TALISMANIC OBJECTS (2)
By:
April 1, 2017
One in a 25-part series of nonfiction stories about objects of talismanic significance. This is the second volume in the PROJECT:OBJECT series. Please subscribe to the P:O newsletter; and purchase P:O apparel and accessories — all profits will be donated to the ACLU!
I grew up in Texas. At the drive-in movie theater, during 1956, my family saw both Disney’s 1940 animated movie Fantasia, with its sequence of dinosaurs fighting to Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” and also Irwin Allen’s brand-new documentary The Animal World, which includes a 10-minute stop-motion sequence — by Ray Harryhausen and Willis O’Brien — about dinosaurs. I was five years old, and completely sold on the strangeness and truth of ancient horrible monsters in a place where volcanoes turned the sky red and black and the earth cracked open and giant beasts fell down fighting all the way to their doom. I fantasized about being in that terrible place, hiding under ferns.
America shared my fascination; the Interstate Highway System was built shortly after that, and you’d see roadside fiberglass dinosaurs made by kooks and impresarios — not to mention Sinclair Oil’s ubiquitous apatosaurus. I was obsessed with Czech artist Z. Burian’s illustrations of palaeontological reconstruction, which I found in oversized books in the grownup part of our local Carnegie library; I also loved Charles R. Knight’s paintings of dinosaurs, which I first discovered in a National Geographic, in my classroom’s coat closet, in third grade.
I wanted to find a dinosaur fossil, badly. I dug holes in my backyard — nothing. Local driveways often consisted of white crushed limestone full of shell fossils, but these weren’t exciting enough for me. When I traveled to Oklahoma, my relatives would help me gather fossils in the strata revealed by highway construction: ferns, clusters of cylindrical shells, a nice branching crinoid, small trilobites. When I was at college, my parents threw away my “bag of rocks.” By then, I had become a dinosaur artist myself; I was hired to illustrate a doctoral thesis on blood vessels in mosasaur vertebrae.
Mosasaurs are one of the Great Marine Reptiles that ruled the seas during the Cretaceous period. Millions of years ago, northeast Texas was a shallow sea. You can find mosasaur fossils in northeast Texas’s Sulphur River, but I was deterred by Texas’s real-life monsters: water moccasins, giant feral hogs, tarantulas, alligator gars, fire ants. Some years ago, though, while visiting my hometown of Sulphur Springs, I purchased these mosasaur vertebrae in a junk store.
My dinosaur fossils are shiny because I’ve handled them so often. I like fitting the concavities to the convexities, forming a section of the spine of what was once a vast, fierce, real-life sea serpent.
TALISMANIC OBJECTS series: INTRODUCTION | Veda Hille on CROCHET SHEEP | Gary Panter on DINOSAUR BONES | Jami Attenberg on SELENITE CRYSTAL | Annie Nocenti on MINIATURE DICE | Wayne Curtis on CLOCK WINDING KEY | Judith Zissman on SPINDLE WHORL | Amy Fusselman on BOX OF PENCILS | Josh Glenn on MONKEY WHIMSEY | Mike Watt on DASHBOARD TOTEMS | Gordon Dahlquist on CLAY FOX | Mark Kingwell on ZIPPO | Jennifer Schuessler on BEER-CAN CHAIR | Anne Gisleson on WISDOM TEETH | Ben Ehrenreich on CHROME LUMP | Matthew De Abaitua on HATCHET | Ty Burr on INFLATABLE KING KONG | Jacob Covey on ARGUS COIN | Jessica Helfand on PILL BOTTLE | Shelley Jackson on IMPUNITY JANE | Jennifer Krasinski on LEO’S LIGHTER | Molly Heintz on EVIL EYE | Mark Frauenfelder on MARTIAN FINK RING | Amanda Fortini on PRAYER CARD | Ed Skoog on MAMMOTH IVORY | CONTEST-WINNING STORY: Seth on PEANUTS PAPERBACK.
POLITICAL OBJECTS series: INTRODUCTION | Luc Sante on CAMPAIGN PAMPHLETS | Lydia Millet on PVC POLAR BEAR | Ben Greenman on MATCHBOX CAR | Rob Baedeker on PRESIDENTS PLACEMAT | L.A. Kauffman on WHEATPASTE POSTER | & 20 MORE.
SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS at HILOBROW: PROJECT:OBJECT homepage | PROJECT:OBJECT newsletter | PROJECT:OBJECT objects (Threadless shop — all profits donated to the ACLU) | POLITICAL OBJECTS series (1Q2017) | TALISMANIC OBJECTS series (2Q2017) | ILLICIT OBJECTS series (3Q2017) | LOST OBJECTS vol. 1 series (4Q2017) | FLAIR series (2Q2018) | FOSSIL series (4Q2018). 12 DAYS OF SIGNIFICANCE | 12 MORE DAYS OF SIGNIFICANCE | 12 DAYS OF SIGNIFICANCE (AGAIN) | ANOTHER 12 DAYS OF SIGNIFICANCE . ALSO SEE: SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS website | SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS collection, ed. Rob Walker and Josh Glenn (Fantagraphics, 2012) | TAKING THINGS SERIOUSLY, ed. Josh Glenn (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007) | TAKING THINGS SERIOUSLY excerpts.
