Category: taxidermy

The Authentic Animal – now streaming!

Some of you may recall that my pal Steve makes great mixtapes. They are essentially all I’ve been listening to in the car since moving to Alabama. Steve favors a good 50/50 mix of UK and US music—at least, he does on the mixes he sends me. From them I’ve discovered such now-beloved acts as The Incredible String Band, Vic Godard, Orange Juice, Pants Yell!, the Soft Pack, Comet Gain, and many many others.

Now, there’s a The Authentic Animal mix, full of cover songs, the taxidermy of the pop-music world. I’m listening to it now and you have to, too, now.

Whose Birthday Is This?

Yesterday was N’s birthday, which he spent on the road and with some friends in Arkansas (thanks, Jaegers!), who bought him a cake, kindfully. But today? Well Facebook tells me it’s my pal Daryl’s birthday. But then how does this account for the two gifts I got?

GIFT ONE
N now lives in Alabama with me. Like: forever.

GIFT TWO
The Authentic Animal, in bound galley form.

Yes, it’s all just awesome. Yes!

Promotional Consideration

I.
The Authentic Animal‘s got an ISBN now: 978-0312643713 if you use the new ISBN-13 designation, and all authorities tell me you’d better. This means the book’s pre-orderable through Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble and other online vendors. I’m still deciding whether to use DAve Madden as some groundbreaking nom de plume. The big letters spell “DAM”, which is what you’ll be thinking as you turn every page.

II.
Pure Products is a well named reading series here in Tuscaloosa organized by very good guys Ryan Browne and Carl Peterson. They invited me to read this term—or maybe I just volunteered actually—and I’m doing it Wednesday night. I’m hoping to read brand new stuff no one’s ever read or heard before, but this depends on the kind of work I can get done tomorrow and Wednesday mornings and you know AWP’s draining effects still linger.

At any rate, the reading is at Little Willie’s in Tuscaloosa and starts at 7pm. I’m reading with some very great people. If you are in Alabama, please try to come out for it. I promise to wear something visually interesting, as a kind of dazzleflage tactic.

UPDATE: So owing to a lack of Customer Discussions on my book’s Amazon page, Amazon has decided to suggest related discussions interested buyers of the book may want to browse. They are as follows:

  • Men and infidelity
  • a selfish request
  • Global warming is nothing but a hoax and a scare tactic
  • Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?
  • The torrent of global warming denialist postings on this and other forums is being directed and financed by fossil fuel-related firms
  • Miller/Urey experiment proves that life evolved… or not…
  • Any good anti-troll slogans?
  • Anyone has a theory of the symbolism of PI 3.14 ?

These will be probably infinitely more entertaining than anything my book might muster up.

A Taxidermy Joke

I don’t know that I’ve ever been told one of these. Here’s one sent by my friend Richie:

A guy walks into a bar down in Alabama and orders a white wine. All the locals sitting around the bar look up, expecting to see some pitiful Yankee from the north.

The bartender says, “You ain’t from around here, are ya?”

The guy says, “No, I’m from Nebraska .”

The bartender says, “What do you do in Nebraska?”

The guy says, “I’m a taxidermist.”

The bartender says, “A taxidermist? What in tarnation is a taxidermist? Do you drive a taxi?”

“No, a taxidermist doesn’t drive a taxi. I mount animals.”

The bartender grins and hollers, “It’s okay boys. He’s one of us.”

Personalized, I think, just for me.

Untitled Taxidermy Project

No, this one’s not about my book. Back last summer, Variety reported that a company called Stiletto Television was going to produce, in the terms of the industry, “a late fall special [on taxidermy] that will act as a backdoor pilot for an upcoming series.” Stiletto Television has previous produced Barry Manilow specials and that very bad Nemesis Rising show for Logo that I guarantee not a single reader of this blog ever watched. It’s also done series for OUTTV and something called GayborhoodTV.

And now taxidermy. Or, well, not now but maybe later. I’ve kept a lazy eye on this project and nothing has happened since July. You can check out the ghost-town of the special’s IMDb page. “Development hell.” This is another industry term I know.

Here’s a recent update from Stiletto Entertainment’s (parent company) Facebook wall:

Barry blew the roof off of the emotional and very moving Nobel Peace Prize Concert in Oslo, Norway on Saturday.
The staid audience came alive when he began to perform.

As even Mr Manilow must know, dead heads of state are one thing, but dead heads of ungulates are a whole different audience altogether.

Oh boy. Is this the point where my blog becomes an online petition to get Barry Manilow hosting a TLC series on taxidermy?

My Style in The Authentic Animal

From the official Style Sheet, as drawn up by my publisher, St. Martin’s:

Author’s style

  • uses fragments
  • favors vague pronoun constructions (e.g., “It would be like finding a new kind of bird,” where “It” has no clear antecedent)—lightly edited for especially confusing instances
  • recounts visits, demos, etc. in present tense
  • uses “human” as noun form for “human being”

The fully copyedited MS came today. It was like Christmas a month early.

Interview on NF and The Authentic Animal with BWR

Eric Parker interviewed me a couple months ago for Black Warrior Review and because it was over email and not in person I was able to say coherent things.

Minor successes!

You can read the review, in which I call out the Republican Party and David Shields regarding certain qualms of mine, here.

(No ideas on that making-it-tough-to-read background.)

I Review Myself, Posted as Promised Below

The very cool blog, We Who Are About To Die just published a review of my Stamp Story with Mud Luscious Press, which asks writers to write a story in exactly 50 words. Or is it 50 words or fewer? And then prints these stories on a stamp. Mine’s an excerpt from the taxidermy book.

(It occurs to me that an interesting way to go about doing this would be to write 1.6 words each day for the month of November.)

At any rate, you’ll find the review here. Of course I panned it. Can one possibly not? There are other self-reviews on WWAATD, and it would be cool to watch this become a genre of writing. In this, its protean stages, self-deprecation is (I think?) the norm. Who will be the self-reviewer to smash convention and love his own work? Or the self-reviewer who … reviews someone else in his own self-review!

I now regret the tack I took.

I Read before the Whole World

“Who wants to buy a 1995 Toyota Celica? I see a nice one right over there….”

Last month, when I gave a reading from The Authentic Animal for my colleagues and students at the University of Alabama, there was someone pointing a tiny box at me the whole time. I knew it was a camera, I just knew it.

If you’d like to hear some stuff on jackalopes and terrorizing monkeys, you can find it at itunes.ua.edu. You need to have iTunes installed on your computer, and you’ll need to find the “Bankhead Visiting Writers” collection under the category of “literature”.

Literature!

And you’ll need to forgive the voice I apparently solicited Ray Romano to provide. Why did no one tell me I sound so froggy? “Something from the grill, Jill?” “Meat makes me ill, Gil.”

Do, though, stay tuned or like fast forward to Kellie Wells, who reads this amazing story about terrorizing mutant rabbits.

Animals are dangerous, clearly.

On Finishing a Book I’ve Been Working on for Four Years, Part 3: Animal Songs

I like to listen to music when I write. I used to hate this, but now that I write first thing in the morning, it helps get me going. I like also not to have to worry about what sort of music I want to listen to. Usually when working on a short story, I figure out quickly which album I want playing in the background, and then stick with it for the whole project.

This would be hard to do with a whole book. I couldn’t imagine listening to one album for two years or so. So way back at the start of this project, I decided to make a playlist of every song in my iTunes that has or references an animal in its title. It was a great morning of procrastination. Now, as a series of three-minute GTD breaks, I’ve decided to post for you in alphabetical order a list of those animals represented. You’re welcome.
Continue reading On Finishing a Book I’ve Been Working on for Four Years, Part 3: Animal Songs

On Finishing Up a Book I’ve Been Working on for Four Years, Part 2.

Taxidermist Carl Akeley is considered by most taxidermy folks to be the father of modern taxidermy. Taxidermy. Taxidermy taxidermy. Certain words when you write a whole book become very easy to type. Taxidermy. Can’t remember the last time my fingers in that pattern didn’t hit their targets: Taxidermy. Certain words’ meanings begin to fade as their sounds take over. Or no: their status as signifiers gets lost, and they become instead like one’s eyes’ specific shade of yellow, or a hairstyle one’s worn for too long.

For the record, in all my notes, taxidermy’s rendered as capital T. Taxidermists become “Tmen”, viz., “Purpose here is to do what 13 Tmen did up till yesterday—mt part. [i.e. “mount partridge”] in exact pose as reference pic.” I know: Tmen. I regret the sexism.

At any rate, Tman Carl Akeley is the father of modern T. He’s famous enough that you can be his Facebook friend, but his a little too famous to respond to friend requests on time. My book opens not with his birth, but just after: with his first mounted specimen of a canary. Beginning at his birth wasn’t much of a choice because all of us get born in more or less the same way and it takes some time for us to become people enough. People enough to write about. People who act and speak and think on their own in ways that can be illustrative. So gone from the book are the first 12 years of Carl’s life. It’s not a problem.
Continue reading On Finishing Up a Book I’ve Been Working on for Four Years, Part 2.

On Finishing Up a Book I’ve Been Working on for Four Years: Part 1

(With apologies to A. Peterson’s On Editing a Novel series.)

oldmanmikeno“The home stretch” is a baseball metaphor, right? Far be it from me to be familiar with baseball metaphors, but I think this is where I am. In, on, or at least facing the home stretch here. Two-to-three thousand more words and I’m finished. Carl Akeley, who is dead, has to die, and then I have to show readers what his African Hall is like. Then, maybe, I need an epilogue at the pet cemetery in town, the one that doesn’t bring its animals back to life.

When you’ve been working on a nonfiction book for four years, reading hundreds of source texts and rereading a handful of source texts many, many times, it all starts to feel like this thing infesting your head. This tapeworm or something you need extracted. Because as the texts accrete and the time passes, unless you are a much more organized person than I am, the hard part is figuring out: okay, is this something I read, or something I heard, or something even I’ve just made up? If something I read, where did I read it? Did I take notes on it, or not? Where can I find it?

Where can I find it?
Continue reading On Finishing Up a Book I’ve Been Working on for Four Years: Part 1

“Play Dead”

TR37CoverGot the current issue of Tampa Review in the mail today. It’s in hardcover! There’s an essay in there taken from the opening chapter of The Authentic Animal, about a dead pet canary that becomes a museum relic.

Other essays therein by Douglas Danoff, Jack E. Fernandez, and Gary Fincke. Fiction by Heather Brittain Bergstrom, John Matthew Fox, Chris Huntington, Manjula Menon, and Courtney Zoffness. Poetry by lots of people.

The dustjacket, as you can see, looks like a Duchamp, and if you like that you should see how gorgeous the cloth cover is. Order an issue here.

Taxidermy T-Shirts, etc.

Wasn’t it inevitable? Print-on-demand pricing being as low as it is, one can sell tons of generic-messaged T-shirts just by switching around occupations. Like tourist-trap mugs or license plates: just drop “taxidermy” in the right place.

tchick

Some of them seem designed solely for taxidermists, with requisite depressing (and factually inaccurate) puns.

that

Some of them are kind of worth buying.

tmccain

And some of them are a deconstructionist’s dream-come-true:

taxidermytshirt

More here.

Good News, Everyone!

animal

The delay in posting has been long. Very sorry. I’ve been waiting jumpily until I could officially announce that my book, The Authentic Animal, has been picked up for publication by St Martin’s Press.

St. Martin’s Press!

I’m way too excited to be able to say much about it. Mostly I don’t know what to do with the news that St. Martin’s seems to love my strange taxidermy book so much. They love it! And it’s a great press, where lots of folks you’ve heard of got their starts (Dan Brown, Augusten Burroughs, Janet Evanovich), to say nothing of the prestige of the parent company and all its subsidiaries.

“Welcome to St. Martin’s Press,” my editor told me earlier this week, and it was like clouds parted and a million trumpets blasted that Macintosh-bootup sound. Except without the apocalyptic overtones.

More news as it comes. Now I just need to finish the book….