Between Fiction and Fact

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Novelty Guinness Bottle

Description

A glass bottle, round base tapering to a small neck, 3” something tall, perfectly tiny, with a 1” label declaring it is Guinness Extra Stout, and topped with an obscenely perfect bottle cap. Through the dark glass, you can see that it’s still full with a dark liquid, presumably real Guinness.

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Starfish, dried

#CuriosityCabinet #NaturalHistory #SugarStarfish #ObjectStories #odditiesandcuriosities #wunderkammer

Description

A dried starfish, roughly the size of my hand, 8 in across. Five arms, one with the tip broken off, after drying. A yellow ocher/ golden tan color with tiny round pimple-like spots, or papulae, in a light sandy color that make a pattern: a star in the center radiating out into a line down each arm. The surface is rough to the touch. The underside has a channel down each arm,…

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Description

Inkwell 1.5” w x 2” h, most likely stoneware, salt or wood fired to create a glossy glaze across most of the surface, except for the base and one side where the clay is bare, likely due to being placed close to another piece in the kiln. Warm brown/tan with brassy tones where glazed, bare clay is a cold gray. It was thrown individually on a wheel, a stout body and narrow neck. A fingerprint is pressed into one side near the base, and striations on the base show where it was cut from the wheel.

Object Story

I have always liked bottles. The feel and weight of one in my hand, the idea of what could be held inside them – secret potions, herbs, feathers and pens. Bottles like this one, clay and old, the aesthetic of apothecaries and ye old wise women. 

I don’t remember exactly when I acquired this one, but I could have only found it during one of my many excursions into Portobello Road as a child. Dad and I would take the tube to Notting Hill Gate at the antiques end of the market, and work our way from the bric a brac of Victorian London into the modern day high road and pubs. The market is famous for its antiques. The road is filled with stalls of shiny brass and dull silver, of paper ephemera and vintage furniture, and if you slip between them, you will find narrow store fronts with names like the Dolphin Arcade leading into warrens of little nooks where every collectible and antique imaginable is sold. 

This, I thought as a child, is what a faerie market would look like, complete with odd characters like the mad old man with a great white beard who sells ceramics found in Victorian rubbish tips. I could have bought this bottle at that very stall, although there is always at least one booth groaning under the weight of precariously stacked pottering and glass. I’m drawn to these smooth and delicate pieces despite feeling a breath away from ruining it all like a bull in a china shop. 

I cannot ignore the influence Harry Potter and the great semi-medieval Hogwarts has had on my sensibilities. I’ve been playing around with fountain pens and inks since I first read them at seven years old. So I can imagine the excitement I felt the moment I picked this little clay bottle. A 19th century inkwell, rich with the subtle details and imperfections that only a handcrafted object can have. I would have bought it immediately, and probably for very little. These sorts of things are riddled across London’s soil. 

Since I first bought this, I have learned hands on how to throw pottery, which has only deepened my appreciation of clay objects. I can look at the lines and curves on this inkwell and visualize exactly how this was made, where the potter placed their fingers. I can guess at the tools they used, this nameless craftsperson, and where they placed this in the kiln. I can imagine the sense of community they experienced during the day long firing, because I’ve been there, too.

Still Curious?

All the Best Rubbish

London’s Rubbish

Portobello Road

Pen Museum

An inkwell from the Museum of London

  Clay Inkwell, circa 19th c. #CuriosityCabinet #inkwell #Victorian #PortobelloMarket #ObjectStories Description Inkwell 1.5” w x 2” h, most likely stoneware, salt or wood fired to create a glossy glaze across most of the surface, except for the base and one side where the clay is bare, likely due to being placed close to another piece in the kiln.

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Cabinet of Curiosity

Read about my Quarantine Cabinet of Curiosity! #QuarantineStories #curiositycabinet #cabinetofcuriosities #odditiesandcuriosities #curiosities #wunderkammer

This post is a little different than others. During the deep dark depths of quarantine, I spent some time going through my own collections and creating a Cabinet of Curiosity.

I love things. I love the aesthetic experience of things. The weight in your hands and the physicality of an object, the tactile feel against fingertips, the color, the shape, the smell and even the sound. I love things…

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Like many people who grew up reading the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, I have avidly devoured the new Book of Dust and the new TV series. In honor of these fantastic books, I wanted to talk about my own attempts to be an explorer like Lyra and Pantalaimon.

Journeys

The trilogy His Dark Materials and the follow up Book of Dust fit the very definition of a bildungsroman (a novel dealing with one’s formative years or spiritual education). They follow the coming of age story of Lyra Silvertongue and her daemon Pan, and, inspired by William Blake, their journey from innocence to experience. Much of what makes the books so beloved is how Philip Pullman seeds the imaginative reality of Lyra’s worlds with the tactile existence of details from our world that we can see and touch and believe. 

While attending a conference in Oxford, I spent some time on my own journey, wandering the streets, canals, markets and alleyways that Lyra might have explored in her own world. I marveled at franchise cafes built inside preserved medieval buildings, the ache of cobbles beneath my feet, and the history lining every stone and doorway in the mist and damp of a spring afternoon. The green trees glowed against the yellow-rough stone of Oxford and I felt as if at any moment I could turn a corner and meet my very own daemon.

Though of course, to truly get into the meat of the books, Oxford’s museums truly allow one’s imagination to wander, finding objects and places that echo some of the remarkable details in the books. The obvious was a visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum, visited by Lyra in the Subtle Knife in her quest to find out more about skulls with holes from trephination at the urging of her alethiometer. Luckily it existed in Will’s Oxford (that is, our Oxford).

  The Pitt Rivers Museum

You enter the Pitt Rivers Museum through the Oxford Museum of Natural History, and for a fan of His Dark Materials this is an opportunity to walk down the aisles of taxidermy animals musing on the settled shape of your daemon, or keeping an eye out for one of Pan’s many forms. The museum even has a few specimens they encourage you to pet, like a plump brown bear. 

https://twitter.com/morethanadodo/status/1230817813020991491

The heart of the museum is the original steel and glass-roofed Victorian building, and most of the cases are original to the founding of the museum. The central space is filled with these moveable cabinets and feels like a mysterious storehouse as you move through it. The dim lighting preserves the material on display with the side effect of making the space sleepy and secret.

The Pitt Rivers Museum is an ethnographic museum founded by Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers, an officer in the British Army in the 19th century. He collected many objects during his travels and military duty and believed in displaying objects according to function and form (Weapons, Food, Medicine, Amulets, etc. being categories) regardless of the culture the objects came from. The museum still uses this display method, today, which means one can see a great many surprising things all gathered together, which encourages many visitors to think twice about their cultural biases.

You can explore further with this 360 interactive image

  An exploration of everything would take days, but for a pilgrimage in search of Lyra, one should go towards the back right corner and find the display of arctic peoples from Siberia and Scandinavia that inspired Pullman to write about the North, including the same photo of Samoyed hunters that Lyra saw in the Subtle Knife. You can easily imagine Lyra wearing the child’s hooded reindeer skin coat with its brightly colored decorative trim. The waterproof seal intestine parkas are a marvel of indigenous technologies, and you can see details of the dog sleds and other equipment the Gyptians used to reach Bolvangar and save children the Gobblers stole. In another section, you can see the trepanation or trepanning tools both Lyra and Pullman saw.

  Lyra’s Oxford

With every re-reading, there are more details to find in the books, just as with every visit, there is more to find in Oxford. I recommend a visit to “Bodley’s Library” or Bodleian’s Library as we call it in our world. They always have interesting exhibits highlighting treasures from their collections, and when I last visited the exhibit, appropriately enough, was called “Sappho to Suffrage: Women Who Dared.” Nothing could be more appropriate to view while musing on Lyra, and even calls to mind her mother, the deplorable Mrs. Coulter, for no one could deny they were both Women Who Dared. In their online exhibits, you can view an alethiometer from their collections, commissioned by Pullman himself. 

Draft of a map that appears in Lyra’s Oxford (2003) by Pullman

  The Museum of Science and History also holds a treasure trove of deliciously tactile scientific instruments from the 18th and 19th century, all gleaming gold and brass, delicate dials and cogs with more aesthetic satisfaction than most modern machines. You can imagine you are holding the warm weight of the alethiometer. The materiality of an object can make a fantastical world feel logically real, despite the daemons and talking bears. 

While I did not have time to visit Lyra and Will’s bench in the botanical gardens (it was also not the right time of year to possibly meet them), I did stop by the Trout Inn, the main setting of La Belle Savage, the first book in the new Book of Dust trilogy. It’s a restaurant now, but the building is as much as the book describes, all old stone and fireplaces with a view onto the river and the ruins of the abbey, as if you arrived only a few months after the Great Flood that destroyed it and set Malcolm and Lyra on their journey to Jordan College.

  Exploration

Much like the bustling education happening in Oxford, Pullman made these books to encourage people to learn how to think, how to gather information, and bring it all together with that final spark, the imagination (the dust), to come to your own opinions. Like Lyra, we must learn how to be an adult, that considers, rather than a child, who is all instinct. 

So I challenge everyone to go forth and explore your local museum for anything that reminds you of Lyra’s world, and to think while you do. Why are these things on display? What does the museum say about them? How do you know they’re right? After your scavenger hunt, pick one thing and research it from home. How does the museum’s opinion compare to what you find? How did the objects get to the museum?

  Activities and Tours

You could make a treasure hunt out of a trip to a museum. Lyra and her friends travelled so much that it wouldn’t be difficult to pick any larger survey museum – like the Met or the British Museum or the Ashmolean if you’re in Oxford – and see who could find more objects from the books, such as:

A clock or compass like the alethiometer

A knife like Will’s

A spyglass

A cat like Will’s daemon

A pine marten like Pantalaimon 

Arctic survival gear

The northern lights

Fortune telling devices that speak to Dust

A polar bear like Iorek Byrnson

Witches like Serafina Pekkala

A hot air balloon like Lee Scorsby

An angel like poor Balthamos and Baruch

  And if you are lucky enough to go to Oxford, here’s a bit of a His Dark Materials walking tour: 

Bodley’s Library: Bodley’s Library features prominently in His Dark Materials and also features in the new book La Belle Sauvage.

The Covered Market: the market is a favorite haunt for Lyra and friends in Northern Lights.

The Trout Inn, Wolvercote: this real pub is where Malcolm lives with his parents, the landlords, in La Belle Sauvage.

Pitt Rivers Museum: Lyra and Will find skulls here with holes in them in The Subtle Knife.

Godstow Abbey: an abbey where the nuns look after the baby Lyra in La Belle Sauvage 

Jericho: where Gyptians board boats in Northern Lights. It is also where the main character lives in La Belle Sauvage and where some of the action takes place.

Port Meadow: in Northern Lights, this is the site of the Horse Fair where the disappearance of a young boy ‘from a gyptian family she knew’ helps to trigger Lyra’s adventures. It’s referenced in the other His Dark Materials books and in La Belle Sauvage.

Botanic Gardens: In The Amber Spyglass, Lyra and Will promise to sit on the bench at the back of the Botanic Gardens for an hour at noon on Midsummer’s Day every year so that they may feel each other’s presence next to one another in their own worlds.

    Further Explorations

Pitt Rivers Museum Human Remains Policy

Pitt Rivers Museum – Online Collections

Pitt Rivers Museum – About Us

  Pitt Rivers Museum – History

Pitt Rivers Museum – Display on the Northern Lights

Pitt Rivers Museum – Video tour of the museum

Pitt Rivers Museum – interactive map

Bodleian Library Online Exhibit – Divination: Unfogging the Future

Bodleian Library Online Exhibit – Mapping the Multiverse

Bodleian Library – Sappho to Suffragettes: Women Who Dared

Album of objects in Oxford museums

The Golden compass and philosophy: God bites the dust

His Dark Materials

The Book of Dust

https://imgur.com/gallery/NipElRt

Exploration and His Dark Materials #hisdarkmaterials #thegoldencompass #thebookofdust #Lyra #howdoyoumuseum @morethanadodo @philippullman @Pitt_Rivers Like many people who grew up reading the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, I have avidly devoured the new…

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Virtual Museums in the Time of COVID-19

In these awful times, everyone is looking for something to keep themselves busy during self-isolation. The “virtual museum” has been offered as one from of edutainment, a way to enrich the mind and pass time when you become sick of binge-watching shows and movies.

Museums have been working to digitize collections and increase accessibility for a while now, designing them to be educational tools or a way for people to access the museum even if they can’t physically visit. Right now, that means all of us, so let’s become armchair museologists, exploring foreign museums from the comfort of our own homes.

The Book

The Pergamonmuseum in Berlin can be found on many lists of online exhibits to visit, and by happy chance I had only just reread a personal favorite that would fit perfectly with the ancient collections in the museum.

Thick as Thieves by Megan Whalen Turner is an epic journey told from the point of view of the runaway slave Kamet and the soldier Costis sent to save him as they escape through the fictional Mede Empire, culturally very like ancient Babylon. The book is the most recent in the series Queen’s Thief, following a thief who becomes king of the fictional world Attolia, heavily inspired by classical Greece. 

Ever since I visited the Pergamonmuseum years ago, I will admit that I think of their displays every time I read this book. But how does the virtual experience compare to the physical?

Attolia and the Mede Empire

Historical Greece and Anatolia

  The Museum

Run through Google Arts and Culture, the virtual Pergamonmuseum has a simple design and intuitive interactive layout. You are greeted first with a header image of the famous Ishtar gate and a few happily browsing visitors.

Click here to follow along

  Underneath is a small introductory text, much like the type that would stand before the entrance to an exhibit. You can choose to read more of it by clicking a button, or you can continue scrolling down to the “stories” or exhibits, much like when a visitor chooses to stroll past the text panels. Scroll a bit further and you can see all 1,591 digitized objects, either organized by topics or pictured individually. At the very bottom is access to a “museum view,” a 360 scan of a room.

At any point you can, of course, share your experience on the social media platform of your choice.

The Pergamonmuseum actually houses three smaller museums, the Classical collections, the Museum of the Ancient Near East, and the Museum of Islamic Art. I’m going to focus on the first two, as they would cover the cultures in Turner’s books.

The Virtual Tour

“Monumental: Highlights in the Pergamonmuseum” is the first exhibit, an overarching tour of the museum’s scope by focusing on a few of the most impressive parts of their collections – reconstructed monuments. These pieces are large enough to walk past or through in a way that lets the visitor truly experience the scale and aesthetics of these ancient cultures.

But how do these very large displays translate to a digital format?

Pergamon Altar is the highlight of the virtual museum. Most of the exhibits focus on it, using the high-quality photos and videos taken in anticipation of the exhibit closing for renovations. Google used a camera to create a 360 experience of the room, which the first exhibit uses to “walk” the visitor through the room, zooming in on details and providing context through pop up text. If you want to explore it yourself, you can take control of the view much as you would Google Streetview.

This high tech interactive gives a life-size sense of scale, allowing you to feel as if you are looking up at the tall steps and large friezes. The sculptures of gods, goddesses, and monsters are marvels of artistic talent, robust and detailed in a way that reminds me of a pivotal scene from the first book, The Thief, when Eugenides finds a room where his gods sit as still as statues, a held breath away from speaking.

“Moving” into the Museum of the Ancient Near East, the online exhibit brings the visitor to a more vibrantly colored reconstruction – the blue and yellow bricks of the Ishtar gate and processional way. The first “slide” has a video pop up with a video about the history of the gate and the city of Babylon. When I accessed the site, the full screen option wouldn’t work. Technological glitches are an interesting issue to consider in accessing the virtual museum. What if certain sections crash and interfere with the narrative of the exhibit?

  Despite the small screen, the video recreated the experience of an audio guide. The narrators create a word picture of the gate while you look at pictures of it. They explain the meanings behind the symbols and emphasized that any visitor Nebuchanezzer’s Babylon would have understood at a glance. The symbolism of gods and goddesses are a reminder of a time when the pantheon of gods lived vividly in people lives as images and statues everywhere, just as in the classical world Turner builds in her series. These books feature gods and goddesses that step out of stories and into the plot to help or hinder her main characters. In Thick As Thieves, she drew from the mythology of the Ancient Near East and the Epic of Gilgamesh to create the heroes Immakuk and Ennikar that interfere throughout the plot.

The video and the close up photos afterwards show the details in the relief carvings of lions, a symbol of Ishtar, which made me realize that the seemingly ridiculous scene in the book when Kamet and Costis hide from soldiers in the den of a lioness might have actually been a hint that this ferocious goddess was another force protecting them.

Having been to this display in the actual museum, the experience is rather awe-inspiring. To walk through this massive gate and along a very long corridor, all lined with ancient tiles and then to find out that this was only a small portion of the entire structure is boggling. Especially impressive is to imagine the time conservators spent piecing together this mammoth puzzle. In the virtual museum, however, the scale of the piece isn’t as emphasized as the detail work. After some digging, I did find a 3D image of the gate on the page for the Berlin Museum Island page.

  The Collections

Below the exhibits are thumbnails for all 1,591 objects that can be explored digitally. As a visitor, you can go through collections organizing the objects by cultural source (i.e. Iraq, Iran, Syria) or by theme (water, textiles, and lions, oh my!).  My eye was drawn to the clay tablets. In Thick As Thieves, Kamet recites from the tablets of the epic of Immakuk and Ennikar. In ancient Mesopotamia, letters and important documents were written in cuneiform on clay. The ones highlighted at the virtual Pergamonmuseum were inventories of goods and horses or letters from kings, rather than poetry, unfortunately.

Collection of Clay Tablets

  You can also go through all of the objects, choosing to organize them by viewer popularity, by time in an easily navigated timeline, or, bizarrely enough, by color. This allows the visitor to engage with the objects in a way quite unlike a usual museum visit. You view the objects in sometimes surprising combinations that cross cultural lines and the usual organizational categories.

I chose to see all chocolate brown objects together, which yielded a combination of detailed textiles and clay imprints from cylindrical signets. They are two very different mediums from different centuries, but you can see some similarities in the symmetry and angles on the textiles and carvings.

  The details for the objects are, however, limited. Other than names and accession numbers, some objects didn’t have any other information while others had a paragraph or two. I wonder if the objects were chosen by the practicality that they were the best photographed. So, the important collections for a virtual museum become the ones that are the most visual.

  Thoughts

The virtual museum was certainly an entertaining way to pass the time here in quarantine. The overall experience became meditative in the way walking through a museum becomes very quiet and calm, although I found after a while the same reading fatigue as hunching to look at text panels in person.

Trying to view the entirety of a museum through my laptop computer screen, the different cultures and topics encompassed within it began to blur together. Unlike a physical museum, where a visitor moves through discretely different rooms organized geographically or by clearly defined topic at a walking pace that allows the mind to shift gears, the virtual museum has a speed to it. You click through topics and it’s easy to switch between topics or go back to check. You can draw lines between displays that might otherwise be at other ends of the museum building.

These blurring of lines might not be what the website designers intended, as the exhibits are more neatly outlined, but the experience certainly fits with the world of the Queen’s Thief series, which is, after all, not a true historical fiction. Megan Whalen Turner drew from classical Greek, Near East, and other Mediterranean cultures to create her world, but she pulled details from several different centuries to do so. Viewing the virtual museum, where it is easier to hop across timelines, did help me understand the setting for the books better, and gave me an aesthetic language for imagining the Mede Empire.

  Further Reading

Interview with Megan Whalen Turner

Map of the world of Queen’s Thief

Virtual Pergamonmuseum

Pergamonmuseum website

The Queen’s Thief Series

Other Virtual Museums

  New in #QuarantineLife I want to explore #VirtualMuseums with the #Pergamonmuseum #Berlin #ClosedButOpen #SMBforHome #StayHome #HowDoYouMuseum #queensthief #attolia #ThickAsThieves #ReturnOftheThief #worldbookday Virtual Museums in the Time of COVID-19 In these awful times, everyone is looking for something to keep themselves busy during self-isolation.

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Margaret Meade and Museums

Check out my musings on museum ethnographic displays and the book Euphoria by Lily King #museums #anthropology #margaretmead @amnh @lilykingbooks

A recent NY Times article about the “revisioned” dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History reminded me of a moment during my last visit. Waiting outside the coat check on a cold winter day, I was pleasantly surprised to hear two visitors discussing exactly the subject I always think about in this museum: the problem with dioramas of indigenous cultures in natural history museums.

I’ve…

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The Guerrilla Girls

Happy #InternationalWomensDay and #WomensHistoryMonth @Tate @GuerrillaGirls #IWD2018

Instead of a single object or quote, for Women’s History Month I’m highlighting the work of the Guerrilla Girls.

They are an anonymous collective of women artists who formed in the 1980s to fight sexism and racism in the art world. According to The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art:

We are a group of women artists and art professionals who fight discrimination.…

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I like to delve into the less visited areas of the British Museum – the out of the way spaces away from most of the tourist traffic. One day in the fall, I impulsively thought to go to the Sainsbury Galleries, rooms I hadn’t been to in ages. The majority of the British Museum’s Oceania, North and South American, and African collections used to be a part of a separate museum with an ethnographic focus – the Museum of Man. Since the 1990s, however, these collections were absorbed (in some cases returned) to the British Museum. The Sainsbury Galleries are a series of rooms below the Living and Dying Room, which display objects collected from across Africa, from ethnographic objects to contemporary art.

Zake Ove Britain and Trinidad, 2015 Mixed Media

Turning right after admiring the El Anatsui bottle cap tapestry, I was at once surrounded by large and striking masks. In that moment, I viscerally returned to a book I had read ages ago – Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor. This is why I go to museums – for understanding rather than knowledge. When I first read about the masks and masquerades in Okorafor’s story, I intellectually understood that she was drawing from a historical and cultural tradition. Her writing described them as powerful and terrifying. But it wasn’t until I stood before these masks that I emotionally understood the impact these creations have. They are scary and eerie and larger than life.

  I have affectionately called Akata Witch the “Nigerian Harry Potter,” but please don’t think this means it’s in any way derivative. It is very much a book rooted in place, set in Nigeria with the country’s cultures, language, and history infusing every page. This book also follows the basic format of so many kids’ fantasy stories – a strange kid with an almost normal life who just doesn’t fit in finds out they’re part of a magical world.

The main character, Sunny Nwaze, was born in the US but her family lives and is from Nigeria. She stands out for her childhood in America and for being albino. One fateful day, Sunny finds out she is also a magical Leopard Person, which means she belongs in a secret world that values learning and celebrating that which makes us unique. Along with her three friends Chichi, Sasha, and Orlu, Sunny is destined to defeat an evil ritual murderer who is trying to summon the dark masquerade Ekwensu to destroy the world.

My disbelief was already suspended – this was a book about magic! I just went along with the brilliant writing and allowed myself to accept that a wooden mask in a raffia body was an all-powerful, horrifying spirit, especially with all the bugs living inside it. But in that gallery, I got it – Okorafor didn’t make masquerades scary to come up with interesting monsters. They were the villains because masquerades were already terrifying.

This seems like a simple enough realization, but I think sometimes we read something without considering the physicality of it. It’s like reading a play without acting it out or seeing it on stage. No matter how good your imagination, some things need to be experienced. When you read a story that takes place in a culture you don’t belong to or aren’t familiar with, one way to start creating an understanding can be to visit a museum. (Eating the food helps, too. Akata Witch had me craving fried plantains for days.)

Masquerades are spirits who come into the spirit world during weddings, births, funerals and festivals, when people dressed up and celebrated as them. But as Sunny’s new book about being a Leopard person describes:

Up to now you’ve known masquerades to be mere symbolic manifestations of the ancestors or spirits. Men and boys dress up in elaborate cloth and raffia costumes and dance, jeer, or joke, depending on whom they are manifesting. Up to now, you’ve believed masquerades to be nothing more than myth, folklore, theater, and tradition. Now that you are a Leopard Person, know that your world has just become more real. […] Masquerades are always dangerous. They can kill, steal your soul, take your mind, take your past, rewrite your future, bring the end of the world, even.

Sugar Cream, Sunny’s mentor, has masquerade masks on her office walls, and it is a sign of her power. Each has a personality: “Some looked angry, with mouths full of teeth; others were fat-cheeked and comical, sticking their tongues out.” Standing in the British Museum, I got a better sense of just how eerie her office was for Sunny. The carved and crafted masks do seem to stare and judge.

The mound was caving in at the center. They all stepped back as a wooden knob rose from it. It was attached to the top of a large tuft of thick raffia. Then the termite mound expanded. They backed away some more. The creature’s body was large and bulbous, covered with beautiful blue shiny cloth. Cowry shells and blue and white beads hung from pieces of blue yarn. They clicked and clacked as the masquerade grew.

The masks are made from many different materials – cloth, metal, basketry, leaves, plastic, resin, calabashes, clay, or wood. As well as the masks, the masquerades wear colorful robes and costumes. They are beautiful, but the feeling of them is eerie. The elaborate structures distort the human form until it is all too easy to believe you’re facing a spirit rather than a figure in costume.

Lawrence Ajanaku, 2013-14 Okpella people, Nigeria Cotton, hessian, synthetic fabric, cane

Sokari Douglas Camp, 1995 Steel, paint, wood and palm-stem brooms

While the exhibit in the British Museum is of masks collected from many different places and time periods, the text acknowledges that a true masquerade is so much more than the easily displayed masks and costumes – it is a complex performance of body, costume, dance, dialogue, and music. It would have been nice if the display included video and sound.

Each masquerade has a unique attribute (like a particular age in life), specialization (different skills or abilities), and personality. The powerful ones are wild beasts, spirits, foreigners, witches or even the dead. Masquerades express secret knowledge, and: “bring the powers of the wild bush and swamps into the civilised area of town and village so that humans can interact with them and use their dangerous forces for social ends.”

The more I read about masquerades the more the symbols of Ekwensu made sense. This masquerade fed on and caused pollution, and fighting it was a part of the Leopard person’s belief that one must care for the environment.

Masquerades have been seen as a way of maintaining peace and social order, and even acting as law enforcement. The masquerades would walk up to individuals and loudly expose all their bad habits, crimes, and misbehavior for everyone to hear. Ekwensu’s power came from what humans did to the environment, but then she turned it around and made it worse, made it exaggerated and terrible

I encourage readers to stop skimming past sections you don’t understand. Go to a museum (in person or their websites!), look up YouTube videos, try new foods, and you’ll find your reading experiences will have more depth and create more lasting impressions.

  After seeing the British Museum’s display of masquerades, I finally got my hands on book two. [Spoiler alert] in Akata Warrior, Sunny is up against Ekwensu once again, but in order to face her, Sunny must first find Udide, the giant spider that lives under Lagos.

Explore Further

Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor

Akata Warrior by Nnedi Okorafor

Nnedi Okorafor

The Sainsbury Galleries

Masks from the British Museum’s collections

Masquerades – info from the Smithsonian

Igbo Culture – Masquerades and Festivals

“Africans concept of masquerades and their role in societal control and stability” by Emmanuel Osewe Akubor

Photos of masquerades:

Link One

Link Two

Link Three

Find out more about the powerful #Masquerades in #AkataWitch and #AkataWarrior @Nnedi #BlackHistoryMonth #MondayBlogs I like to delve into the less visited areas of the British Museum - the out of the way spaces away from most of the tourist traffic.

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▪Medusa. Artist: Francesco Salviati (Italian, 1510-1563) Date: ca. 1540 Medium: Red chalk on off-white laid paper.

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Things in Jars

In China Mieville’s Kraken, a Giant Squid has been stolen by unimaginable means from the Natural History Museum’s collection of pickled, jarred, and gross things (aka the Spirit Collection). …

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Quote of the Month

#QuoteoftheMonth is a poem by #PaulLaurenceDunbar #poetry #WeWeartheMask 🎭 #MondayBlogs

We Wear the Mask BY PAUL LAURENCE DUNBARWe wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while        We wear the mask. We smile, but, O great Christ, our…

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In China Mieville’s Kraken, a Giant Squid has been stolen by unimaginable means from the Natural History Museum’s collection of pickled, jarred, and gross things (aka the Spirit Collection). The search for the disappeared cephalopod leads an unprepared museum curator, Billy Harrow, into the demimonde of demigods, cults, magic and spirits. It’s an entertaining jaunt, but since I first read it, I have been desperate to see the secret underbelly of the Natural History Museum for myself.

The book opens with the museum’s actual Spirit Collection tour from Billy’s perspective, but since the book came out in 2008 and I finally visited in 2017, the experiences were a bit different. Instead of meeting in the grand Victorian cathedral to Science, the tour now begins in a hall lined with highlights of the collection just inside the new-since-2009 Darwin Centre, a large Cocoon where you can see scientists at work. Glass walls let you peer into labs and get a sneak peek into what appeared to be the lizard portion of the collection. I recognized myself in the eager know-it-all geeks in Billy’s “standard” cast of museum tour group characters, but I was attached to a group of Google employees enjoying a team building exercise.

I felt more like I was slipping into the story when I saw the same video feed of a large fish being cleaned by flesh eating beetles. I also got to flaunt my knowledge of collections management by correctly describing the ideal environment (18-19 degrees celsius and a relative humidity under 40%) which sounds clinical and boring compared to the eerie experience of descending into a dark, cool basement guarded by double security doors with flickering automatic lights.

I expected long rows of creepy specimens, rather like the pathology collection where I once spent an uncomfortable hour researching Victorian surgical specimens. Kraken promised:

The visitors […] were in a specimen maze. Ranked intricacies. Kilometres of shelves and jars. In each was a motionless floating animal.

Sadly, nowadays practical conservation concerns trump romantic aesthetics. On my tour, the majority of the collection was hidden away in metal lockers, and only a few were open to show some gruesome highlights. It wasn’t until we reached the tank room – containing all of the over-sized specimens – that the mad scientist aesthetic won through.

It wasn’t until we reached the tank room that the mad scientist aesthetic won through. Here be monsters, indeed. The cold steel shelves around the room were lined with large fish in jars, “grotesque mouthfuls like pickled onions,” a shark jaw in a box, snakes floating around each other like Medusa’s hair in the bath, and the piece de resistance – the long, long squid down the center.

It was a Linnaean décor; species clined into each other. There were steel bins, pulleys that hung like vines. […] This was what they came for, that pinkly enormous thing. For all its immobility; the wounds of its slow-motion decay, the scabbing that clouded its solution; despite its eyes being shrivelled and lost; its sick colour; despite the twist in its skein of limbs, as if it were being wrung out. For all that, it was what they were there for.

It would hang, an absurdly massive tentacled sepia event. Architeuthis dux. The giant squid.

    Archie the squid is 8.62 meters long (about 28 feet for Americans), although this species can grow up to 15 meters. Seeing the size of the tank itself, I could see why it’s disappearance would be such an impossibility. The monstrous beak was kept in a separate jar so the guide could take it out and demonstrate the avian way it moves. It looked incongruous for something so squishy, exactly like the beak of a parrot. Floating above Archie’s tentacles is a piece of a colossal squid’s arm. While the giant has the calamari-esque suckers you’d expect, the colossal has vicious hooks. Long before this beastie was ever found, scars from their tentacles have been found on sperm whales.

The squid might have been the initial draw to the tank room, but the other specimens were just as if not more fascinating. I saw a celocamph – a fish we thought was extinct until it was found recently off the coast of South Africa. It’s fins have the same bones found in our hands and feet. The echidna mentioned in Kraken is part of a collection of Australian marsupials (including platypuses) that Richard Owen dissected himself in an attempt to prove them hoaxes. They challenged his view of science and possibly supported evolution – so of course he had to discredit them.

The last case pointed out in the tour was not flashy like Archie or gruesome like the jars filled with the same species packed on top of each other – just a few shelves with smaller, singular specimens. All but one have had updated labels with garish yellow stickers, but the tour guide (like Billy the curator) pointed out a flat fish with an aging brown label. These specimens are a portion of Darwin’s collection from his journey with the Beagle, the journey where he formed his thoughts on evolution and changed science forever. The yellow markers show them as “type specimens,” and as soon as this is pointed out I noticed that most of the other jars around the room have yellow labels, too, and I found this even more impressive than the giant squid.

Type specimens – the “bottled Platonic essences that define everything like them” as Mieville described – are literally the first samples of that species to be studied and preserved. They are the specimen by which others are compared and measured. The only species without a type specimen is Homo sapiens (although for a laugh some scientists did decide that Carl Linnaeus must be the type since he only used himself as a study when describing our species).

My experience touring the spirit collection was remarkably similar in feel to when I viewed reliquaries in Munich or Paris. The darkness, the hush, preserved saints in glass coffins, finger bones in elaborate cages, bejeweled skulls. Yes it lacked the clinical steel and class, but the feel was the same. The niggling horror that something died and it’s (his/her) body was manipulated for a purpose that served only the living.

For 10 quid, you can see all the ooey gooey pickled animals you want, and it’s a behind the scenes tour well worth it that lets the museum show off the current work they’re doing. Transparency is a recent theme in museum collections. The Natural History Museum has the Darwin Centre with it’s glass walled labs, but other museum focus on opening up their collections stores. Hundreds, thousands, millions of objects that are in storage in perpetuum, that wouldn’t be seen if not for the tours or open storage displays their museums instigate.

The Spirit Collections is one great example of how the public can use museum collections. Mieville was inspired to write Kraken, Speedo used their shark skin collections to inspire swimsuits for Olympians, and Damien Hirst’s’ animals in tanks were prepared by the same people who made the squid’s tank. Museum collections and store rooms are stagnant, but are being used for research and inspiration behind the scenes. Not just a place to visit, they are an active resource.

It’s worth checking to see if your favorite museum has any form of open storage or tours of their collection, because it’s a chance to see objects not usually on display and to see the work the museum is doing behind the scenes. And maybe, a trip into the museum’s underbelly will inspire you, too.

Explore Further

Kraken by China Mieville

China Mieville’s Website

Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums by Stephen T. Asma

The Spirit Collection: Behind the Scenes at the Natural History Museum

The Darwin Centre Spirit Collection

Archie the Giant Squid

The Ethics of Open Storage in Museum Collections

  Read about the collection and #giantsquid 🦑 @NHM_London that inspired #Kraken #ChinaMieville In China Mieville's Kraken, a Giant Squid has been stolen by unimaginable means from the Natural History Museum’s collection of pickled, jarred, and gross things (aka the Spirit Collection).

[betweenfictionandfact]

The Hanging Tree by Ben Aaronovitch, the newest novel in the Peter Grant/Rivers of London series, called to mind displays in the Museum of London. I’ve been to this museum so many times, but I was inspired to explore how the Rivers of London series would influence my experience of re-visiting the museum.

The magical version of London captured in the series isn’t far off from the version in the Museum of London, full of magical entities and long memories. The museum uses collages of images, videos, sounds, recreations, replicas, and sometimes even smells to communicate London’s history in a holistic way. 

About the series (hopefully without spoilers)

For those who haven’t read the series (or need a refresher), the Rivers of London/Peter Grant books by Ben Aaronovitch follow the adventures of Police Constable Peter Grant as he discovers the magical underbelly of London policing. As a narrator obsessed with architecture, Peter creates a strong sense of geographically organized history since his descriptions of locations and scenes are practically biographies of London.

Forbidden Planet’s Map of the Books

They are more history lesson than sensory descriptions, telling the reader what happened to give a place its character, like a pondering the impact of the Metropolitan Line on London’s geography and expanding urbanization while riding the tube during rush hour.

The railway hit Harrow on the Hill in 1880 and it’s been downhill ever since, culminating in one of those formless red brick shopping centres which artfully combines a complete lack of aesthetic quality with a total disregard for the utilitarian function for which it was built.

– The Furthest Station

Beyond the history lessons, the magic system (invented by Isaac Newton, apparently) also includes the concept of “vestigia” – that everything holds onto impressions, especially magical impressions, that the sensitively inclined can sense as smells, snatches of sound, images, or strange emotions. Stone especially absorbs these sensations, which means a city like London is absolutely saturated in remnants of its past.

The book also captures the people of London and the cultural diversity that is not always acknowledged enough in pop culture. The magical characters draw from the myths of the different groups that have immigrated to England, not just the “indigenous” fairies. Mama Thames, a Nigerian immigrant, took over London in the 60’s after Father Thames moved up river to the country. It’s brilliant commentary on the changing population of London.

The Museum of London

Basically, reading the Peter Grant series is already a bit like walking through the Museum of London, but for this visit I decided to leisurely look at all the objects and only stopping to read the text that really jumps out to get a sense of the story the whole museum is telling. In this museum’s case, it is the biography of London. Walking through the displays, you really get a sense of the character of the city through the centuries. The museum uses its collections to tell the story of the physical face of the city and its changing cultures – the waves of immigration and socio-cultural influences that defined it at every turn.

The “London before London” gallery focuses on London’s prehistory – from paleolithic animal bones and early tools to the civilization that lived along the banks of the river just before the Roman invasion. Winding along one wall is a soft blue glass case of objects found in the river, arranged chronologically like a river through time. Most were sacrifices – human remains, tools, ornaments, weapons, and other objects – given over to the river to ensure the life of the communities along it. It makes sense, seeing the number and quality of offerings, that the River spirits would be the most powerful ones in Aaronovitch’s book.

    One line in the exhibition text in particular resonated with the Peter Grant series: “the land bore witness.” While in the museum, this is a poetic way of summing up archaeological and geological evidence of human actions. This line reminded me of the vestigia.

Leaving the “London before London” gallery, you are immediately confronted with a dramatic mural of the Romans crossing the river Thames. The “Roman London” section really gets into the building of London as a city. Maps show buildings expanding along the Thames, the Walbrook, the Fleet. While standing in an immersive display of a Roman London street, you can see sections of the London wall outside the window. Still scattered throughout the City of London, the wall is layers of history itself – Roman, Medieval, Tudor, Victorian.

The “War, Fire and Plague” gallery was unfortunately incomplete when I visited, as the exhibition about the Great Fire was still going on and its section in the permanent gallery was closed off, but the London Stone is on temporary display here. The stone is supposedly the center of London, and if it ever leaves the city will fall (much like the ravens in the Tower). Like the personifications of London’s rivers, the stone is a genus loci, or spirit of the place. It’s waiting here in the Museum of London for it’s permanent home, and like some sort of digital genus loci, it’s entertaining itself on Twitter. You can talk to it @TheLondonStone and see what it’s been up to (hint, it is very full of itself).

The Great Fire devastated huge portions of the city and led to a massive rebuilding effort. The “Expanding City” rooms cover a time period (post 1666 to 1850) that was marked by rapid change. You get a sense of the speed of history in the layered displays. Odd details jumped out at me as I moved through them leisurely – an 18th century board game, the hollow Georgian costumes, the Newgate Prison cell, rubbish and broken teacups in a perspex case set into the floor below my feet. The Victorian Walk is a delightful warren of Victorian shops and was very reminiscent of the moments in the books when Peter Grant slipped into pockets of the past.

  “People’s City” covers the 1860s to 1940, and covers a large number of social movements. Hygiene efforts to clean up London’s water, the Suffragette movement, the rise of automobiles, World War One, and, of course, World War Two. Like the Great Fire, the Blitz changed the face of London. It’s described in a small, dark room with written and recorded accounts from survivors of the Blitz projected across a bombshell suspended in the center of the room.

“World City” is the last gallery in the timeline – 1950’s to today. Post-war London received a boom of immigrants from all over the world that drastically changed the cultural milieu of the city. The display cases in this section revel in that by using clothing and accessories to show not only the changing styles through time, but the increasing diversity of Londoners. There is also a section devoted to the Brixton Riots, and the change in policing practices after that, which is something I’m reminded of implicitly whenever Peter Grant jokes about “modern policing.” When I visited, there was also a “Changing London” art installation – video booths where visitors could record stories about their London.

It’s not surprising that recurring shared themes appear between these books (so very rooted in the city itself) and the Museum of London. The importance of the river appears again and again as I walked through the museum, from Romans to Saxons, all the way to quaint Victorian streets and model underground trains. Two long panoramas showed the changing skyline along the river in post-1666 rebuilding. The Great Stink and cholera epidemic which led Victorian Londoners to rethink the pollution they put in the river was represented by a brilliant digital interactive that looks like a fountain and lets you explore pollutants and germs. A small room was wallpapered with a map of London, letting you see how the boroughs stitch together with the Thames snaking through like the opening credits of East Enders.

  London is a palimpsest – a trait the Rivers of London series really captures in the narration and with the magical system. If you want to experience the history of London the way it unspools in the books – geographically, rather than chronologically – I recommend taking their great app Streetmuseum out for a spin. It lets you view old archival photographs of London laid over the street you’re physically standing in to see what it looked like decades earlier.

  The museum will be changing house over the next few years to Smithfield Market, so take a chance to experience the story as it’s displayed now at their London Wall location!

Explore Further

Museum of London

StreetMuseum

The Peter Grant / Rivers of London Series

Guided Walks organized by the Museum of London

Event on October 7th – Tour the Thames: History, Legend and Folklore

BBC’s resources for British History

City of London – Timeline

London is magical whether you're visiting @MuseumofLondon or reading about it @Ben_Aaronovitch The Hanging Tree by Ben Aaronovitch, the newest novel in the Peter Grant/Rivers of London series, called to mind displays in the Museum of London.

[ala-archives-deactivated2021092]

It’s Banned Books Week! Did you know that Banned Books Week, founded in 1982, is now on its 35th year?

(Artwork courtesy of @americanlibraryassoc)

@ala-banned-books-week-blog

[betweenfictionandfact]

From the collections at the American Museum of Natural History

Happy Mewseum Monday, everyone!

[betweenfictionandfact]

Palimpsest

#ObjectoftheMonth is all about Palimpsests #dissertation #thesis @MorganLibrary @metmuseum

Stanley William Hayter (1901-1988) Palimpsest, 1946 Sugar lift, soft-ground etching and scorper Plate: 8 7/8 × 6 7/8 in. (22.5 × 17.5 cm) Sheet: 13 1/8 × 10 3/16 in. (33.3 × 25.9 cm)

Stewart S. MacDermott Fund, 1983 Accession Number: 1983.1141.1 © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

A palimpsest is defined as:

writing material (such as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after…

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