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Morbid Anatomy Museum Provocateur in Residence Mark Dery recently interviewed our creative director Joanna Ebenstein about the importance of books in her life and in the greater Morbid Anatomy project. The result--a wide-ranging conversation touching on soulless California suburbs, Charlotte's Web , British New Wave, Lois Duncan, Rosemary's Baby , V. C. Andrews, post-mortem photography, The Mütter Museum, Frederik Ruysch, Walter Potter, Edward Gorey, wine coolers in the park and "Genleman's Erotica"--was just published on the wonderful Boing Boing website and can be read by clicking here . Image: The wonderful book Design for Death by Barbara Jones

Image found here .

I was recently invited to select a single object from Blythe House--the storehouse containing the remains of early 20th century pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcome's once million strong collection --for an episode of the Wellcome Collection 's “The Thing Is… " From the over 100,000 amazing objects in the collection--including ivory anatomical mannequins, wax vanitas busts, antique sexual aids, Greek anatomical otives, torture devices, statues of saints and even a Peruvian mummy--I chose, it will not surprise regular readers to discover , Henry Wellcome's Wax Anatomical Venus (see above). I had been curious about this enigmatic creature ever since Kate Forde and I featured her in the Wellcome’s 2009 Exquisite Bodies exhibition . Although diminutive--she is only three feet in length while most others are life-sized--she is still an extraordinarily uncanny and charismatic object. She was also a very mysterious object, with very little I could discover, despite my be...

    Our good friend Norman Klein--author of the amazing The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects --has partnered with Cal Arts' Margo Bistis to create what he calls an "interactive wunder-roman" entitled The Imaginary 20th Century . Following is a guest post by Norman detailing this impressive and characteristically eccentric project; You can also find out more by clicking here . In 1816, a letter by the philosopher Friedrich Schelling describes a novel that runs on wooden and iron gears, propelled by a river, like an early industrial loom. He called it a wunder-roman . This year, an interactive wunder-roman has been published online, and may be the largest archival novel to date-- of rare print curiosities-- certainly the largest in story form that can be navigated as if one were operating a giant machine. Here is an introduction: According to legend, in 1902, a woman named Carrie, while traveling through Europe, selects four men to seduce her, each with a ...

Following is a guest post by Amy Slonaker-- Morbid Anatomy Museum Board Member and two-time attendee of the Morbid Anatomy Day of the Dead Tour in Mexico . I asked Amy--who is also a bit of a dilettante in the area of religious history--to write a brief report about the phenomenon of “La Madre Santisima de la Luz” as witnessed on our Mexican travels. The information contained in her post, Amy points out, came via the world wide web, so she warmly invites any corrections or addenda; you can email them by clicking here . The Marian Cult of “La Madre Santisima de la Luz” The 2014 Morbid Anatomy Day of the Dead Tour was another winner that focused on experiencing the celebration of Dia de Los Muertos in Mexico. It also brought us in touch with the Marian cult of “La Madre Santisima de la Luz.” We had seen her image in a church on last year’s tour but didn’t know her name. Imagine our delight to find this prayer card amongst so many others! In 2013, while visiting the city of Guanajuato, ...

In the words of October's Scholar in Residence Salvador Olguín : In 1930, after failing to secure enough backing for his motion picture projects in the US, which would have marked his entrance into Hollywood, Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein decided to go for the second best thing in North America, and headed south to Mexico. There, he shot extensively: about 40 hours worth of film. The idea was to produce a movie celebrating Mexico’s violent and diverse history. The title: ¡Que viva México! Eisenstein would never finish editing the film. All we are left with is a version from 1979, and a legend. Above is a wonderful clip from Eisenstein's unfinished ¡Que viva México!, compliments of our friend James Bell .

  In the following guest post, Morbid Anatomy foreign corespondent Eric Huang reports on the little-remembered phenomenon--and hysteria related to--the 1960s "death disc," or songs in which the love interest dies "due to a lovers’ spat, jealousy, a cruel twist of fate, or suicide." Just a few well known examples of "death discs"--which spanned such genres as rock, Motown and country and western--are "Leader of the Pack" by The Shangri-Las (1965); "Ode to Billie Joe" by Bobby Gentry (1967); "Tell Laura I Love Her" by Ray Petersen (1960); and "Teen Angel" by Mark Dinning (1960). Following is the full and fascinating story, along with videos of ten of the best remembered "death discs." Thanks, Eric, for this excellent report! THE RISE OF THE DEATH DISC In the 1960s, there was a trend in popular music dubbed, ‘death discs’ or ‘splatter platters.’ All were songs about love-lost in which the protagonist – o...

Doing research for the 2015 Morbid Anatomy Museum Wall Calendar , I came across the wonderful tidbit above from the a 1907 issue of Australia's Kalgoorlie Miner . For more on the Paris morgue--which attracted throngs of tourists throughout the 19th century eager to view the bodies of the unclaimed dead--see these recent Morbid Anatomy posts ( 1 , 2 , 3 ). To find out more about the calendar--and pre-order a copy!--click here .

For those in the St. Louis area: February of next year, St. Louis University and Washington University will be co-presenting an interdisciplinary symposium to celebrate the 500-year anniversary of the birth of Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), founder of the study of modern human anatomy. The symposium--which runs from February 26 - February 28, 2015--is open to the public, and will feature some of our favorite international anatomical scholars including Michael Sappol of the National Library of Medicine; Andrea Carlino of the University of Geneva
; Jonathan Sawday of Saint Louis University; and Rebecca Messbarger , author of The Lady Anatomist: The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini . Morbid Anatomy founder Joanna Ebenstein will also be speaking. Schedule follows. To find out more--and get tickets--click here . Hope to see you there! This interdisciplinary symposium will celebrate the 500-year anniversary of the birth of Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), founder of the study of mode...

The Morbid Anatomy Musuem crew has just returned from our annual Day of the Dead field trip in Mexico . This year, our trip--as always, under the guidance of Scholar in Residence Salvador Olguín --took us to Oaxaca and Mexico City, where we saw markets, mummies, churches, skeleton puppet shows, three day of the dead celebrations, and much, much more. We have just posted a set of photographs--from which the above are drawn--documenting some of the fabulous churches, mummies and street scenes we saw whilst in Mexico; you can see the full set--at much higher quality!--by clicking here . For more, you can see Day of the Dead celebration photos here , and photos from our visit to Enriqueta Vargas' Tultitlan-based Santa Muerte Shrine by clicking here . If you would like to be put on the wait list for the 2015 Day of the Dead trip, you can email Salvador at info [at] borderlineprojects.com or sign up for the Morbid Anatomy Mailing List (and thus receive an alert when it is announced) b...

Santa Muerte --literally "Holy Death" or "Saint Death"--is the sacred figure of death personified as a woman. She is venerated by an ever growing number of people in Mexico and beyond, and is especially popular with disenfranchised members of society such as criminals, prostitutes, transvestites, homosexuals, prisoners, the very poor, and other people for whom conventional Catholicism has not provided a better or a safer life. The phenomenon is thought to have its roots in a s yncretism  of the beliefs of the native Latin Americans and the colonizing Spanish Catholics. We at Morbid Anatomy have long been fascinated by the phenomenon of Santa Muerte (on which more here ) and, whilst in Mexico last week for the Morbid Anatomy Day of the Dead field trip , we had the very good fortune--thanks to our good friend Dr. Andrew Chesnut --to visit to the epic Santa Muerte shrine in Tultitlan, Mexico. Founded in 2007 by Jonathan Legaria Vargas (aka “Comandante Pantera"...

The Morbid Anatomy Museum's creative director Joanna Ebenstein will be giving a talk as part of a conference at New York City's School of Visual Arts. Entitled "Naturally Hypernatural: Visions of Nature," the conference will take place from Friday November 14 through Sunday November 16. You can find out more--and purchase tickets--by clicking here . Conference Naturally Hypernatural: Visions of Nature is an interdisciplinary conference investigating the fluctuating “essences” of “nature” and the “natural” in the 21st century. Each of these terms carries with it an enormity of philosophical questions ranging from the alteration of life itself to dialogues concerning the notion of the Anthropocene, a term used to describe man’s intervention into the natural world. The talks presented here will focus on contemporary issues in the visual arts as they intersect with the biological and geological sciences, confirming that nature remains an intrinsically mysterious, ever mo...

Following is a guest post by Romany Reagan, PhD Candidate, Royal Holloway, University of London, on the idea of the uncanny. If this topic interests you, we hope you'll join us for her illustrated lecture "A Theoretical Ghost: Analysing the Uncanny Through the Lens of Charles Dickens' Night Walks" tomorrow night--Tuesday November 4th. More information and tickets are available here . The Uncanny: Liminal Space and the Seduction of Melancholic Mystery By Romany Reagan, PhD Candidate, Royal Holloway, University of London The uncanny is apprehension rather than experience, dread rather than terror. It inhabits a liminal psychological space, existing in our peripheral vision and built on uncertainty. The moment our imagination is satisfied into certainty — whether that be of safety or of horror — the moment ceases to be uncanny. If a ghost were to be proven to be a ghost, it would no longer be uncanny; it would be paranormal. Under this term fall an entire franken-family ...