The Cabinet of Wonders
Bookstores never know where to put Lawrence Weschler’s books. Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (1995), his portrait of the curator of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, is likely to be found in “Psychedelics.” Boggs: A Comedy of Values (1999), a profile of a performance artist who draws images of money, in “Economics.” A Miracle, A Universe (1990), which examines the role of torture in the military dictatorships of Brazil and Uruguay, may be in the “Latin America” section. That the confusion stems as much from Weschler’s remarkable breadth as a writer as it does a bookstore’s parochialism gives him little comfort.
Where does Weschler want his work collected? Calamities of Exile (1998), his book about three expatriates from three totalitarian regimes�Czech dissident Jan Kavan, Iraqi architect Kanan Makiya, and South African poet Breyten Breytenbach�offers a clue. The volume’s subtitle, Three Nonfiction Novellas, is a designation that simultaneously clarifies and complicates the question of just what kind of writing he does.
Weschler was born on February 13, 1952, and raised in Van Nuys, California. His father was a professor and industrial psychologist, and his grandfather was Ernst Toch, whose Third Symphony was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1956.
Weschler attended Cowell College of the University of California at Santa Cruz. After university, Weschler freelanced for the L.A. Reader and L.A. Weekly while working as an editor and interviewer for UCLA’s Oral History Program. His biography of the artist Robert Irwin (Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, 1982) grew out of interviews Weschler was editing for the program. The book was excerpted in The New Yorker, and so began Weschler’s most important literary relationship.
In 1981, he became a staff writer at the magazine, where he divided his time between long, foreign political pieces, and more lighthearted cultural ones. In particular, Weschler wrote frequently about Poland (collected in The Passion of Poland, 1984).
The first of his books not to originate in The New Yorker (parts were published in Harper’s), Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder explores the Museum of Jurassic Technology, a tiny L.A. storefront where one encounters bizarre exhibits like the Cameroonian stink ant, and bats embedded in lead. Weschler’s first bestseller, Mr. Wilson, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Weschler first wrote about J. S. G. Boggs in 1987, as the oncesoaring stock and art markets were collapsing. “Where did all the money go?” he wondered. In several pieces over the next decade (collected in book form in 1999), Boggs proved the perfect marginal character through whom to explore this question. Boggs is a performance artist and monetary draftsman who exchanges original renderings of paper currency for goods and services.
In 2001, Weschler became the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU. His most recent book, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences (2006) won The National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.
