#motvd book club

[boyhood]

I've written an episode of my podcast All Miracles Are Strange about the strategic spectacle of the dead body in moments of violence, the politicizing of the dead, about interacting with photos and videos of the dead body, and about looking. About continuing to look and to hurt in the looking.

It is an episode about photos, about dead bodies, about America, and America's Christ's thirst for blood. It's an episode about Gaza. It's an episode about blood.

I will have a little essay coming out on my substack tomorrow morning in which I will link the essays, articles, and books I referenced in the ep.

This wasn't what I was intending to bring you- I still have many near finished episodes about weeping and about stigmata and about grief. But sometimes things become urgent.

You can find All Miracles Are Strange on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and contact me at allmiraclesarestrange@gmail.com if you wish

[olreid]

[ID: Taxidermy is one medium for imposing the possibility of meaning or, more accurately, for exposing the human longing to discover meaning in nature, but always obliquely and often in contradictory ways. [highlight begins] There is nothing unequivocal about the practice except that the animals are dead but not gone. [highlight ends] In writing this book, I hope to clarify what sort of thing a preserved animal becomes -- [highlight begins] what does it mean to be dead but not gone? [highlight ends] and also to explore why anyone would desire such an animal-thing to exist. end ID]

rachel poliquin, introduction to the breathless zoo: taxidermy and the cultures of longing

[boyhood]

Current/recent reads + I am on goodreads if that's your sort of thing

[boyhood]

Books I have been enjoying lately- about trickster language, about reading between and through lines

This week I discovered I've been actively preventing my begonia maculata from growing, accidentally pruning away its new leaves; I have a big yellow bruise from one of the cats' claws getting hooked in and stuck as he tried to struggle out of my arms; I bought a new cinnamon candle from the botanica that has little stones embedded in it that will surely explode the glass; I took a class that had an exercise in speaking in tongues; it's been raining and the frogs are out and the coyotes away

[boyhood]

What was the most fucked up book you read this year?

[boyhood]

Current reading. Am enjoying Mariana Enriquez so much I've been trying to go slowly. Probably my favorite book I've read since Between Two Fires. Also currently rereading The Southern Reach and trying to decide what the fuck Jeff Vandermeer's deal is. Jeffery Gibson's An Indigenous Present is A+++, bummed it didn't have some of my favorite Galanin or Natalie Ball pieces but so so good.

I will return to my All Miracles Are Strange saint posting in the fall and have probably four or five new episodes. Until then, a little break.

[boyhood]

I'm currently writing the next three episodes of All Miracles Are Strange (originally two, but one got too big and had to be broken into two parts), but they're requiring a crazy amount of research and reading for me so it's been sort of slow going. I have planned for five more episodes total, and the other two are mostly written.

I'm hoping to have something out in maybe a week and a half or two weeks? My work schedule is a little heavy for October, so we'll see. Thank you for your patience, and sorry it's taken me quite awhile.

I'm also starting research and field trips for what I think will be AMAS season 2, which will have a different theme. I have two appointments with weird museum specialists and am very excited!

[boyhood]

Current/recent reads! I am on goodreads if you want

[boyhood]

Books I am currently reading that are making me feel absolutely insane 

A reminder that my goodreads is here if you want and that I am hoping the thing I’m working on will coalesce into something shareable in maybe a month? 

[boyhood]

Whats the best and/or weirdest and/or fucked up book you've read recently?

[boyhood]

I think the vibe here is “I SAID I’M FINE” 

[boyhood]

How accsessible do you think Glück's Margery Kempe is for someone not familiar with art history/religious iconography? I'm super detached from that type of nonfiction just as a result of having to read Different kinds of text for work/school, but the topics you bring up are really intriguing and I'd like to get into them, recreationally.

A good question! The book isn't really nonfiction, though. Fictionalized reality, maybe. The book covers one of Glück's relationships and then fictionalizes the life of Margery Kempe- a real woman who lived in the late 1300s and who is responsible for the first autobiography written in English- and lets the two stories twine in and out from each other.

I think a cursory wikipedia read of Margery's life will probably give you most of the background you need.

Honestly, from all the reviews I've read, it's all the graphic sex with Christ that seems to make the book inaccessible to most people. I think it's the sort of book you just have to fall into rhythm with and see where it goes.

[boyhood]

Current reading list 

[boyhood]

You guys reading Closet Devotions yet or what

[boyhood]

As we all Dracula Daily again, I would like to take the time to remind you all that The Route of Ice and Salt by Jose Luis Zarate is about Dracula’s boat trip on the Demeter from Varna to Whitby and is the most hysterically horny and gay book I have ever read and I am always miffed as to why it is not more popular 

[boyhood]

Unexpectedly moved at the sudden appearance of someone's fingertips in this scan of Teresa of Avila's Interior Castles