Since the Peabody I’ve had a soft spot for natural history collections housed at universities. Apart from anything else I’m half in love with the plant collection at the new Lee Kong Chian Museum (they seem to me to be the exact opposite of the Harvard Glass Flowers — you marvel at the lifelikeness of the glass flowers for the mastery of glass, that something glass should breathe so much life, but the genuine specimens of the LCK collection terrify one precisely because they are hyper-real — being real is not enough for them, no, this pronounced solidity, this lurid vividness, this surfeit of materiality, is almost unbearable, yet desperately fragile and imminently perishable (in my mind, I can almost feel the granules coming away under a trailing finger, the rain of dust falling from a mushroom cap, a leaf crackling, blowing away like ash.)