Commonplacing

Aug 6

7 links and a poem:

on the August season and the beauties of abundance.

I don’t know that I will ever match this woman’s age and grace in her own body, but damn if it wasn’t a beautiful and inspiring article to read—and to see images of her in the 1930s as a young artist.

How Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son crafted a literary takedown of one of the nineteenth century’s feminist heroines, the brilliant Margaret Fuller (for more on Fuller, read this and this).

Struck by how many articles are surfacing about the *surprise* that many high-status “warrior” graves turn out to be—gasp!—women. Such as here, here, and here.

A newly recovered manuscript by 16-17th c. Scottish miniaturist, calligrapher, and embroiderer-book- maker Esther Inglis—who also was one of the earliest women artists to paint self-portraits.

Katherine May

on Sinead O’Connor, and the often traumatic vagaries of fame and promotion of deeply personal works.

A restored archival video of Hebridean women waulking wool with song. I never tire of watching this.

And finally, a poem for this week by poet, activist, and Harlem Renaissance salon host Georgia Douglas Johnson:

The Heart of a Woman

The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,
As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,
Afar o'er life's turrets and vales does it roam
In the wake of those echoes, the heart calls home.
The heart of a woman falls back with the night,
And enters some alien cage in its plight,
And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars
While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.

A view of the fiery sunset at midnight as I arrived back in Anchorage a couple weeks back…

com·mon·place book| ˈkämənˌplās ˌbo͝ok | noun: a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use.

10 Comments

Patrick

Aug 7Liked by Freya Rohn

Julian Hawthorne's opinion of Margaret Fuller doesn't jive with his dad's opinion of her, according to other Hawthorne biographers. I tried to find an article I recently read that claimed both Nathan and Julian had some unresolved mommy issues.

https://library.northshore.edu/Hawthorne-Literature/Women

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