There was Something in the Weather
by James Walsh
To be published in 2011
John Ruskin’s obsession with weather has long been a source of fascination for artist and writer James Walsh. Ruskin (1819-1900), the pre-eminent art theorist and critic of Victorian England, is best remembered as the champion of J. M. W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and as one of the great prose stylists in English.
In There was Something in the Weather, third feuilleton in our Libellulae series, Walsh uses traced excerpts from Ruskin’s travel diaries to create a portrait of the period just before and after the failure of his first great love. The text begins in 1835, when he was sixteen, with his vivid description of a Swiss glacier. The diaries for the next four years are missing. During this time, Ruskin went up to Oxford and began writing on architecture, and he also fell in love with, pined for, and was rejected by Adele-Clotilde Domecq, the daughter of his father’s partner. When the diaries resume he writes
i have determined to keep
one part of diary
for intellect
and another for feeling
The diary for feeling, which he elsewhere describes as “the book of pain,” seems to have been among those destroyed later by Ruskin himself. The rest of the text is drawn from the diary for intellect, but, being Ruskin, feeling somehow finds its way into his descriptions of Rome and his inability to feel the beauty around him.
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Cryptozoo
edited by Tom LaFarge, Wendy Walker and Erik Schurink
To be published in 2011
Over the course of 2010 artist Erik Schurink took a series of photographs of animal forms found in inanimate matter, often in the city. He called the series Cryptozoo. Now thirteen writers and artists, all of them members or correspondents of the Writhing Society, have agreed to compose a one-page response to one of Schurink’s images. They were given the following directions:
One way to think about these images is as illustrations of mimicry. Like the famous moths that turned themselves, over generations, from white to dark grey, in order to be invisible on tree-trunks stained by factory-smoke, these animals have hidden their body-forms to escape attention — or declared them to gain it.
If you agree to participate in this project, we will send you one of the Cryptozoo images. What you will then write will be a further or analogous or reverse mimicry of one of the Cryptozoo images. Maybe you will want to make a form appear in alien matter — or show a becoming or a becoming-visible — or a gesture. All we ask is that your writing answer the image in some way.
Some responses will themselves be visual or visual-verbal. The contributors to Cryptozoo are: Corina Bardoff, Diane Bertolo, Carrie Cooperider, M. Sam Goodman, Emily Haydock, Gretchen Henderson, Tom La Farge, Jennifer Nelson, Alicita Rodriguez, Erik Schurink, Maria Schurr, Joseph Starr, and Wendy Walker.
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Museum of Matches
by Sasha Chavchavadze
To be published in 2011
The author, a visual artist and founder of Proteus Gowanus, explores her father’s career as a Cold War CIA operative in an interdisciplinary memoir, a non-linear compilation of visual art, narrative prose, documents, photographs and memorabilia. The body of work has been presented in exhibitions, in interdisciplinary publications and as a “one-room Cold War Museum” called The Museum of Matches, a permanent installation located at Proteus Gowanus. The work was inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s description of a match game in Speak, Memory and by Nabokov’s passion for finding symmetries between past and present.
Donate $50 or more towards the publication, and you will receive a copy of Museum of Matches signed by the author. The names of all donors will be printed in the book, but donations must be received by the end of January, 2011.
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Libraries and Danger
Creative Director: Sasha Chavchavadze
Editors: Andrew Beccone, Wendy Walker
To be published in 2011
A compilation of text and images that grew out of the 2006/2007 “Library” exhibit and programs at Proteus Gowanus, this two-volume set will explore two of the many topics surrounding the evolution of libraries. The first, edited by Andrew Beccone of Reanimation Library, explores a flowering of small alternative libraries that have appeared around the country as the role of the library, and the book itself, is questioned. Shelley Jackson’s Interstitial Library, the collections of Jeffrey Schiff and David Gatten, Julia Weist’s Deaccession.org, Public Collectors/Temporary Services will all be represented in text and images, as well as the Prelinger Library, the Chicago Underground Library, Reanimation Library, and the Morbid Anatomy Library.
The second volume examines the life and death of libraries and the healing they bring us. It will explore such topics as language-death, book thieves and biblioklasts, the Cotton Library fire, the restoration of the incinerated papyri from Herculaneum, the incarceration of dangerous books and the chaining-up of irreplaceable ones, the shelling of the university library at Leuven and the Vijecnica in Sarajevo, and the looting of the Bayt al-Hikma in Baghdad. This volume will include images of burned, bombed, rotting, and neglected libraries around the world, as well as of beautiful living, life-giving libraries.
Proteotypes invites you to support the publication of this beautiful, innovative, illustrated book by an advance donation. We are offering three levels of participation, at $50 +, $100 +, and $150 +. Donors at every level will be thanked by name in the books. Those giving $100 or more will receive a free copy of one volume, of their choosing, and those giving $150 or more will receive both.
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Chamaeleomancy
by Tom La Farge
To be published in 2011
This travel memoir recalls the months that an American couple spent in Essaouira, Morocco. It sets their experiences by putting them in parallel with the experiences of two young chameleons, Tetta and Haha, given to them by a spice-merchant as a means of warding off the Evil Eye. In remembering the courageous lives of these two small reptiles, the author teaches himself the arts of adaptation and exploration, following the directions of “chameleons of the mind.” Illustrated with photographs.
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