Bananas are red.

I’d seen The Blue Planet before I moved to England and was amazed by it, but since my friend A. made me aware of Sir David Attenborough, I’ve been the most faithful fan. I haven’t missed a single episode of Planet Earth, Life in the Undergrowth and Life in Cold Blood.

To watch him kneel or lie in the sand, windswept, donning khakis and a light blue shirt, whispering and pointing to explain to us even the creepiest, crawliest, slimiest creatures with genuine enthusiasm and passion, is simply awe-inspiring. He reminds me that ‘curiosity’, etymologically, is associated with ‘care’.

For two weeks in autumn, I purchased every issue of the Daily Mail (with a slight feeling of guilt, because it’s an appalling newspaper) - and if I couldn’t, for whichever reason, I terrorised E. to do so - to collect single episodes of all the Attenborough series on DVD.

And then, last Wednesday, I had the opportunity, between two meetings in London, to squeeze in a visit to The Queen’s Gallery next to Buckingham Palace to see Amazing Rare Things, the current exhibition of natural drawings from the Royal Collection co-curated by Sir David. Get past the airport-style security and don’t be unnerved by the muffled, repressed atmosphere (I had to sneeze at some point and felt like a terrorist) - and it is quite amazing.

The deep, saturated, velvety red of Maria Sibylla Merian’s Branch of banana tree (Musa paradisiaca) with caterpillar and moth (Automeris liberia), c. 1701-5, still haunts me.

The impossible city.

C.R. Cockerell (1788-1863), The Professor’s Dream, 1848, in the Royal Academy of Arts collection.

The Collector (V)

Trinity College Library, Dublin. From Candida Höfer, Libraries.

I asked her, “Could we kiss for a little bit?” “Excuse me?” she said, although, on the other hand, she didn’t pull her head back. “It’s just that I like you, and I think I can tell that you like me.” She said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Disappointment #4. I asked why not. She said, “Because I’m forty-eight and you’re twelve. “So?” “And I’m married.” “So?” “And I don’t even know you.” [...]

“Here’s my card,” I told her, when the cap was back on the lens, “in case you remember anything about the key or just want to talk.”

OSKAR SCHELL

Inventor, jewelry designer, jewelry fabricator, amateur entomologist, francophile, vegan, origamist, pacifist, percussionist, amateur astronomer, computer consultant, amateur archaeologist, collector of: rare coins, butterflies that died natural deaths, miniature cacti, Beatles memorabilia, semiprecious stones, and other things

E-mail: oskar_schell@hotmail.com
Home phone: private / cell phone: private
Fax machine: I don’t have a fax machine yet

From Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

A Bit of Everything

Obscura Antiquites & Oddities storefront, New York City.

We started by placing in the centre of the window a piece of basalt, fairly big but not too unwieldy, well brushed and laid delicately on a bed of cotton like some every fragile object. On the right and on the left, imitation crystal goblets held white and yellow sea sand and common calcareous sand… A variety of leaves - beech, locust, oak - were pasted on a sheet of black cardboard at the back of the display. Each leaf was identified by its origin, from the soft green of May to the golden yellow of October… One page, dog-eared, numbered 165, from one of the least engaging novels by M. Pierre Benoît, a member of the French Academy, was displayed in a frame under glass…

Hungarian novelist Alexandre Maraï’s idea for a store called A Bit of Everything, published in the French magazine Lu, August 1935.

Listmania.

I’d certainly have chosen different words than Christopher Foyle did for his Treasury of Unusual Words (beautiful-looking book and fantastic birthday present from M. and J.) - as anyone of us would have. But I’d definitely have included the following too,

for their meaning

to moodle - to pass time in doing nothing, to meander aimlessly

thigmophilic - touch-loving, liking or needing to be touched or to feel the touch of something

blennophobia - an abnormal fear of slime or mucous

colombophile - a pigeon-fancier

for their onomatopoetic quality

susurration - a whispering, rustling or murmuring sound

curmudgeon - a bad-tempered, mean-spirited or miserly person

to murken - to darken, to grow dark, to become overcast; to make dark, to obscure

rambunctious - exuberant, boisterous, difficult to control

and for its straightforwardness

to unnun - to expel a nun from the religious order to which she belongs.

Surrealist end-of-year questions.

It’s the season for end-of-year reviews. Government summits were held, agreements reached. Germany fell in love with a polar bear cub, the inflation increased, William and Kate broke up and got back together. Nobel Prizes were awarded and the flooded basements have dried up.

I’m never quite certain what all of this has to do with us. But I sincerely hope you can look back to a year full of pleasant surprises, mind-boggling coincidences and fascinating encounters.

• How do you evaluate inspiration, behaviour and progression?
• What is a fire that smoulders?
• What is the number 27?
• Is there a way of building in trails of the unexpected?
• What has been the most important encounter of your life?
• How will your session take into account the widest range of participants?
• What is a path through the imagination?
• Are you a fox or a hedgehog?
• What hope do you put in love?

“Papillons” with questions, some of which were originally asked by the Surrealists who gave out a bunch of business cards with philosophical quotes and thought-provoking, slightly disturbing questions at the opening of their Bureau of Surrealist Research in 1924.

Mark Dion echoes this practice with his Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy at the Manchester Museum since 2005.

Christmassy flower.

Last year around this time I held a rose of jericho in my hand; it felt dead, but strangely elastic. The friendly tour guide at Trausnitz Castle in Bavaria, the partly restored Wittelsbach kunstkammer collection that opened to the public in 2004, had us touch a specimen, no doubt trying to keep the children at bay. I remember thinking, what’s the point? After all she didn’t pour water on it to make it blossom.

But maybe the opportunity to handle the object is the reason why I still remember everything she told us about it: that it is an African desert plant brought to Europe by the Crusaders; that it opens its dead-looking branches and begins to blossom as soon as it is watered; that it was kept in cabinets of curiosities due to its magical, oracular powers (its failure to open symbolised a person’s imminent death); that, according to its Christian symbolism, it was believed to represent the opening of the womb at childbirth, and that it was therefore supposed to blossom only at Christmas.

Cornell’s other boxes.

Hans Namuth, Joseph Cornell’s Cellar Workshop at 3708 Utopia Parkway, New York, 1969, photograph.

a diary journal repository laboratory,
picture gallery, museum, sanctuary,
observatory, key… the core of a labyrinth,
a learning house for dreams and visions.

Joseph Cornell (not on the collection of found objects and materials in his basement but) on a file he kept on one of his finished boxes, quoted in Rikki Ducornet, The Monstrous and the Marvelous.

I dream of a new age of curiosity.

Rosamond Purcell, Goliath beetles.
From Illuminations: A Bestiary, 1986.

Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity is seen as futility. However, I like the word; it suggests something quite different to me. It evokes “care”; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental. I dream of a new age of curiosity.

Michel Foucault in an interview with Christian Delacampagne, Le Monde, 6./7. April 1980.

Inventory (II)

Mark Dion, Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy, 2005, desk.

Inventory
by Günter Eich

This is my cap,
this is my coat,
here is my shaving set
in a linen bag.

A tin can:
my plate, my cup,
in the metal
I have scratched my name.

Scratched it with this
precious nail,
which I hide
from greedy eyes.

In my haversack are
a pair of woolen socks
and some things I don’t
tell anyone about,

it serves as a pillow
at night for my head.
The cardboard lies here
between me and the earth.

The pencil lead
I love the most:
by day it writes verses for me
that I have thought up by night.

This is my notebook,
this is my canvas,
this is my towel,
this is my thread.

From The Faber Book of 20th-Century German Poems, edited by Michael Hofmann.