into the British Museum's Enlightment exhibition (which seems to be ongoing since 2003). The new-ish room that houses it, the King's Library, is apparently set up pretty much as a Wunderkammer itself.

Here is what the Museum itself has to say:

"The physician Sir Hans Sloane and his contemporaries collected natural specimens, beautiful sculptures and ‘exotic’ objects from around the world. He created an encyclopedia of the world in one place, and after his death in 1753 his collection became the British Museum – a ‘universal museum’ for the people of Britain and visitors from around the globe.

Founded by an Act of Parliament in 1753, the British Museum was the first free public museum in the world, intended ‘not only for the inspection and entertainment of the learned and the curious, but for the general use and benefit of the public’. It was thus one of the most potent acts of the Enlightenment and at the same time one of its greatest achievements.

Its founding collections were rapidly supplemented. Captain James Cook, Sir Joseph Banks and many others made extraordinary voyages, returning not only with objects, but also with drawings and accounts of people’s customs and ways of life from distant lands. Sir William Hamilton formed an amazing collection of classical antiquities from southern Italy. King George III himself had an superb collection of scientific instruments. They wanted to understand, and use that knowledge to improve their world. Through their activities new disciplines were born: taxonomy, geology, palaeontology, archaeology, the history of art and ethnography, to use the labels that would soon be applied to new areas of study. In this way the eighteenth century laid the basis for the way future generations and we today would understand their own worlds."

It's not often that one gets to see a properly assembled Wunderkammer in the flesh. I'm looking forward to visiting it next year when I'm in London!