i'm stuffed.

This post is a small aside. Lately I have been wanting to learn more about taxidermy. Apparently it is not yet possible to stuff a cephalopod (even if you stuff it with love!), but I still wanted to learn more about it. And maybe I could steal gunther von hagen's (of bodyworlds fame) secret preservation techiniques and make "squid world."

So, because I am thinking about dabbling in taxidermy (though it is probably not a hobby people dabble in, more like all of the sudden I am in my moldy basement surrounded by the stuffed heads of dead things twenty years from now and I have a strange gleam in my eye as I hold a very sharp scalpel above the body of some sort of rare antelope and all the neighbors tell their children to STAY AWAY from my house because remember when little Stevie went missing?) I went to the library to see what I could find. All of the books on taxidermy I came across were very old, and I was worried I may be missing the great technological leaps and bounds that have may have affected the taxidermy industry (surely there must have been some sort of taxidermal enlightenement in the 1950's) in the intervening years between 1896 and now. Hence, I was really excited to find the book "Lessons in Taxidermy" by Bee Lavender, published in 2006 and I put it on hold immediately. I went to pick it up yesterday.

Well, just a warning, it's not about taxidermy. I'm really disappointed about that. It turns out to be an autobiography, which I will try to read, if only because one review of it called it "a poignant book about anguish." But, jeez. It's still not "a poignant book about stuffing dead things."