Commonplacing

Links to content I’ve loved the past week or so, and always, a poem.

…if such radical pictures had been excluded from the art-historical canon, it begged the question: what, and who, else was left out? On the spiritual surrealism of Georgiana Houghton.

The fascinating story of the short life of Marie Bashkirtseff, who declared herself her own heroine.

In a similar vein, I cannot wait to read a new anthology of 400 years of women’s diaries.

Loved reading about Ursula K. Parrott, whose book of the Jazz Age, Ex-wife, far out-sold Fitzgerald’s awful Great Gatsby (yes, I said it—I honestly cannot stand that book), and how it still reverberates loudly today. It also led me to watch its adaptation, The Divorceé, a 1930 pre-code film adaptation with the fantastic Norma Shearer.

A new film is out, about the scandal of poison-penned letters (Olivia Coleman! Jessie Buckley!) in a small 1920s English town—and the inspired swearing is all taken from the letters of the real story, which is even stranger.

Loved learning about the work of Sagebrush in Prisons project that Holly Starley shared this week.

An article on how archives are just waiting for researchers to evaluate the wills and records of medieval women—and all that they left to their kin, communities, and history.

And a poem for the week:

February: Thinking of Flowers

Now wind torments the field,
turning the white surface back
on itself, back and back on itself,
like an animal licking a wound.

Nothing but white—the air, the light;
only one brown milkweed pod
bobbing in the gully, smallest
brown boat on the immense tide.

A single green sprouting thing
would restore me...

Then think of the delphinium,
swaying, or the bee when it comes
to the tongue of the burgundy lily.

                     —Jane Kenyon

Mountains in a higher sun, and guilty looking dogs...