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[After the elephant, the gorilla was Carl Akeley’s greatest love. He went to Africa for the fourth time in 1921 to collect three for the American Museum of Natural History, and came back with those three, as well as a new resolve to help preserve the animal. In the mythos of Carl Akeley, this trip was a transformative one, the redemptive act in the narrative of his life.

What follows is a bit about the mountain gorilla that got cut from the book. Mostly to trim what is still, in the end, a perhaps exceedingly long final chapter. Maybe this is how it works. Maybe you get to what you know is your book’s final chapter and suddenly it’s Oh, damn, I have so much more to pack in here.

For more on Carl and gorillas, be sure to check out Jay Kirk’s biography of Carl Akeley that came out last year.]
Continue reading TAA Outtake No. 7: Gorilla gorilla.

It’s hard to write a book on taxidermy and not write about hunting. It kept coming up. I would write about hunting, and then I would tell myself my book is about taxidermy and not about hunting. That hunting is, yes, often the process that begins a work of taxidermy, but not always. And then I’d think more about it and decide to write about hunting again.

The book’s final chapter eventually tries to reckon with the ethics surrounding taxidermy’s dead-animal prerequisite. What follows is a much clunkier way of writing about all this than what (I hope) I eventually got to in the final draft. And note, once again, how doggedly I tried to work Architectonica perspectiva into the book!

(Many thanks to Adam Peterson for his help and advice on this section of the book.)

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[Anti-t]axidermy protests tend not to get covered in the media outside of online forums among taxidermists, and indeed it’s the Internet that has made whatever outrage ever existed toward taxidermy grow and spread among those who may never have thought they were against it until a URL was sent their way, or a search turned up something unwanted, or they got forwarded one of a million effectless online petitions. Like the one against Art by God, a Web site that sells “natures [sic] art of earth’s wonders”—essentially fossils and skins and other such animal products. The petition argues that “[t]he global awareness as to the sanctity of wildlife, and man’s duty to preserve same is an ethos which obviously does not fit in with [Art by God’s] trade,” and asks not that the company stop selling animal parts, but merely that it change its name.
Continue reading TAA Outtake No. 6: Ethical Reckonings

[The following outtake is very, very bad. You’ve been warned.

The life and work of Carl Akeley, considered by many to be the father of modern taxidermy owing to certain innovations in mounting he helped to develop in the late 19th century, forms a kind of spine for the book. I deployed him to hinge thereon much of what I wanted to write about: pet taxidermy, competitive taxidermy, taxidermy schools, etc.

Earlier drafts did a lot more fictive biographizing than does the final book, I think. Back then I believed more in Akeley’s heroism, and I trusted too fully the accounts that had been written about his life. Over time, this changed. One of the problems in the book is that I think the writing about Carl is inconsistent. At times I help to build the man, the myth. At times I tear it all down.

In the end, my aim was to convey my personal ambivalence toward this person I’d originally pegged as a hero—dramatic or otherwise. And so the following bits became too grossly manipulative, creating a forced, falsed-up persona to fit my narrative’s needs.]

About a year after Carl arrived in Rochester, looking for work, a man named Will Wheeler started at Ward’s [Natural Science Establishment, where Carl landed his first professional taxidermy gig] and immediately began intense, diligent work on the classification of invertebrates. Shells, mostly. On breaks, Carl would come across cases of seashells in certain corners of the compound, and as Carl’s was the indiscriminate eye of the sculptor, taking in everything and storing it for future use, he could never see any real difference between the specimens Will categorized and named in full. Conus kintoki. Conus virgo. Conus gloriamaris. Carl would read the names printed on little cards pinned to the back of these display cases and he’d pronounce them in with his untrained tongue over and over again until they sounded like a kind of music.
Continue reading TAA Outtake No. 5: Biographizing.

On vacation this week. My outtake’ll have to be brief. As brief as, say, this swimsuit?

The notion of Miss TASCO 2008—those words, in fact—do appear in the book, but not this image. It came folded up Playboy-style in the 2008 catalogue for the Taxidermy Arts Supply Co., owned and operated by Dan Rinehart.

Mr. Rinehart: I thank you once again for letting me hang out in your taxidermy school for a day and take notes and ask people questions. I did my best to honor your students and you and the work you’ve accomplished with your school and supply company. Please don’t sue me for posting this image here.

The rumor is that Ms. Rezendes was a former student of Rinehart’s School of Taxidermy. Even less surprising: there are no more planned Miss TASCOs for the future. The shame about this is that in 2009, TASCO launched its CAD Series of deerforms, which come no only with preset eyes, but also pre-sculpted and pre-painted nostrils.

It woulda made a splash draped by a model.

Pre-order The Authentic Animal on Amazon.com

[Last week, my outtakes got linked to on the taxidermy.net forums, where taxidermists go to help each other on such tricky items as painting an elk eye or tanning a snake skin. If you want to know a thing about taxidermists, you should know that every one I ever asked questions of answered them in a way that was friendly and quick (the one exception being a certain NYC-based “rogue taxidermist” so self-involved and rude I dropped him from the book and hope his career has ended and ended tragically. At taxidermy.net, there’s also a lot of arguing—it’s an Internet discussion board, so this is no surprise. They argue about the work of taxidermy, sure, but also about the taxidermy industry as a whole. They argue about competitions and judging and awards. They argue about current events. It’s what every subculture does online.

I bring it up only to state an ongoing concern: I didn’t write The Authentic Animal exclusively for taxidermists, but the book is so much of taxidermists and their work that I hope this subculture likes the book. I hope I did some justice.

In honor of my being linked to on taxidermy.net, I’ve chosen the following outtake. I think it got cut for two reasons. First, there’s this forced and confounding queer-history metaphor I try and fail to deploy. Second, it’s the bit where I try to get a handle on the history of taxidermists’ organizations. It’s a good history, and I think it’s an important one to get down in writing. It turned out, though, not to fit in with the chapter on taxidermy competition as well as I would have liked it to. It also turned out that I wasn’t the person to write this history.]

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Continue reading TAA Outtake No. 3: National Taxidermists’ Organizations

[Keeping the outtakes coming with the other outtake from my visit to the 2007 World Taxidermy Championships, which had taxidermists from more than 16 different countries in attendance. Even so, the ceremony (and this passage in the book proper) began with a singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and only “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Also, remember especially toward the end that this happened in the spring of 2007. The specificity of the references may be one reason this bit got cut out.]

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Larry [Blomquist] introduces Mike Kirkhart, one of the fish judges who is here to give an “incovation.” I admit to being completely ignorant to what such a thing might be. Exactly what could posssibly be invoked at a taxidermy competition’s awards banquet? Kirkhart is a tall man with silver hair on his round, round face, and at the podium he tells some old yarn about a man named Bubba, who converts to Catholicism, being told by the priest that he was born a Baptist, he was raised a Baptist, but that now he’s a Catholic. Still, though, Bubba grills venison on Fridays, to the confusion of his Catholic neighbors. Eventually they investigate, and everyone comes to find out that just before putting the steaks on the grill, Bubba makes the sign of the cross over the meat and saying, “You were born a deer, you were raised a deer, but now you’re a catfish.”

Kirkhart knows his audience, and the joke fucking kills. Hoots and hollers fill the Expo Hall, and when it all finally settles down Kirkhart turns to matters more serious: God and taxidermy. “God has give us the beauty of nature,” he says, with the slow and even cadence of a preacher. “Let’s hear a round of applause, all of you, for loving the Creation so much to make it beautiful in His eyes.”

And before I know it Kirkhart leads the room in the saying of the Lord’s Prayer.
Continue reading TAA Outtake No. 2: The WTC Awards Ceremony

Despite being the World Taxidermy Championship, the World Taxidermy Championship is a decidedly American affair. It is invariably held in some U.S. city [ed. this is no longer true, in that the 2008 WTC was held way out in Austria], it is owned and operated by a magazine run out of Louisiana, and 90 percent of its competitors and judges are born-and-bred Americans. Europeans form the majority of the few non-Americans in attendance, and their influence at the WTC is compounded by the fact that 57 percent of the bird judges are European—a bit of a controversy given that bird taxidermy in the Europe is way different from bird taxidermy in the States. Much of the reason behind this is legal. Here, it’s illegal to mount any bird that it’s not legal to hunt. So: turkey, grouse, pheasants, ducks, etc. These birds are, pardon the pun, fair game for taxidermists. Your pet parakeet? Not fair game. The dead owl you find in the barn one morning? No, sir. No matter what the cause of death, if you come upon the carcass of a migratory or non-game bird, all you can do is call your local Game and Parks and they’ll come over and take the bird off your hands and find some way to dispose of it.

Europe, by comparison, is a bird taxidermist’s paradise. As long as the taxidermist is licensed, anything that dies of natural causes can be mounted—a falcon, a grackle, your budgie. European taxidermists deal with a vaster array of bird species than do Americans, and as such they’ve spent far more time studying the subtle physiological differences among those species.

Which brings us to the first-ever World Avian Challenge, a small side competition at the WTC in which competitors all mount the same bird in the exact same pose. Whoever most successfully captures the pose is declared winner. This year’s challenge is the Hungarian partridge—a brown-grey bird about the size of a volleyball, with an orange face and a bold black bead of an eye. Breakthrough [Magazine, corporate sponsor/host of the WTC] published back in January a photographic reference all contestants would use, showing a partridge stepping to the left with its head turned just to the right. This is all the contestants have. This and whatever experience they might claim with birds in general and the Hungarian partridge in specific.
Continue reading TAA Outtake No. 1: The World Avian Challenge

We’re just about eight weeks away from TAA‘s official release. (Not much more time to or on Barnes & Noble!) For those eager to find out what someone can say about taxidermy for 90,000 words, I’ve decided to launch each of those eight weeks with some outtakes.

Researching a nonfiction book is like shooting a documentary film. (I imagine?) You end up gathering way more material than you’re able to use. So at varying points in the writing and editing process, this and other stuff gets cut out. In the case of “the Animal” (can I try this, this nickname?), some of it made whatever chapter stray too far from its focus. Some of it was me indulging whims and interests no other person would ever care to follow. Some of it was just confusing and bad.

And now you’ll get to read it all!

I’ll start tomorrow, with a piece about the first-ever World Avian Challenge—a bizarre and tense side competition at the 2007 World Taxidermy Championships. Here’s, um…. Here’s sort of what it looked like:

That in the background there? That’s a griffin made from a stillborn lion cub, of course.