Mx. Anantharaman sees the art form as a way to help people connect with nature, to experience “that moment of stillness, of vulnerability and enchantment” — even in an urban environment.
Taxidermy “shows you that bodies are not fixed and finite — they’re very liminal,” they said. “Bodies can really be whatever you want them to be.” Mx. Anantharaman, 40, lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn, with their partner and four cats: Fugazi, Garfield, Mani and Junior.Oh, that reminds me: The New York Times is disbanding its sports department:
"We plan to focus even more directly on distinctive, high-impact news and enterprise journalism about how sports intersect with money, power, culture, politics and society at large,” the editors wrote in an email to The Times’s newsroom on Monday morning. “At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.”
It almost seems like a joke, doesn't it? If you're reading the NYT, you shouldn't be concerned about the tangible activities that ordinary people might engage in — taxidermy, sports, etc. — not in themselves. It only matters if it can be processed into a larger social/political meaning.
And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: Political meaning, what about dictionary meaning? What's with "liminal"?
It's like something a character on a cool new HBO show (or an old Woody Allen movie) might say: Taxidermy shows you that bodies are not fixed and finite — they’re very liminal.
Anyway, just to help you out: "Liminal" means "Characterized by being on a boundary or threshold, esp. by being transitional or intermediate between two states, situations, etc." (OED). For example: "Airports are places of waiting and uncertainty—liminal, indeterminate spaces, caught between one world and another."
I've never used the word "liminal" in the nearly 20 years of this blog, though I have quoted other people using it a few times. One of those times, in 2018, I got involved in the OED definition and went on about the word at some length. An NYU professor had called mayonnaise "liminal"! Oddly, in that post, I selected the same OED example (about airports) you see in the previous paragraph and the name Woody Allen comes up.
Is taxidermy liminal? The animal is somewhere between a living being and a rotting corpse. Is that the idea? But Mx. Anantharaman goes beyond that to say: "Bodies can really be whatever you want them to be." In taxidermy, your dreams really do come true.
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58 comments:
"Bodies can really be whatever you want them to be."
Well, yes, as long as they're dead and stuffed.
I've never used the word "liminal" in the nearly 20 years of this blog, though I have quoted other people using it a few times.
I guess there's a certain someone who isn't spending her ample time in retirement reading French Post-Modernism!
I literally was fostered by the NYT sports section. It's where I learned to read following the Yankees as a boy. School taught me nothing and I grew up at a time where parents didn't read books to kids. The sports section also helped me develop a sense for numbers, daily checking the winning percentage of teams and the batting average of players. The sports section led me to regularly read the rest of the paper(well, not the fashion section) up to graduating high school.
I wonder what we have led me to reading if I were growing up now.
Once upon a time, the only way to get box scores and stats was through your newspaper. Now you get them live all in detail on your phone. No one buys the NYT for box scores. Instead they want the NYT to tell them how this or that sports issue contributes to DEI, climate change or white supremacy. That is the only context you need.
It almost makes me want to get past the paywall to see what kinds of creatures that city folk are taking to the taxidermist. Tell me it's not pets. Let them go.
They always got to use those special words. For a long time it was "exacerbate" (which rubes insist on bowdlerizing as "exasperate").
Then it was "preternatural" and also the ubiquitous "quintessential" whatever tf that is.
Without special words the news just ain't fit to print.
Taxidermist in Brooklyn???
When I was a kid hiking with the Boy Scouts, every wide spot in the road was a taxidermist, gun shop, beer, gas station, and maybe a diner to eat.
I never really took a liking to hunting. Pulling the trigger was the easy part. Rendering the animal was a mess.
We had a couple of cast-off mounted elk heads in the fraternity house. They looked cool on the wall, and collected a lot of dust.
"'Taxidermy is a very homogeneous field. It’s very, very white and very, very straight.' said Divya Anantharaman, who's 'not either of those things.'"
If she's not White, then who's the fair skinned Caucasian in the photo accompanying the article?
The best use of the word "liminal" was in a piece at smoothbrains.net called Planetary scale vibe collapse: The death of liminal consciousness as the origin of human suffering.
It is a read, but very enlightening from a philosophical, psychological, and cultural perspective. "Liminal" - derived from Latin, and indicating doors - is far too sophisticated a word for the NYT to be using in conjunction with its 10,459th glow-up of the intersectionality of something something. "The death of liminal consciousness as the origin of human suffering" is an appropriate use and is appropriate subject matter, NYT could just as easily use 'door' when pandering to the sophists in their audience seeking intellectual validation for their middling intellects.
On MTV's "Jackass" TV show, Johnny Knoxville once brought his aged grandmother with him to a taxidermist, explaining that that was what she wanted done with her remains after her death. As I recall, the guy was initially aghast, but then he started rubbing his chin and looking her up and down professionally. I don't recall if he quoted them a price.
In taxidermy, your dreams really do come true.
The animals' dreams? Not so much.
Surely you have snuck subliminal into a blog post or two.
Translation: "New York Times admits it is not a paper for New Yorkers." I bet the Post has no intention of ditching sports.
So the New York Times is disbanding its sports department. Probably a good idea, but untimely. The first department to be disbanded ought to be human interest, as fewer and fewer humans find the New York Times interesting.
There was a time when jaded gentlemen and silly ladies paid threepence a head to tour the halls and survey the cells of Saint Mary Bethlem Hospital, rudely known as Bedlam. There they were heartily entertained by the jibbering speeches and antic prancing of the poor benighted souls confined therein, a pastime deeply despised by the London bluestockings, but the admission did help pay for the inmates' daily gruel. Today, we're not so charitable. The ringmasters of the NYT do nothing for the chimeras and oddities they display, keeping the fare entirely for themselves. Barnum, at least, paid his freaks a pension. To be an ethical peon to the likes of P.T. Barnum, what an accomplishment.
So now progs are coming for taxidermy, of all things. It's 1. racist 2. proof of transdom.
"Taxidermy “shows you that bodies are not fixed and finite — they’re very liminal. Bodies can really be whatever you want them to be.”
Umm, no. I say science is real. Take that, Mx.
"It only matters if it can be processed into a larger social/political meaning."
Correct. All the news that's fit to promote the prog agenda.
Taxidermy is not homogeneous, though its practitioners may be, though I defy the NYT editors to prove that assertion. Taxidermy is no more homogeneous than any other form of sculpture. Does the NYT even own a dictionary? Or maybe there is one gathering dust somewhere at 620 Eight Avenue.
What the hell kind of animals do you find to stuff in Brooklyn? Stray cats?
Audubon was a taxidermist and painter. More than just highways in Germany!
What the NYT is really saying is our revenue stream doesn't allow us to directly report sports news anymore, so we'll use a lower cost service. Our readers will never know the difference, they are such dopes.
Shorter version: Go woke, go broke.
Seems kind of mxed up to me.
There used to be two daily papers in Memphis, and we took both. My father (I'm fairly sure) and my older brother (definitely) read the sports news first, or only. I never caught the bug myself. My next brother was like them; youngest read nothing until he was grown, and shares my disinterest in athletics.
As for the NYT, a historian learns very quickly that it's a great record of what the owners of the NYT want you to know and think. Why so many take it so seriously is a mystery to me.
This is what insanity actually looks like.
Oh for the love of God! "Liminal" was the favorite word of every 2nd-rate English grad student from about 2000-2010. I shudder to think how many conference papers I sat through with "the liminal space of the border/playground/dressing room/stage/afterlife/insane asylum," or "By putting on socks and standing on the box, the fox enters a liminal space..." Liminal replaced the "Lacanian mirror stage" of 1990-2000, which replaced the "deconstructed binaries" of 1980-1990.
I forget where I read that theory that wokeness is just what happened social media started transmitting the dumbest things college freshman learned in their grad-student taught literature courses back into high-school-age students, who were naive and ill-educated enough to see it as profound (previously, only grad students were that dumb). But it does seem like that's what happened--the stupid-virus is now loose in the wider population. It was bad enough when it was just in the English departments, but in a much larger population of midwits in which to breed and mutate, these dumb-but-superficially-appealing ideas could be dangerous .
If I was the interviewer for the NYT, I'd have asked this lady, how does a feller tell the difference between a jackalope doe and a regular rabbit if you see a stuffed one behind the bar?
Difficult but not impossible to cram a Trump angle into sports commentary.
bodies are not fixed and finite — they’re very liminal
I guess there are laws on how we treat the dead. I'm not aware of any human beings who have been stuffed and mounted in somebody's living room. You could theoretically change somebody's sex organs or do any amount of "transitioning" to a corpse if it was allowed.
I quit an SF paper because it no longer wanted to stay up to print the evening's scores.
For years now I have been snarking that the only information in the New York Times or Washington Post are the box scores. And now, in the Times at least, we won’t even have that.
“At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.”
Yeah, because you can't make the games end the way you think they should have (think: based on CRT and AA, for example) because it'll be a simple exercise to figure out when you're lying. Which is pretty much all the time. You know- like you do in your "news" reporting.
“Bodies can really be whatever you want them to be.”
So Mx. Anantharaman is the source of those “jackalope” figures one sees now and again?
Liminal fits as a description for mayonnaise better than as a description for taxidermy. Using liminal to describe taxidermy seems like it is more being used to give the impression that the speaker is deep and wise, rather than to be an accurate description of taxidermy. Does that mean the use of liminal is performative? Even if it is perhaps it is a perfectly cromulent use.
Head spinning…
I thought we were only allowed to say what we (ourselves) are or want to be, not that we can dictate such about others, even a dead animal! What about dead naming?
Does this mental case realize how creepy using the deliberate killing and mutilation of animal corpses as a metaphor for trans and homosexuality in general is? Lol. Apt, but creepy. She/he/it said the quiet part out loud. Oops.
There was a time when jaded gentlemen and silly ladies paid threepence a head to tour the halls and survey the cells of Saint Mary Bethlem Hospital, rudely known as Bedlam. There they were heartily entertained by the jibbering speeches and antic prancing of the poor benighted souls confined therein,
You could pay a penny more and get a "poking stick" if an inmate wasn't sufficiently animated enough for you.
Sports is the last house of worship that is proving difficult to capture by the agenda to remake the world into something unrecognizable.
They won't be missed. (NYT Sports section)
What Prof. M. Drout said. I spent so much time on campus that the jargon often just glances off my attention. "Liminal" was unlimited, easily imitable, and versatile.
I'm old enough to remember the Sub-liminal Influence panic. (That photo of the glass of bourbon-on-ice is packed with virtually imperceptible subliminal images of sexual organs and acts!)
Good times.
"Mx. Anantharaman, who uses the pronouns they and she ..."
I hope someone can explain this to me, because I can't figure out what it means.
"They" and "she" are both third-person pronouns. "She" traditionally refers to a female person other than the speaker and the listener, or the writer and the reader. "They" traditionally refers to more than one person, sex unspecified, but also third-person to the speaker/listener.
So if these pronouns are both third-person, how can very special people like Mx. Ananthraman expect us mortals to know which third-person pronoun to use when talking about Mx. A? Should I say "She told me to take my dead possum and go stuff it somewhere myself?", or should I say "They told me ..."? How do we keep from offending the no-doubt very sensitive animal-stuffing person involved?
Asking for a friend.
Have never forgotten what Roy Rogers did to Trigger in the 1960s. So damn liminal.
My old friend Trigger up and died
Now they've got him stuffed and dried
You know they've tanned his hide, and crucified
Got him starin' glassy eyed out through the parlor door
“Liminal” has always felt like a bullshit word to me.
I think it irritates me because of the way other people love it. Kind of another garner.
Ann Althouse said...
"'Liminal' has always felt like a bullshit word to me... I think it irritates me because of the way other people love it. Kind of another 'garner'."
Q: Hey, whaddya wanna do today?
A: I dunno. Maybe go garner some liminals?
St. Croix: "I'm not aware of any human beings who have been stuffed and mounted in somebody's living room." There's Jeremy Bentham, but he is reportedly propped up at the entrance to the Student Centre at the University College of London.
My interest in sports occurs perhaps once every four or five weeks. I don't pay for the crossword any longer: if the NYT imagine that I'm going spend money on The Athletic they're going to be sorely disappointed. There are plenty of other sources to satisfy my random curiosity about this or that.
The Athletic has 500 non unionized sportswriters. The New York Times was down to 20 unionized sportswriters.
"In taxidermy, your dreams really do come true."
The animals' dreams? Not so much.
If you're saying what you seem to me to be saying, this is EXACTLY the problem I have with the "transing the children" thing: it isn't being done for the children's well-being, no matter what attempts are made to pretty it up.
That goes for the vulnerable adults too.
I am fine with the word "liminal" when it's used in an explicitly religious sense - for instance, to describe what Celtic mystics called "thin places." In any usage where it's describing anything less than a place where the Divine pushes in on the everyday, it seems to me to be silly posturing.
I’m disappointed that NYT isn’t shutting down other sections.
Very, very white and very, very straight: Stuffed and mounted.
"Not either of those things": Prefers to be mounted and stuffed.
rhhardin said... "Audubon was a taxidermist and painter. More than just highways in Germany!"
We've got a winner!
Let me guess - someone demanded a pair of rainbow-colored male rabbits mounted (in both senses) and a very very white, very very straight taxidermist objected.
They’re closing the sports section because since Colin Kaepernick and Megan Rapinoe aren’t playing anymore they won’t have anything to talk about.
"Q: Hey, whaddya wanna do today?
A: I dunno. Maybe go garner some liminals?"
As a noun, I like it. Seems related to "animals."
I'm also reminded of limnology, which is about something quite real and tangible.
"Oh for the love of God! "Liminal" was the favorite word of every 2nd-rate English grad student from about 2000-2010. I shudder to think how many conference papers I sat through with "the liminal space of the border/playground/dressing room/stage/afterlife/insane asylum," or "By putting on socks and standing on the box, the fox enters a liminal space..." Liminal replaced the "Lacanian mirror stage" of 1990-2000, which replaced the "deconstructed binaries" of 1980-1990."
Ha ha. Nicely put.
I've noticed these people sidelong. Other people's buzzwords are annoying.
Robert Marshall, maybe she's demon possessed... by a legion.
I'm going to open a combination veterinarian's office and taxidermy.
My slogan will be "Either way, you get your dog back."
@Robert Marshall, believe it or not, they/she people would often ideally like people to mix it up and use both. So, for instance, you could say, "She told me to take my dead possum and then they told me to go stuff it somewhere myself." But I think it practice they will often go with either.
To paraphrase Mike Campbell in Hemingway's The Son Also Rises---"How does sports news disappear in the dead tree newspaper world? Two ways. First gradually, then suddenly".
The NYT has just shut its sports department. On Sunday July 9 the Los Angeles Times effectively shut its sports department. Instead of the old sports section--which weas much smaller than in past years, the LA Times will now offer a sort of "sports magazine". Based on the first three days of that "magazine" there will be no scores, no game news, but lots of human interest stories about women in sports.
The LA Times sports section was the only reason to subscribe to the paper. It no longer has much (if any) news. What it has is a lot progressive opinion pieces on issues dear to the progressive heart. I might as well be buying the old Nation or National Republic. Of course if I wanted to buy a conservative opinion magazine, well The Spectator, both the UK and the US versions are available, would do.
I don't read Outside Magazine, but they send me spam daily offering subscriptions.
Most of their content would seem to be inspirational stories about members of the various grievance groups doing sporty, outdoorsy things.
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