The Weather

The Weather is a collection of 41 obituaries of artists, writers and musicians, combined with the weather report of the day they died. Among the people in this booklet are Ernest Hemingway, Bas Jan Ader, On Kawara, Sylvia Plath, Robert Walser, Marguerite Yourcenar, Billie Holiday, Curtis Mayfield, Gil Scott-Heron and others. – – –

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Townes van Zandt died of organ failure in the early morning of New Year’s Day, 1997, in Smyrna, Tennessee. The maximum temperature was 7 degrees Celsius. The minimum was zero.

Yukio Mishima died on November 25, 1970, in Tokyo, after performing an ill-executed seppuku. That evening, the national newspaper Asahi Shimbun carried a photograph of his severed head on the cover. The lowest temperature was 5 degrees Celsius.

Sylvia Plath died on February 11, 1963. A nurse, who was supposed to help Plath with her children, found her dead of carbon monoxide poisoning, with her head in the oven. She was 30 years old. It was zero degrees Celsius, windy and snowing in London. The sun did not come out.