A detail of the text:
Life and Conversation of Animals
by
In 1789 B. White and Sons of London brought out Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne, two series of letters describing a lifetime of “looking particularly” at birds, weather, gypsies, geology, and many other natural occurrences in Selborne, a parish of southern England. In Life and Conversation of Animals, Tom La Farge has subjected this first classic of micro-environmental writing to a process of radical recomposition. Working from a digital version of the first edition, he has used a micro-cut-up method to recombine White’s phrasings, still
in their original typography, with each other and with text from other writers: the Abbé de Condillac and Gretchen E. Henderson.
The seven pieces include “Curleople,” “Here Is a Migration Disclosed Within Our Own Kingdom,” “Vitellius’ Violent Propensity,” “Natural Enough Language,” “Gesture Betides Light Bodies,” “Conversation Among the Gestures,” and “Mutual Fellowship.” Language as animal behavior is a dominant theme in all of them.
In some pieces La Farge has worked the prose into still livelier forms of wild behavior. One piece, for example, is built entirely from the two words that end each typographic line of one of White’s letters. This constraint, the “Incessu Patuit,” and all the procedures used are fully described in the notes on the final page.
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