The Gardner Museum

Yesterday Anat and I went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Now where to start with this? The museum is the brainchild of one very rich woman, who loved art (though I'm not quite sure how you could appreciate art by the thousands...) and wanted not only to own it but also to have control over how others experienced it. I don't know very much about this infamous woman, but at the museum her name is mentioned with the awe and recognition of a goddess. Her vision was to create a space for the pieces of artwork she collected and to arrange them not thematically or chronologically, but aesthetically.

We didn't tag along with any of the numerous tours that chased each other around the indoor coutryard through the four-wings of the museum, but I did manage to eavesdrop on snippets of the dosants' speeches. One woman was obsessed with the "connections" establishes by the museum. "Isabella loved connections," she said, "and she tried to bring those out in her arrangements. The fabric on the woman in this portrait's skirt echoes the upholstry on the chair below. The flowers she's holding are similar to those in the portrait across the room." And on and on. Another dosant was caught up on the words "emotion" and "motion", and couldn't avoid using them together in nearly every sentence as she described a painting of a flamenco dancer. (That was, actually, one of the coolest parts of the museum.)

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Isabella Steward Gardner was rich and bought a lot (and I mean a lot) of artwork. Then she build a huge house to hold it all, and arranged it all herself, and lived in the house (I think), and then said that after she died anyone could come and view her collection, as long as no one touched or moved anything. As a result the museum is very very creepy. It's like a haunted house. There are hundreds of chairs that no one is allowed to use. The place is dark and cluttered and overwhelming. There's a beautiful interior garden that no one may walk through. Yet somehow this place has to be maintained. Someone has to touch everything, dust everything, rake the un-used gravel walkways, weed the flowerbeds. Yet that presence is oddly absent. A few rooms were closed off for "refurbishment", but those were completely covered in black plastic as if their existence were nullified. All in all, the place felt like a haunted house, and the initial strictness of the security guards (no cell phones, not even silenced, no unworn coats, no bags, no umbrellas in hand) began to make immaculate sense.

The place was beautiful, but oddly so. It was one woman's idea of perfect aestheticism. An idea of perfection that died with Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1924. The museum's website claims it is a place, "Unchanged but certainly not stagnant." I am not sure whether that duality is achieved, but I certainly applaud them for trying.

I know, I know...

I'm supposd to be writing about graduating and leaving MIT and "moving on" (at least about the Boston Marathon, for my mom's sake...), but right now all I feel like writing about is Robert Sullivan's Rats.

I'm going to keep this brief (as my stomach is grumbling and there's a piece of homemade zucchini bread in my bag that I can't eat until I leave the Boston Public Library and its free wireless access), but I'd like to start by saying that Robert Sullivan is my writing hero.

As you all already know if you are acquainted with me (or any of my recent writings), I'm preoccupied with all things gross, putrid, and disgusting. Even though Sullivan gives rats a fair evaluation in his book, the fact that rats are undeniably gross shines through on every page; this is why I loved it so much.

I'm going to go easy on quoting Sullivan (as I trust that you are all going to go out and read the book, and not just for its "excellent rat cover"), but I can't resist completely (even though, at points, I have to admit I got a bit tired of his Thoreau-emulating).

Sullivan notes that while there may not actually be one rat for every American (though there are plenty of rats everywhere...yes everywhere), there is at least one rat story for every American. I picked up this book on the suggestion of my Nature Writing professor, after I described some of the rats around MIT while brainstorming for my first essay. One of the rat-catchers Sullivan talks with remarks, "The general consensus...is that if you see one, then there are ten, and if you see them during the day, then you don't know what you've got." Yesterday at about 9 am in from of the Z Center I saw a good-sized rat scampering (because rats always scamper) about on top of a short rock wall.

My other favorite parts of the book include the historical descriptions of the plague outbreak in San Fransisco of 1900 (I'd be interested in hearing how many of you knew about this...I certainly didn't), which gave rise to the plague-carrying rodent populations in the American Southwest that I heard about while backpacking in Utah. I also enjoyed the sections about rat fighting. Apparently dogs were unleashed upon 100 rats at a time: "Jocko the Wonder Dog, a London-based rat fighting dog, was said to hold the world's record, having killing one hundred rats in five minutes and twenty-eight seconds."

Also, there a chapter called "Excellent." Excellent.

The Afterword (not the actual booky book) ends thusly:
"Now, go and have a drink or relax or something, because the book you just read that was all about rats is thankfully over."

I think I'm going to go do just that.

Then I'm going to ruminate on more gross things, and hope that gross-ness isn't going to become vogue. But if it does, that's ok too.