The Black Isle

Now showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney:

YINKA SHONIBARE, MBE
How to Blow up Two Heads at Once (Ladies), 2006
Two mannequins, two guns, Dutch, wax printed cotton textile, shoes, leather riding boots, plinth

US Army Balloon School, Arcadia, Calif.
circa 1917-1919

Postcard from British-ruled Turkey, 1913.
Pic purports to be that of a “Turkish woman.”

Joyful paintings from Travis Lampe, with the Silly Symphonies aesthetic I so adore.

2666 by Roberto Bolaño.
p. 640

At three Hans Reiter was taller than all the other three-year-olds in his town. He was also taller than any four-year-old, and not all the five-year-olds were taller than he was. At first he was unsteady on his feet and the town doctor said it was because of his height and advised that he be given more milk to strengthen his bones. But the doctor was wrong. Hans Reiter was unsteady on his feet because he moved across the surface of the earth like a novice diver along the seafloor. He actually lived and ate and slept and played at the bottom of the sea.

The above also struck me as an uncanny description of my little friend Jacob Baron-Heaton at age three.

James Wood on Richard Yates in The New Yorker:

Around the compulsion of writing he shaped everything else. There were two other compulsions, smoking and drinking, but they only killed him, while writing plainly kept him alive. (He was an alcoholic, but he rarely wrote while drunk.) He lived in New York, in Iowa, in Los Angeles, in Boston, and, finally, in Alabama, yet his homes were identical in their shabby discipline of neglect. In each there was a table for writing, a circle of crushed cockroaches around the desk chair, curtains made colorless by cigarette smoke, a few books, and nothing much in the kitchen but coffee, bourbon, and beer. Friends and colleagues found these accommodations appallingly bleak; for Yates they were accommodations for writing.