Itinerantdaughter's Blog

“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.

A friend of mine sent me a link to a thread on therapist-dedicated subreddit, in which the original poster asked if anyone else who worked with offenders felt uncomfortable with the concept of cancel culture. A few interesting anecdotes and ideas came up, that led to lots of questions (in my head, that is) about cancel culture, but the most interesting thing to come out of it was this:

I work primarily with OCD and anxiety disorders and I’ve seen [fear of being canceled] popping up more and more in OCD content in the form of moral scrupulosity. Compulsions are often checking and re-checking accounts to make sure they didn’t accidentally say or post something homophobic, racist, or otherwise offensive.

This is so fascinating to me! It’s like, the newest version of Truman Show Delusion! If the person who is to Internet Scrupulosity what Marc Feldman is to Munchausen’s by Internet is out there, please get in touch so I can write a long form piece about your attempt to get this into the DSM!

What hermits were and how they lived, once quite familiar, now became shrouded in the kind of mist that fostered romantic images that persist to this day. Peter France, in his book Hermits: The Insights of Solitude, noted a practice, which sprang up in England in the early 1700s and lasted almost until the 1900s, of wealthy families establishing a hermit in their formal gardens as an ornamental fixture for the edification and entertainment of guests. He quotes from an architectural guide published in 1767 which featured detailed suggestions for housing these hermits appropriately, ranging from the simple hut “ten feet, nine inches square made of trees and lined with moss” right up to the top of the line, the “Gothic Grotto, made of six rooms lined with shells.” A Miss Cynthia Aldburgham remembered that as a child, visitors to her family home could tour the grounds and “be shown a hermit who sat in a cave fondling a skull.” Presumably, he was given advance warning when his presence at the cave entrance would be required!

A Mr. Powys of March advertised for a hermit to live in an underground grotto for seven years. The apartments provided were commodious including a cold bath, a chamber organ (!), and as many books as the hermit desired. If he needed any convenience beyond the food provided daily from Mr. Powys’ own table, he was to ring a bell and his needs would be met. Ideal as this might sound, no one lasted more than four years. The most long-lasting of these ornamental hermits appears to have been one who “for fourteen years was Hermit to Lord Hill’s father; and sat in a cave in that worthy baronet’s grounds with an hourglass in one hand and wearing a beard once belonging to an old goat from sunrise to sunset.” The romantic image of the melancholy hermit appeared to have little to do with spiritual motivation, even if provided with an organ, presumably to play religious music to enhance the atmosphere!

~Consider the Ravens: On Contemporary Hermit Life by Paul A. Fredette and Karen Karper Fredette