Itinerantdaughter's Blog

Guys! I’ve been so absent that I forgot to note that I missed the FIFTEENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THIS BLOG. 15! Can you believe it?! The last anniversary parties were huge; this one was just me and coffee sorbet in bed. But it was great! Mazel tov to us for still being here.

I always think about fun things I want to write/note on here, but then I get busy and can’t do them. This, from a woman who once said she hated nothing more than seeing a ghost blog on the Internet. I have two ideas that I can maybe whip up in in the next few weeks, if things get calmer, but then again:

In the meantime, I was reading the transcript of this Ezra Klein interview with Jud Brewer, a Brown University neuroscientist and mindfulness advocate, and though I am neither a big fan of Ezra Klein nor of mindfulness, I found this part funny:

EZRA KLEIN: There’s a study you reference in the book, “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind.” Can you tell me a bit about that?

JUD BREWER: Yes, this is one of the first studies that I’m aware of that actually used smartphones. So this is back in 2010 when the iPhone was first being rolled out. And there was a couple of researchers at Harvard — I think it was Killingsworth and Gilbert — where they basically just pinged people on their phone and asked them about — basically, what are you doing and how happy are you? And what they found was that on average people’s minds were wandering to the past or the future — ready for this — 47 percent of waking life. [LAUGHS] I just want to let that settle in. Almost of 50 percent waking life we are not present. Wow.

EZRA KLEIN: That seems low to me.

The end of Mark Twain’s 1898 Harper’s Magazine article “Concerning the Jews.”

“To conclude. – If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star-dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of; but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers.

He has made a marvellous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished.

The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

“And one day Wulfhild, having dropped off the rents with Marie, stops in the scriptorium to kiss Gytha on the cheek, to slide a packet of candied fennel seed into the mad nun’s pocket. Gytha smiles bluely. Later, when in weariness Wulfhild takes off her leather tunic at her house at night, out falls a tiny painting of a fantastical beast on a cut-up old letter, a green tighter with a human smile or a porcupine playing the lute, which her daughters will one day pin to their collection on the wall. Some nights, going in to kiss her girls in their sleep, she will stop and look and feel before these many bests of Gytha’s something akin to what she felt as a child when the nuns sang their most beautiful, most awesome psalms, a slow internal pouring of ecstasy. Awe. If only she had time to examine this feeling, Wulfhild thinks ruefully; but she does not have time, she never has time, her children call, the business of the abbey calls, the hungers and fatigues of her body call. She will come closer to god when she is old, in a garden among the flowers and the birds, she tells herself; yes, some day she will sit in silence until she knows god, she thinks, lying down in her bed to sleep. Just not now.” ~Lauren Groff, Matrix

Let’s start with the obvious: everyone loves the Cholmondeley Ladies. Painted in the early 17th century by an unknown British artist, the Cholmondeley ladies were said to be sisters, though not much else is known about their identities beyond this.

And now, Israeli-American artist Andi Arnovitz’s take, if one of the sisters had been infertile:

Also, a really interesting interview with Arnovitz over at Hey Alma.

If I ever took a dance class again, I’d want the prompts to be similar to what Spike Jonze told Margaret Qualley to do when she auditioned for that Kenzo video:

“The only note I got from my agent was that they wanted me to dance like a tree,” said Leftovers actress Margaret Qualley, star of the original, viral Jonze-directed Kenzo World perfume ad, which featured her dancing and contorting her limbs with a back-bending frenzy…

“I get to Spike’s apartment and he’s there. I’m terribly nervous because I’m such a massive fan. We sit down and talk, I filibuster while I try to calm myself and tell him bizarre anecdotes about my father that have nothing to do with why I’m there. He gives me a vague idea of the story and concept. He plays the song [the same one heard in the ad] and is like, ‘Okay, want to improvise?’ He records it on his iPhone. I dance like a psychopath for about an hour, literally until his phone dies.

“During it, he was saying things like, ‘Now you’re a vampire, now your arm is trying to attack you, and you’re eating your pinky.’ I’m crawling on his floor, jumping on his chairs, it’s winter and I’ve got a turtleneck and stockings on and by the end, I’m drenched in sweat and out of breath. Then I get up and he’s like, ‘Nice to meet you.’ I’m like, ‘You too,’” says Qualley.

Jennifer Coolidge, in an interview with The Guardian:

Is it true you used to pose as Ernest Hemingway’s granddaughter to get into nightclubs?

Yeah, Muffin – the Hemingway daughter who wasn’t as well known as Mariel and Margaux. I had these thick black eyebrows and shoulder-length blond hair, so I looked the part. I’d turn up to New York clubs in high heels and a short dress and tell them I was Muffin Hemingway. You wouldn’t believe how well it worked. I got a lot of mileage out of that. Until I got kicked out of a few clubs, then it wasn’t so flattering for poor Muffin.

My husband pointed out to me the other day that I “don’t blog anymore,” which I knew already because I’ve been slowly eaten away by guilt about it over the past few months. Life is really hectic when you have prestige television to consume and a dead animal rotting in your basement! (Speaking of being eaten away.)

Anyway, to tide you all over until my longer post materializes, here is an amazing (to me) comic I drew at the beginning of the pandemic. The truth is I’m just ok at drawing, but I was like, I got this! And then I did it and it never came out *exactly* right. And then my friend who IS amazing at drawing was like, I can do it for you! But I had already submitted to The New Yorker on a whim (rejected!) and I thought I’d better see that through before she took over, and now I feel awkward raising the conversation again. This is the most possibly pointless mental wormhole of all time.

“Hamblin enjoyed a reputation of unimpeachable integrity among the Saints of southern Utah, who called him ‘Honest Jake. The historical record plainly shows, however, that Hamblin had no compunction about ‘lying for the Lord’ when he thought it would advance the goals of the Kingdom of God. Indeed, the record also shows that Hamblin was quite willing to lie through his teeth simply to enrich himself. It’s worth noting that John D. Lee had his own nicknames for Hamblin: ‘Dirty Fingered Jake’ and ‘the fiend of Hell.'”

~Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven

Butterscotch yellow quilted satin mini-pumps with a buckle and fur. Amazing! From the 1995 movie A Little Princess. Yes, I re-watched it recently; yes, I thought about the plot through the lens of contemporary issues (“Just because you’re nice to the slave at boarding school doesn’t mean you get off the hook for being a colonizer in India, Sarah!”); yes, I am fine with being a capitalist POS if it means I can have these shoes.