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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 the kinds of bizarre exhibits—the Cameroonian stink ant, horns sprouted from
human heads, bats embedded in lead—that were long ago deaccessioned from the great museums of
the world. Like the “wonder-cabinets” of Renaissance Europe, curator David Wilson’s museum is
less a reflection of the world than a delightful escape from it. New York Times critic Michiko
Kakutani called the book “a thoughtful meditation on the role of museums (and the place of wonder)
in our society today” and praised Weschler’s “sympathetic radar for human idiosyncrasy and
obsession.” 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 once-soaring 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. He will go into a bar, order a drink, and present
a drawing of, say, the back of a five-dollar bill in payment. If it is accepted, he asks for a receipt and
change, which he then sells to his collectors, who track down the original drawing and try to buy it.
The complete transaction—drawing, change, receipt—constitutes Boggs’s art. One Boggs transaction
was auctioned for $420,000, and others have been acquired by the British Museum, the Art Institute
of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian. The Atlantic Monthly’s Toby Lester
picked up on the parallels between author and subject: “Weschler always seems to be, as he says of
Boggs, ‘engaged in philosophical disruptions, in provoking brief, momentary tears in the ordinarily
seamless fabric of taken-for-granted mundanity.’ ”
In 2001, Weschler became the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU. His
most recent book, Vermeer in Bosnia (2004), is a collection of his work from the past twenty years.
His next book, to be published in 2005, is a collaboration with McSweeney’s tentatively called
Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences.
Despite the variety of your subjects, your work feels like a whole. Is this conscious?
Yes, I’m very conscious that I am building an overarching structure. It reminds me of the Borges
story in which a person writes and writes his whole life, and at the end realizes that what he’s written
is his own face.
The problem is that not everybody sees the continuity, and bookstores frequently don’t know what
sections to put my books in. I just heard that a Barnes & Noble in Ann Arbor put Mr. Wilson’s
Cabinet of Wonder, my book about David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology, in the
“Psychedelics” section! Boggs, my portrait of an artist who draws money, sometimes ends up in
“Economics.” A Miracle, A Universe, my book about torture victims settling accounts with their
torturers, is put in the “Latin America” section.
It is very frustrating because I believe there is a kind of writerly nonfiction—a tradition to which I