Antony and Cleopatra, and the brain.

My dear friends of the internet,

If I may introduce myself, my name is Jack Grey. I'm ever so slightly overeducated, a fishmonger, a drinker of fine teas, and a magician. I'm tattooed and hermaphroditic.

Favourite authors include Virginia Woolf, John Ruskin, and Emily Post. (I thought it best that you were forewarned.) I think that trying to choose one's favourite Shakespearean play is a bit like trying to select one's most useful internal organ.

I'm between world travels at the moment. I'm drawn to antiques, to decadent cultures, to historical moments at which savage civilisations met strange natives.

But I suppose it's best to be on with it. I've heard that we're summoning ghosts.

I can, I think, safely state that we modern Americans are quite madly in love with the Victorians. We adore their fading photographs, their marvellously purple phrases, their stockings, the devastatingly straight lines of their suits, their conflicting romantic notions: prudish and prurient, secretive and enduring. We emulate their wallpapers, and, if I may be allowed to speak for all of us, we miss their manners. Desperately.

I would argue that this love affair with an epoch is well timed. Our empire is crumbling. It is no surprise that we'd look longingly to the culture of the fallen empire that we remember best. Perhaps we want to feel ourselves surrounded by their ghosts. We want to believe that we, too, will be remembered fondly by absurdly dressed Japanese teenagers in some glowing future. Or we want to learn to die gracefully. Or we really do just love the wallpaper.

Besides sharing in the collective obsession with the Victorians, I also like taxidermy a great deal. They were fond of the art, in fact.

They, I think, were doing it in conquest. When they were gaining their empire, they were sailing to strange lands, finding beautiful, naked creatures they didn't understand in the least, and animals of which they'd never dreamed, even in the mythologies of the empires that they themselves remembered fondly. The Pre-Raphealites, for example, were quite fond of the wombat, and there is the famous story of the first taxidermic platypus sent back to Britain: the receiver responded that it was a terrible joke and a hideous fake, that, clearly, no such beast could exist.

Taxidermy is enjoying a small revival, if only in my own mind. We, however, are not trying to catalogue dark continents, or to prove our masculinity or our skill with an elephant gun. We're clutching, once more, at ghosts. As our supremacy fades, we're forced to confront the fact that we've taken more than we ought. We've created quite the ecological mess, and, as a few monumentally populous nations in the East begin their own Industrial Revolutions that, we're a bit shocked to discover, we cannot stop, we note that we aren't dying alone.

I don't know about you, but I want an elegantly mounted gazelle head. I want gorgeous stuffed peacocks, taxidermic piranhas, gorilla skulls, and a stuffed crocodile, which I'll display in my study, so that my friends will understand instantly that I'm a magician of great skill. And I want them because, I'm afraid, their living counterparts may not be long for this world. The Victorians stole these creatures away from their native lands in order to prove that they were real. I'm afraid that we may need to begin preserving them for the same reason.

Yours always,

Jack