Things I learned while looking up other things, 2024.10.11
Dear friends,
This is a good sentence: “Billy ordered a pair of size 9 bananas.” (Billy is Billy Connolly—in this age of supposedly global fame it can be so refreshing to encounter someone who is evidently a household name, but not in any household you’ve ever lived in.)
“On the other hand, she [Naomi Mitchison] never exhausted the Haldanes' eccentricity, and once remarked in her biography in Who's Who that her recreation was "burning rubbish".”
If you never skip “Fingertips” when listening to Apollo 18, you probably will also enjoy Miniatures: an album of 51 tracks, each less than a minute long.(Also: a band called They Might Be Gannets [“The only They Might Be Giants tribute band from South Queensferry”] fleshed out each part of Fingertips into a whole song?)
“In 1920 Lissitzky coined the term "Proun"—an acronym for the Russian words meaning "project for the affirmation of the new"—to refer to a series of abstract works that combined the Suprematist lexicon of geometric, monochromatic forms with tools of architectural rendering.”
I only made it to Edinburgh on my recent trip to Scotland but next time I think I will try Glasgow, if only to see as much as I can from the group of artists known as the Glasgow Girls. (This piece is absolutely stunning in person.)
Also: Encounter by Remedios Varo. Also: that this isn’t currently on display is very sad.
“He [Mago Chiò] lived off small rural robberies, off petty thefts from sheds, but wherever he arrived, before stealing, he announced himself by blowing an old trumpet. The peasants let him do it.“ (machine translation)
Clock golf: a good backyard spoiled.
Stay well!
Your friend,
Erin