Still Life Melissa Milgrom (notion reading list .txt) 📖

While I was there, she worked for hours and hours reattaching the head, never pausing, not even for food. (Luckily, I found a pillowcase full of dried apple slices hanging on her husband's door and snuck upstairs periodically to eat.) By day three, I started to fidget and ask questions. "You could be doing this yourself in galleries and making quite a splash," I said, crunching numbers in my mind.

"Well, I couldn't, because I don't think of the ideas, do I? And if I went and showed this as a piece of art in a different context or whatever, I'd be like stealing, wouldn't I? I can't do that. I wouldn't want to anyway."

As it happens, the Uphall Dairy, a big commercial milk supplier, is right across the road from the workhouse. The next afternoon, Mayer suggests we go there to look at cows. She wants to observe cow noses, eyes, tongues, and topknots in order to perfect her facsimiles.

A ceiling of gray clouds hovers over us as we walk over to the huge milking sheds. They smell like manure and wet hay. "It reminds me of my childhood in the country," Mayer says. She is wearing a blue fleece jacket, black leather clogs, and torn jeans splotched with paint. When we pass the birthing field, Mayer spots a stillborn calf lying on the muddy ground. She stops to examine it with the unsentimental eyes of a scientist or a veterinarian. The industrial sheds, covered by corrugated cement-composite roofs, contain rows and rows of Holsteins. "Metal would be too noisy for them, wouldn't it?" she admonishes. I, her reluctant apprentice, nod sheepishly.

We walk along the side of a shed. Mayer narrates what she is seeing; she is teaching me how to look at cows. They are postcard perfect, black with wonderful white spots, tagged and numbered (yellow clips in their ears), wearing electric bracelets that monitor their milk production. They poke their bony heads through the fence, grazing, staring up at us with huge brown eyes. "They have great faces," she says excitedly. "When you start looking at them, each one is different. That one has bluish eyes. They've got different topknots—curly, straight. That one's kind of worn-out, really." Then she does a very un-Mayer-like thing. She gets all gushy, talking to the cows as if they were children. She grabs some hay and waves it under their pink and black nostrils, trying to get one to stick out its tongue for a photo. "I want to see your tongue, baby! Taste some hay!" she croons.

"That one's got a really short face compared to that one, which is long and broad," she says. I check out their faces. To me, they look alike, but I'd never say that to Mayer. So I look for variations: 00676's nose is more well-defined than 00758's, and 500211 has amazing wrinkles above its eyes. 00749 (mostly black) has a blue tongue. "That one has an orange nose, and that one's really pink. And that one is concave between the eyes," she says.

She gives a cow an "Eskimo kiss," rubbing noses with it. The cow's bony head is three times as big as hers is. "It's called Ray! Look! Look at the pink on that nose [00636] versus the orangy pink on that one [60075]! They can lick right up their nostrils. Look!" As if on cue, 60075 sticks its tongue up its nostril. Mayer bursts out laughing.

She leads me farther along the side of the shed. "Look how fat that gray one's nose is. It's like a boxer. It's quite narrow behind the nose, and the nose is broad, like it walked into a wall." Occasionally, she turns back to make sure I've noticed everything—all the nuances that enable her to excel at her job. "That one has a face like Alice [her late terrier]: she has a funny undershot jaw—the lower jaw is too far forward. Look at the shape of their bodies. I love cows! Look at how bony that one is! It's almost like a skeleton with the skin just hanging over it."

She pets the bony one's nose with the back of her hand. "They're friendly but don't like to be touched too much. The more you look at them, the more you can see. Some are really pretty, and some are quite brutish-looking. She's quite cute.

"I just want it to stick its tongue out for me, and it's gotten all shy," she says. The cow sticks its tongue up its nostril. Mayer snaps a photo. "You've got a ridiculously pink nose, don't you?" she gushes, extending her hand to another grazer. "Somebody lick me!"

000021 is an archetype: the perfect specimen, almost a cliché. "That's a beauty," Mayer says, eyeing me to make sure I've noticed all the variations—variations taxidermists live for and I am only now just beginning to perceive. "There! Are you seeing the differences now?"

8. KEN AND THE IRISH ELK

WITH ITS OIL-RICH PRAIRIES, cattle ranches, and mechanical bulls, Alberta, Canada, is often compared to Texas, only it is much, much colder. In the 1960s and 1970s, Edmonton, the province's capital, was like Houston: a boom-and-bust town founded on light oil, which was discovered just south of the city in 1947. Then, in the 1980s, the big petroleum companies moved their headquarters to Calgary, much to the dismay of Edmontonians, who also never got over losing their area code to Calgary or losing the distinction of having the world's largest shopping mall to Minneapolis. Nonetheless, in spite of what some locals call its huge inferiority complex, Edmonton doggedly clings to its nickname: "City of Champions."

Of all the champions ever to have come from Edmonton, none is more famous than hockey star Wayne Gretzky. Gretzky won four Stanley Cups with the Edmonton Oilers and is considered the greatest hockey player ever. He retired in 1999, the same year, as it happens, that Ken Walker took his first Best of Show with his timber wolves. Other taxidermists accused him of coming