Museums of Disasters, III

Picture from here



Museum of failed products


Museum of extinct insects


Museum of Lost Wonder


icy Museum of pointless existence

Museums of Disasters, II

picture from this site: http://www.kakarigi.net/manu/vijecnic.htm

Museum of genetic catastrophe

“I understand that the idea of bringing something dead back to life is fundamentally frightening,” he went on. “It’s a power that science has come to possess and it makes us queasy, and it should. But there are many viruses that are more dangerous than these—more infectious, far riskier to work with, and less potentially useful.’’


Museum of an extinct race

"The man [Dervis Korkut] so determined to protect a Jewish book was a scion of a prosperus, highly regarded family of Muslim intellectuals, famous for producing judges of Islamic law. He studied theology at Istanbul University and Near Eastern Languages at the Sorbonne. He spoke at least ten languages and served as the Bosnian National Museum’s chief librarian."

museums of disasters

Picture: Burning of the Duchess Anna Amalia Library from Wiki

The Museum of Broken Relationships


Museums of Unworkable Devices

The museum of food failures


The museum of dust


Museum of useless efforts


The Museum of Lost Interactions

The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies

more amusing muses

The Surrealists' Muse, by Francine Du Plessix Gray, from the New Yorker

“…Marie-Laure [de Noailles] met the last great love of her life, a Spanish painter named Oscar Dominguez, one of the few heterosexuals she ever took up with. Dominguez, four years older than she, was born in the Canary Islands and, after moving to Paris, hung out on the fringes of the Surrealist movement. A man whose face resembled that of an Easter Island statue, Dominguez was a heavy drinker given to outrageous behavior- he would shout out “My penis is hard as gold” at the dinner table. According to a friend, the couple looked like the union of a transvestite Louis XVI and a Cro-Magnon man, and even at formal parties they pawed at each other like teenagers.”

“…there was something subversive about the institution of the fairy tale in France during the 1690s, for it enabled writers to create a dialogue about norms, manners, and power that evaded court censorship and freed the fantasy of the writers and readers, while at the same time paying tribute to the French code of civilité and the majesty of the aristocracy. Once certain discursive paradigms and conventions were established, a writer could demonstrate his of her “genius” by rearranging, expanding, deepening, and playing with the known functions of a genre that, by 1715, had already formed a type of canon…”

-Jack Zipes from the Introduction, Spells of Enchantment

dangerous blonde sunday

Sunday, I spent nearly the whole day in bed reading the biography of Caroline Blackwood (Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood by Nancy Schoenberger). Blackwood was born in London in 1931, grew up in Ireland and lived sporadically in America until her death in1996. She is famous for her beauty, her eccentricity, her writings and her husbands (the painter, Lucian Freud and the poet, Robert Lowell). What struck me about her was her slovenliness, her alcoholism and her morbidity. Nevertheless, it makes for a magnetic read. I wondered if she had not been beautiful and titled, would she have become a writer and would she have even been famous at all? I am quite enchanted by muses, how little they are acknowledged and valued and the creatively inspired havoc they can unleash on their lovers/artists.

I came across this book while browsing the late Theresa Duncan's blog; she quotes in her post, a little from this review of the biography. I was immediately intrigued and went out to check out the book from my library. The pictures above are: Lucian Freud's portrait of Lady Blackwood and the cover of the book, which is a photo taken by Walker Evans.

Here is an excerpt of an article written about Lowell and his last minutes of life- it gives insight into the ill-fated marriage between Lowell and Blackwood:

On this day [September 12] in 1977 the poet Robert Lowell died at the age of sixty in the back seat of a New York City taxi. He had hailed the cab at JFK airport and was heading up to West 67th Street, returning to his ex-wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. He had just flown back from a disastrous trip to Ireland, where he had gone to explain to his present wife, the Anglo-Irish Lady Caroline Blackwood -- like Hardwick a writer, as well as heiress to the Guinness Stout fortune -- why their marriage was over. The meeting at Blackwood's estate outside Dublin had of course ended badly, with Blackwood storming out with her three children -- the son she had had with Lowell and two daughters from two former marriages, one to the painter, Lucien Freud (grandson of Sigmund Freud), one to the composer, Israel Citcowitz. At the end, Lowell still clutched in his stiffening arms one of Lucien Freud's paintings of the young Blackwood, staring out from the canvas into the void.