See: the mythical giant squid, which isn’t mythical at all—it’s been photographed and captured (dead), it’s been encased in Plexiglas in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (in a room bordering that which houses the profoundly boring Hope Diamond), stretched out to its maximum length in its thermoplastic coffin—unimpressive, dead, anorexic, a behemoth snot hanging horizontally, its poor legs limp, spaghettical.
Preparing the Ghost began after I saw the first-ever photograph taken of the giant squid hanging in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. I scribbled the three-line caption beneath it on a piece of scrap paper. When I got home, I turned to Google, and then tumbled down the proverbial rabbit hole. I discovered that, in 1874, when Newfoundland Reverend Moses Harvey secured and photographed, for the first time, an intact specimen of the giant squid, he finally rescued the beast from the realm of mythology and proved its existence, forever altering the ways in which we engaged the construct of the sea monster (via the lenses of literature, art, science, religion, et. al.). To take the photo, Harvey transported the squid from one bay to another, and then to his home where he proceeded to drape it over his bathtub's curtain rod so its full size could be displayed. I became obsessed with tracing the logistics of Harvey’s undertaking and connecting said logistics to the peculiarities of Harvey’s personal life. I expected to get a 2,500-word essay out of it, and then 500 pages later, I found that I had about 300 pages to cut. What are some of your latest Google-fueled “rabbit-holes?” Where have they lead you?
