100 Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (1995)

Unwary visitors to Culver City, California, would never guess that the nondescript storefront on Venice Boulevard bearing the legend “The Museum of Jurassic Technology” is a portal to another dimension. Step inside and you’ll find exhibits devoted to: a Cameroonian “stink ant” which can die by inhaling a fungus which grows inside its brain, which devours the ant until all that remains is a spike protruding from its head; early bedwetting cures, including two dead mice lying on a piece of toast; a neurophysiologist called Geoffrey Sonnabend who, after suffering a breakdown triggered by the collapse of his investigations into the memory pathways of carp, developed a radical new theory of human memory, the Sonnabend model of obliscence, inspired by an amnesiac lieder singer; micro-sculptures, including one of Pope John Paul II made out of hair, so tiny that it fits into the eye of a needle; a horn that was removed from the head of a woman called Mary Davis in 1688; and more, so much more…

New Yorker writer Lawrence Weschler’s initial reaction was that the museum must be a big joke, an ingenious art prank or time-travel installation along the lines of Robert Wilson and Hans Peter Kuhn’s HG. But something about the meticulous solemnity of the setup and the museum’s eccentric proprietor, former experimental filmmaker David Wilson, suggested a more complex intention. Entranced, Weschler made repeat visits, always finding himself trapped between multiple layers of irony.

Was he really, though? For one thing—much to Weschler’s surprise—not everything in the museum is “fake,” or at least not in the way we normally understand the word. Although the context in which it’s displayed has been augmented, Mary Davis’s “horn” is real enough: it’s just a cyst that would nowadays be simple to remove. In fact, the museum is a throwback to the Renaissance and the “wonder-cabinets” in which wealthy collectors stored the exotic curiosities they picked up on their travels. It exists to inspire childlike wonder at the strangeness of the world and blur the boundary between the scientific, the speculative, and the magical—a boundary we know enchanted Bowie because it’s the territory inhabited by so many of the books on his list, from Hawksmoor (see p. 80) and The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (see p. 115) to Strange People (see p. 190). As Weschler points out, quoting the economist John Maynard Keynes, Isaac Newton wasn’t just the first scientist, he was the last alchemist. Magical thinking did not become scientific, rationalist thinking overnight.

After much brain-hurting rumination Weschler concludes that the Museum of Jurassic Technology (which still exists, by the way, and which benefited no end from this Pulitzer-shortlisted tribute to it) is a museum, a critique of museums, and a celebration of museums all at the same time. What matters in the end is not just whether something is “true” but whether it’s sincere.

An obvious parallel suggests itself. Bowie’s work might have been inauthentic—nothing wrong with that; inauthenticity has been central to pop performance since Brian Epstein forced the Beatles to wear suits instead of the leather jackets they favored at the Cavern Club—but only rarely, in moments of personal and professional crisis, was it insincere. That is the reason he and his songs endure. It’s the reason so many people around the world were devastated by his death. And it’s the reason we care even remotely about what his hundred favorite books were.

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