Reading notes: The Mushroom at the End of the World
Notes on Anna Tsing's book about matsutake, precarity, and the art of noticing.
The Mushroom at the End of the World — Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Princeton University Press, 2015.
Tsing follows the matsutake mushroom — 松茸 — through the forests of Oregon, the sorting sheds of commodity traders and the markets of Kyoto. The book’s real subject is how life persists in damaged landscapes.
What I want to keep
- The art of noticing. The method is less a theory than a discipline of attention: follow one thing closely and let it lead you across scales.
- Patchiness. Landscapes are not uniform systems but patches with their own rhythms. This is a good model for a notebook, too.
- Short chapters as method. The book is written in short, interrupting chapters, which Tsing compares to the flushes of mushrooms after rain.
Questions
Is “noticing” a method that can be taught, or a temperament? And how would one write a reading note in the manner of the book — patchy, interrupted, attentive?