[Holden Turner]

Sending my regrets to the book club for not making it this time. I got about halfway through and was definitely picking up on the unusual verbs. I love that “felting” made it into the summary! To me it described perfectly the texture of a mushroom body on the tongue or between one’s fingers, and I was thrilled to learn that the structure (so different from plant and animal cell structures) was what made it so. In watery studies over here we’re talking a lot about the “in-between” as a site of study (paradox?) — and super cool that fungi fill in spaces between cells, roots, ecosystems. For a practice of study I would hazard that considering fungi (as Anna Tsing so wonderfully shows) is about considering the unnoticed understructures. But also, might we be careful about so breathlessly raising them as champions of unruly nature? For many humans out there, even those who are ‘close to nature’, they are for one reason or another still put in utilitarian relationship. In Entangled Life they’re used to point to a sense of wonder. That tension between use-value and wonder seems to point to something in the middle of the two. What might it be?