6 Questions with Jay Kirk
Perhaps you haven't yet read Jay Kirk's Kingdom Under Glass. Good news! It is now out in paperback. The book tells the story of the remarkable career of Carl Akeley, the taxidermist who in 1909 dreamed up the African Wing of the American Museum of Natural History. Along the way, Kirk creates a kind of cyclorama of the early twentieth century: eugenicist museum curators; Teddy Roosevelt on safari; “Kodak King” George Eastman baking huckleberry pies in Kenya; and the forty-six-pound heart of P.T. Barnum’s Jumbo, preserved in alcohol. Harper’s asked Kirk six questions about the boundary between history and fiction, navigating racism in primary sources, and Akeley’s artistic legacy.
And in case you need a little more incentive, here is Harper's Magazine's recent interview with Jay, here is a little sampler of interview. (Well, not really a sampler. Just the first questions.)
1. You first stumbled across Akeley while writing a story for Harper’s. What made you identify him as a subject for a book?
The Harper’s piece was about the non-existence of the Eastern Panther (Puma concolor couguar). I’d been reading a lot of natural history to understand how it had gone extinct in the nineteenth century before making a return as Bigfoot’s feline cousin, and I came across something in passing about a “famous taxidermist” who had once strangled a leopard with his bare hands. When I realized this was the guy behind the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History, I immediately became intrigued. I grew even more so when I learned of his obsession with being a True Artist, and how, in order to fulfill that obsession, he had not only strangled a leopard, but gone on these insane, massive expeditions, dragging with him small armies of painters and sculptors, and terrorizing his African porters along the way. I think what I found so compelling was the idea of anyone going to such preposterous lengths for something that, in the end, as art—or even as the “scientific” contribution it purported to be—was dubious at best. I also liked having a story where I could meditate on the absurdity of adventure in general—for me, it kind of throws a cheery light on the pointlessness of all human ambition. Most appealing, though, was the paradox of Akeley’s character: he killed animals in order to save them.
Read the interview here: http://harpers.org/archive/2011/12/hbc-90008352





Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 10:21AM




























